August 29 to 31 Long travel day to Australia

I love Australia but I don't much enjoy the process of getting there.

This trip is especially excruciating since we added on a jump from our original destination of Sydney down to Melbourne. We built in a long-ish layover in Sydney to allow for any issues in customs or late arrivals of our flights from California.

Not a whole lot of interest here so feel free to look at the pictures and move on.

My first flight leg was on Continental from Houston IAH to Los Angeles LAX. Because of all my travel last year I've got "status" on Continental so I get a better choice of seats, can use the short lines, and do early boarding. Not so the rest of this trip where I'll be on Qantas. For some insane reason, Qantas doesn't do anything except airport check in. I managed to get an aisle seat way in the back. I used to do window seats but ... aging... need more trips to lavs. Sigh.

My flight leaves LAX about 11pm Friday night. Fourteen and a half hours later and across the international date line, I'm on the ground in Sydney at 6am Sunday morning. My co-instructor for the Melbourne class arrives a bit later on a flight from San Francisco.

Customs is very busy but a breeze. A visit to the ATM, then we hunt down the transfer to our Qantas domestic flight to Melbourne. Coffee in one of the few things open. "Skim milk" does not register with the girl at the counter, "skinny" does.


Short 90-minute flight to Melbourne and a taxi ride to the Melbourne Sofitel arriving around noon. It's about 28 hours since I left the house in Pearland.

The Sofitel is a very nice place! The hotel lobby is on the ground floor but rooms start on the 35th floor and go up to the 50th. The floors between the lobby and the 35th are an office block. I'm on the 48th floor looking more or less south.

After all that travel last year, this is the first trip where I've got a working phone. Got a company-issue Blackberry a month or two ago. Not just a working phone, but full function email, web browser, Google Maps, etc all work here in Australia.

We scout out the building where the company office is and then wander down a random street in search of food. And wine. Most things in the area seem to be closed but we find a little Italian cafe. Good food, a glass or two of nice Australian red wine and exhaustion hits.

I spend the rest of my day going over material for the class.

Tweeting...

Finally took the time to sign up on Twitter. If you think the blog here isn't enough info about my mostly boring life, get even more boring details by following my tweets here.

Oregon trip for Dad's 80th

Did a short trip to Oregon for Dad's birthday on the 25th. He's in good shape, thankfully. Still very active. Still can't sit in one place for more than about 5 minutes. I hope I'm in that good of shape if I make it to 80.

I got to see my brother, Mike, and his new girlfriend, girlfriend's children, and girlfriend's grandchild. But I didn't manage to see Mike's kids or ex.

The trip was short because of my impending trip to Australia and Singapore. Arrived mid-day on Saturday and left Tuesday morning. I did the air travel on miles and managed to snag a first class ticket for the trip home. That brings my Continental miles down to ... not enough to do anything.

Houston to Melbourne the hard way

About 5pm yesterday I got an email asking me "Oh, did we tell you that the Sydney training has moved to Melbourne?". Ah, no, nobody bothered to inform the instructor.

Non-refundable plane tickets were sorted out a couple of weeks ago. Houston to L.A. to Sydney for me. SFO to Sydney for my co-instructor (my safety net!). And for me, a trip on the following Sunday from Sydney to Singapore for round two of this class.

So now we're going to Sydney, allowing 3-1/2 hours to clear customs and re-check baggage, then on to Melbourne. Instead of an early morning arrival, shower and all day to get settled and discuss the class, we'll get to Melbourne in extra-exhausted state about noon. Door to door will be something like 30 hours. Ick.

Returning to Sydney Thursday evening, on to Singapore on schedule. Home on Friday the 12th.

And now they're making noises about a run of this class in Latin America and Eastern Europe in October.

Back dated posts

In case all you do is look at the top of the blog on the web, I just inserted a couple of back-dated posts about the Loran family reunion.

http://halmobileblog.blogspot.com/2008/08/fire-fire-fire.html

http://halmobileblog.blogspot.com/2008/08/reunion-was-great-success.html

Netflix issues

I'm on a two-at-a-time unlimited plan with Netflix. There's a distribution center here in Houston so I typically see two day turnaround from when I put a movie in the outgoing mail to when there's a new one in my mailbox. I haven't seen delays in the ... two or three years I've used the service.
<>So today I realized that I hadn't seen the usual "We've received..." email from stuff I sent back earlier this week. On checking the website I find this:

Our Shipping Centers Are Mailing DVDs
Delayed DVD Shipments Are Being Sent Today (Friday)
Click here to learn more

We’re happy to report that all of our shipping centers are resuming normal operations (after 3 days of issues). If you should have been shipped a disc Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, it will ship today (Friday). Your Queue may not yet reflect what we have received and shipped. We expect your Queue to be up to date later tonight.

We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused. To all of you whose shipments have been delayed, we’ll be automatically applying a 15% credit to your next billing statement. Or, if you are new to Netflix and your first shipments have been delayed, we recognize that this is not a good way to begin your Netflix membership and we’ll automatically extend your free trial by a week.

Again, we apologize for the delay and thank you for your understanding.

The Netflix Team

I wonder what the "issues" were?

Falling behind in blogging

OK. It's been way too long since I've posted. Got some stuff I'll be catching up on. Soon, I hope.

• Never did finish up posts for the Paris trip.
  
• Did some interesting stuff in Amsterdam that I can post
  
• Just back from a Loran family reunion, my mother's side. The trip and the "run up" to it were interesting.
  

And some stuff coming up:

• Short trip to Oregon to see dad for his 80th
  
• Two-week business trip to Sydney and Singapore. Found out at the reunion that I'm leaving Sydney the same day some of my relatives are arriving.
  

Reunion was a great success

The family reunion was a great success. It ran from noon on Saturday August 9th to noon on Wednesday August 13th. We flew Houston to Billings via Denver on Frontier airlines, got into Billings at 7pm on the 9th and got to the camp about 8:30 after a 5-minute stop at our motel.

Frontier airlines is the one that Southwest spoofs on their commercials. Fees for everything. We had two flights each around two hours. They wanted $3 for a "snack" (bag of chips type snack, nothing substantial). Each seatback had a nice video display. You could watch it run ads for free. Or watch TV for $6. I ran the brightness control down until it dimmed out of view. Soft drinks were still free. But a bottle of water sold for $2.

Anyway. The reunion was a good time. I hadn't seen my mother since Aryn got married in April 2005. And hadn't seen my brother Jerry or his wife in probably 5 years. They all came to the reunion two years ago but we had just moved so skipped that one. I think we were still rebuilding the kitchen or had just finished it.

We had Mom's one surviving sibling, Uncle Ben with his wife. There were several cousins from my generation. A good number from my daughter's generation, and a gaggle of young kids who are my cousins grandkids. Folks from Alaska, Washington, Minnesota, Texas, California, and Montana. I think that's all the states represented. There was way too much food and I attempted to eat all of it.

I think it's been close to 20 years since I've been in the Montana Rockies. Beautiful country!

Can you trust your business to Google's cloud?

This article asks if you can trust a business to the Google cloud for mail, documents, etc.

Right now I'm thinking ... no.

GMail has been down for at least the last four hours.

Fire, fire, fire...

Posting this long after the fact. Just so nobody gets too worried, all was well.

We're having a family reunion in the mountains of Montana in a few days. They're expecting close to 80 folks for this one. Probably.

Seems there's a little 10,000 acre forest fire just over the ridge from the place we're all hanging out. Two good sources of information are InciWeb and the City of Red Lodge Cascade Fire site.

Some of the family, including us, are staying in Red Lodge in a motel. The reunion site is the Billings Lions Beartooth Mountain Youth Camp. The fire is just west of Red Lodge and just north of the camp.