{"id":721,"date":"2005-12-11T01:32:37","date_gmt":"2005-12-11T08:32:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.m-dnovember.com\/?p=720"},"modified":"2005-12-11T01:32:37","modified_gmt":"2005-12-11T08:32:37","slug":"oh-what-fun-it-is-to-ride","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.m-dnovember.com\/?p=721","title":{"rendered":"Oh what fun it is to ride&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m in San Francisco again &#8211; my new boss and I have a meeting with a client on Monday, and after my little adventure back in October, I decided to come out a day early so acclimate a bit better.  (Fortunately, a loophole my company&#8217;s travel policy covers the extra day.)<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, some thoughts from the road (which I would have posted earlier, if not for the fact that Chicago O&#8217;Hare is, apparently, the only airport in the US without pay-for-play WiFi hotspots in the terminals):<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Checking in online has its advantages.  When I printed my boarding passes last night, I was able to switch into rows without someone in the middle seat.  For a change, my luck held out, so both flight segments were reasonably comfortable.  Of course, as each plane boarded, I couldn&#8217;t help but look longingly at those big, comfortable, empty seats (emphasis on &#8217;empty&#8217;) at the front of the plane&#8230;<\/li>\n<li>On the Newark to O&#8217;Hare leg, I was seated directly behind a mother and a 6 month old in a carseat.  If, two years ago, you had said to me, &#8220;Hey, M-D, how&#8217;d you like to be stuck behind a crying child for two hours with no hope of escape?&#8221;, I&#8217;d have instructed you to take a sharp stick and jab it in my eye, because that would have been preferable.  And yet, today?  I wasn&#8217;t even phased by it.  So it looks like I have a certain two-year-old to thank for teaching me some tolerance.  (Don&#8217;t worry, Cindi &#8211; I&#8217;ll repay in kind by teaching you how to be snarky about movies.)<\/li>\n<li>Of course, having a good pair of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shurestore.com\/earphones\/eseries_e3c.html\">sound isolating headphones<\/a> helps too.  They&#8217;re a bit pricy, but if you spend any time flying (and enjoy being able to hear your music over the airplane &#8216;hiss&#8217;), they&#8217;re worth the money.  (They&#8217;re not &#8216;noise-canceling&#8217;, per se, but they block out nearly all outside sound.  So you&#8217;re not going to want to wear them on, say, the NYC Subway.)<\/li>\n<li>On picking up my rental car, I came to the realization that I&#8217;ve completely forgotten how to get into the drivers side of a normal passenger car.  They&#8217;re so low to the ground!  (I suppose I&#8217;ve been spoiled by my Explorer &#8211; it&#8217;s a slight step up, instead of a huge stoop down, and the driving position is more of a natural sitting position, and less of&#8230;well, the best comparison I can come up with is this &#8211; it&#8217;s like sitting upright on your bed with your legs straight out in front of you.  Or like using a rowing machine at a gym.  Either way, it&#8217;s not terribly pleasant.)<\/li>\n<li>This bullet point is directed at CalTrans:  If I&#8217;ve said it once, I&#8217;ve said it&#8230;um&#8230;well, once &#8211; you have to give at least <i>some<\/i> warning prior to major decision points on freeways!  At least twice on my drive from SFO to my <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hilton.com\/en\/hi\/hotels\/index.jhtml?ctyhocn=CONCHHF\">hotel<\/a>, I ended up in the wrong lane because there was no clear warning of a fairly major decision point.  Of course, nearly all the interstates here are spurs or loops of I-80, so one way or the other, you&#8217;ll eventually find your way &#8211; but that&#8217;s not the point!<\/li>\n<li>So seeing that I didn&#8217;t get into the hotel until after 5pm (local time &#8211; 8pm EST), I was already pretty damned tired.  What&#8217;s more, I noticed that the traffic headed back towards San Francisco was pretty horrible.  So I grabbed some dinner and caught an early (for me&#8230;although technically it wasn&#8217;t &#8211; DAMN YOU, TIME ZONES!) show of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0365737\/\">&#8220;Syriana&#8221;<\/a>.  It&#8217;s a hard movie to describe, story-wise, except to say that it does a nice job of summing up the situation in the Middle East, while presenting a whole host of new questions.  (And, if you&#8217;re a Trek nerd like me &#8211; Dr. Bashir!)  It&#8217;s incredibly well acted, and there are no shortage of powerful moments &#8211; but given the number of intertwining plot threads, this is NOT a movie to see when you&#8217;re already half asleep.  Still, I highly recommend it, right along with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.participantproductions.com\/\">Participant Productions&#8217;<\/a> other recent film, <a href=\"http:\/\/us.imdb.com\/title\/tt0433383\/?fr=c2l0ZT1kZnx0dD0xfGZiPXV8cG49MHxrdz0xfHE9Z29vZCBuaWdodCBhbmQgZ29vZCBsdWNrfGZ0PTF8bXg9MjB8bG09NTAwfGNvPTF8aHRtbD0xfG5tPTE_;fc=1;ft=21\">&#8220;Good Night, and Good Luck&#8221;<\/a> &#8211; both incredibly timely films, but in different ways.<\/li>\n<li>Speaking of Trek, one more thing about &#8220;Syriana&#8221; &#8211; in looking at the IMDB cast list, I&#8217;m noticing that there are a lot of characters with the surname &#8216;Khan&#8217;, which is to be expected since much of the movie takes place in the Middle East.  I&#8217;m just saying, if I were more awake earlier, I&#8217;d probably have noticed that.  And secretly hoping that whoever the &#8216;highest-ranking&#8217; character was in the room would <acronym title=\"'KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANNNN!!!!' (harsh chord)\">respond appropriately.<\/acronym><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>That&#8217;s just about all I can muster for tonight.  I&#8217;m sleeping late tomorrow, then meeting up with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jessajune.com\">Jessa<\/a> &#8211; she mentioned something about the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dickensfair.com\/\">Dickens Fair<\/a>&#8230;hey, I&#8217;m open to just about anything.  (No, really.  Stop laughing.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m in San Francisco again &#8211; my new boss and I have a meeting with a client on Monday, and after my little adventure back in October, I decided to come out a day early so acclimate a bit better. (Fortunately, a loophole my company&#8217;s travel policy covers the extra day.) Anyway, some thoughts from [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-721","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-have-macbook-will-travel"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hxip-bD","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.m-dnovember.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.m-dnovember.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.m-dnovember.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.m-dnovember.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.m-dnovember.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=721"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.m-dnovember.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.m-dnovember.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.m-dnovember.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.m-dnovember.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}