zen.org Communal Weblog

It’s nice to be back in our own bed, ya know?

Traveling was a long day. Thank the goddess for JetBlue and the live DirecTV personal monitors. If they didn’t have Nick Jr, we’d have been in trouble. 🙂

Problems started when we got to Boston, finally got checked in and through security. We hadn’t eaten since about 8am, so we’re all starving (this is at about 4p). Went to a “nice” place (according to one of the check-in attendants at Aer Lingus), sit down, inside the security area. And ended up having this skanky bitch ho for a waitron. Now, I’ve waitressed. I know it’s not easy. I know it sucks. But the *second* I said “Our son has food allergies….” she got this blank look on her face. Like she didn’t want to hear it. Anything we asked her about, she would roll her eyes, sigh deeply, and huff away. After the last time, when she cut me off in the middle of explaining P’s allergies by saying “Yeah, my grandkids have food allergies too”, she just walked away. I shouted after her “Then WHAT IS THE PROBLEM?!?!?!” She didn’t come back to us. I went up to the hostess after 10 minutes (of waiting with a cranky, hungry 3 year old) and asked for a new server. We got a lovely woman named Sandra, who had some food on the table for P in about 5 minutes. They gave him something that wasn’t on the menu (pasta) and he was thrilled. So we tipped her. Handsomely.
When I talked to the manager later, I explained that I was a waitress, and I know it’s not easy. But for fuck’s sake, that woman needed a slap upside her head. B and I were wondering how she deals with her grandkids.

Even worse, when we got on the plane, we checked about our special meals. Only one. DAMMIT. I called the day before the flight, was told that there were two vegan meals, no toms, no nuts. That P’s wouldn’t be overrode by the fact that he was a kid (that happened once before). They managed to get a veggie plate on the plane as well, and that helped. The vegan food, by the way, is a keeper. Since food on airplanes has to be over-seasoned and have TONS of flavor (apparently your tastebuds don’t work so well up there, dunno why), I have had some excellent vegan meals on airplanes. This one was grilled tofu with rice and steamed veggies. The sauce on the rice was a fake-butter (I hope!) sauce, but it had curry powder in it. YUMMY. With the tofu it was faboo.

And P is recognizing things. He looked at the airplane (distinctive logo on it) and said “E-lingus!” Um. Okay. It’s Aer Lingus tho. “NO, E-LINGUS!” Okay, kid, whatever.

Thankfully, P crashed out during taxiing for takeoff. Didn’t wake up til 15 minutes before landing at Shannon. So he didn’t really eat. And I scarfed down tons of food :-). We all slept decently, but we were still out of it yesterday. And it’s 12:18 now, and I’m still in bed (love the laptop!). About to get up tho.

It’s nice to be home 🙂

I was searching for something or other I can’t remember and I found maps.google.com. Though I think it’s only good for US sites so far, and still has some bugs, it’s still really cool.

There’s a great article to help you learn about John Gilmore’s efforts to call the government’s bluff, insisting we shouldn’t be tracked like felons when we want to fly around the U.S.: Grounded: Millionaire John Gilmore stays close to home while making a point about privacy.

Though 余艾蕾 noticed it first, I went outside today and heard birds. It’s the first time this year my ears where full of them. Though four inches of snow on the ground, and more comming Monday, it sounded like spring.

We’re on a holiday trip with some family members, and the place we’re staying lets you use the Net via a cable modem. So ever in pursuit of a hack, I got a linksys wireless router and hooked it up so we could all share the connection wirelessly. As an experiment, I left it unencrypted (we’re not billed for bandwidth) to see how many people would discover it and want to partake.

Up until today, it’s been a non-issue. But since this morning, we found the bandwidth slow to a crawl. None of us were doing any big transfers. (And this nearly 4Mbit link can get an awful lot before you start to feel it.) So I looked at the DHCP logs, and saw two IP addresses that were out of the range being assigned automatically. Hmmm. Turns out those two addresses were doing, together, long unending transfers. For hours on end. Sigh.

So much for that; up went the WEP (no WPA yet), and down went my hopes that people would enjoy the freeness of it but not abuse it. I know WEP won’t stop them if they’re really trying, but I expect there are easier targets now. Some jerk or jerks ate it up. Oh well, maybe I’ll try this experiment again sometime.

Just back from Nantes, where a good time was had by both, and thought I’d make a post about some smoked salmon that Jim had as a starter.

Now, smoked salmon is not a rarity in our household, and I’ve even had it fairly often when eating out, but this smoked salmon was the ur-smoked salmon – it was “welcome to the mother-fish” time.

Within its succulent walls your tongue could track the route that smoke had swirled around the fish’s body; the taste was so clearly defined, you could roll the history of the flavouring process back and taste the individual knots of wood that been used up during the smoking. It was like realising that previously you had only been eating in 2-D, and now whoosh! – here was a third dimension of flavour.

It wasn’t the strength of the taste, it wasn’t particularly strong in fact, it was more the precision and the degree of definition that it possessed. I hadn’t imagined that a taste could be like that…

In Shannon Airport, we waited in line at US Immigration to continue our trip. There were six booths, each of which can have two INS officers working separate sides. On this occasion, there were only four INS folks working, divided between two stations. We went to the line on the right, sporting about 15 people; the line on the left was similar in length. We saw it take an average of about 5 minutes for each person to make it through. The slowdown appeared to be the requirement that every single non-US citizen (which in this case appeared to be the majority of the people) pose for a photo and offer a finger for a digital fingerprint.

Setting aside the debate about the problems in such a thing—no commitment to how long the information is held, who has access, etc—we’ll just focus on the amount of time it took for anyone to make it through immigration. We heard repeated calls for passengers to board our flight, heightening the stress as we’re convinced the airline will find a reason to take off our baggage and leave without us. It didn’t matter that we had US passports, we just had to wait like everyone else.

The two people in front of us divide up, going to each of the two INS staff. After a long wait, we saw the first immigration officer left her station with the person she’d been assisting. A few minutes later, the same thing happened with the other INS employee, leaving our side empty. About three minutes later, the second INS officer came out and told us we had to queue up on the other side. We couldn’t believe we’d just wasted all of this time, only to have to go to the other line and wait even longer. It was with great relief that we saw the first INS officer from our side materialize, and signal for us to come back. In less than one minute, she’d swiped each of our passports, given some idle chatter, and flagged us on.

While we were stuck in line, and when we got transferred to the other line, we were able to commiserate with our fellow passengers, all of whom were not US citizens and had to go through the fingerprinting exercise. Without exception, they all voiced their opinion that this did nothing at all to encourage them to want to visit the United States. Nor, they said, did it give them any confidence in the ability of the US government to treat foreign nations as anything other than second-class citizens of the world.

Sometimes this kind of crap makes you feel ashamed to be part of the land of the not-really-free.

For a word geek, searchspell is a cool toy. For example, if you visit www.searchspell.com/sites/wordid/, you’ll find a list of the pages for a variety of words that begin with the letter “i“.

Maybe Brendan was excited by the Mötley Crüe tour, but Abba is reuniting! Sort of, well they are not, but they are seeing eachother again, I guess. Never mind, just ignore this post.

Seen on a wall in Dublin, which really drives home (sic) the high prices for rental or purchase: