miscellaneous

   Rain drops fall,
         floating in the wind,
      8-bit symphony on my window screen.

As I write this, my second and last leg for my return trip to DC is delayed in Cincinnati (just as the first trip was) for an unknown amount of time (estimated time of departure is currently 5pm instead of 4:20pm but who knows). Seems like the weather is bad…

Maybe because flights are often delayed here, the airport is meshed with wireless hotspots. I haven’t had access to the net since last night, 7pm and I’m itching to get online but I’ll resist the temptation this time (I cracked on my way to Montreal). I can make it, it’s not that hard. Plus, I don’t know how long I’m going to have wait so it could be that my hour connection would go wasted. Oh well…

I haven’t even posted this yet and I’m already updating this post. What’s wrong with me? It’s now 5 and the estimated time of departure for my flight has been pushed back to 5:30pm. Damn, I should have gone online when I had the chance! It’s too late now. Or is it? Maybe another delay will occur? Maybe not? Oh the agony! Oh the whining of a rich, stupid westerner who can afford to complain about a stupid plane delay.

Well, it’s 8:40pm now and I’m still in Cincinnati: we got on the plane at around 6 and after a couple of delays, they told us that the plane was going to go back to the gate. Once there, we were told that the flight was cancelled and that we had been rebooked on another flight in a different terminal. It was then 7. Took the shuttle to the other terminal and got a new boarding pass for the new flight. The actual boarding took place at 8:10 and we started taxiing at around 8:30. The commandant just told us that there is yet another hold order coming out of DC so we’re sitting here in the plane, waiting to be told that we can take off, which is not scheduled to happen before 9:30 now. I’m not holding my breath. This post started as a spoiled kid rant about internet access and deprival therefore. Now it’s turning into an account about yet another of my plane adventures (which, if you know me and my luck with planes, is rather unsurprising). I’ll keep updating it when I feel like it assuming I don’t run out of batteries before! Hopefully, I’ll get to leave Cincinnati soon.

Epilogue. It’s now half past midnight and I am home. We did indeed took off at 9:30. We, in fact, had to hurry since the take-off window was really short: we needed to leave Cincinnati before a thunderstorm looming off in the distance got there and to make it in time in DC before another thunderstorm hit. Lightning is really beautiful to look at when it lights up the clouds in the night. However, it’s not as enjoyable when you’re in a plane and when said plane is flying a little too close for your own comfort to said clouds. Anyway, I’m home safe and I am pooped so this is good night!

I have been invited to join Orkut so I decided to give it a shot. I don’t have much experience with so-called social networking applications but I find Orkut pretty neat so far. I can see why people would like that kind of stuff but I am unsure of the finality/usefulness of the whole thing for now. Maybe it’ll grow on me? By the way, if people I know want to get in, let me know… The more, the merrier!

New words:

• inquilines
• nocebo

By the way, World Wide Words is great!

4am Conversation from the album Wake Up! by The Boo Radleys

Here used to be a rather interesting post about how both US and EU Martian exploration robots have dog names and that both of them have experienced troubles but MoveableType shitty comment erasing interface resulted in the text of this post being replaced by the text of the comment I was trying to erase. This post has thus been replaced by this statement that MoveableType sucks.