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.