London Calling

Today's the day. I'm off to Europe with James, Heath and Mike. We're flying British Airways today to the UK. Heath and Mike are with us for a couple of weeks and then we head off to France. The picture below is a BA 747-400 taking off from Sea-Tac. :)
I have to say that I'm pretty disappointed with British Airways right now. Let me start off by saying that the last time I flew BA to London, I was in first class (it's pretty hard to top that experience). However, since buying our tickets a few months ago, we have not been able to request seats. You have to request seats online, but when we bought our tickets all the seats that can be "pre-allocated" had been pre-allocated. We were instructed to try again 23 hours before our flight (this was several months ago). Also, you can't just call them up and ask for seats. Not only will they charge you $20 per person for even talking to them on the phone, their phone reps do not have access to the seat maps. Last night 23 hours before the flight came and went. The web site was having trouble. We called the web support line (also under threat of a $20 per person fee) to be told that it was a known issue and to try again in an hour. We tried again in an hour (didn't work), and tried to call back, but their web support office closed! When I woke up this morning, the option to check in online (which had been unavailable) was now available. But instead of being able to check in, the process failed on a whole new page of the Manage My Booking web site. I again called the web support people and this time they didn't even know there was a problem. Long story short, after months of waiting and $1k+ in ticket price, I don't know where I'm sitting on this monster 747-400. It's a 9 hour and 45 minute flight and I don't like not knowing where I'm sitting on that long a flight. Needless to say, I might consider one of the American carriers next time I need to get across the pond.

Anyway. I'll be posting pictures of the trip as I can so check back! Cheerio.

75 Recipes for Blended Diets

Dear God what am I doing? Yesterday I had my pre-surgical appointment with my oral surgeon. On July 28th (two days after my birthday, yay), I go in for upper and lower jaw surgery. They gave me this handy little cookbook: "Drink to Your Health: 75 Nutritional and Tasty Recipes for Blended Diets." Blyuck.
Fortunately, I'm supposed to get some good drugs out of this and when it's over, it's over. Recovery will take 4-6 weeks, with most of the swelling from the surgery gone within 2 weeks. I spend one night in the hospital, hopefully drugged out of my gourd, and then they send me home with an ice pack that you wear on your face. It will be nice to have this over with because that means there is only fine tuning to be done with my braces and then they come off; about 6 more months of braces. Stay tuned. :)

Dry Tortugas National Park

I'm still catching up on my Key West photos. I'm surprised that it took me so long to get these up since it involves flying. Unfortunately, I wasn't doing the flying, but I did get to sit in the copilot seat. While in Key West, we took Key West Seaplanes out to the Dry Tortugas National Park. It's about 70 miles west of Key West in the middle of nowhere. The Dry Tortugas are actually composed about a bunch of little islands, but the biggest development is the 1800s era Fort Jefferson. These are some neat pics of the trip out there. The seaplane never goes above 500' AGL so you get a really nice view of the water including the sea life.

Me posing in front of the seaplane.

Now in the seaplane.

One of the cruise ships docked at Mallory Square.

A view of the little keys on the way to the Tortugas.

A sunken ship in the shallow gulf waters.

Fort Jefferson coming into view.

Me gazing off into the wild blue yonder.

Old Flying Pictures

As part of my whole fun with Vista yesterday (see the post below), I found all these old school pictures of me flying. This was from a trip with James to Friday Harbor in the San Juan Islands of Washington state in summer of 2001. This was pre-9/11 and I guess we didn't have a digital camera back then so this feels and looks like a million years ago.

Me checking the fuel at Boeing Field. Wow, I look so young.

Some grain towers near Seattle.

Final approach to Friday Harbor.

Me on the landing approach to Boeing Field.

On final approach to Boeing Field.

Because mine's only about yay big

This has got to be one of the best TV commercials I've seen in a long time. This version is the version that played in Seattle, but I found another version on YouTube where the man with the small penis says he making up for his shortcomings rather than he's only about yay big.

Vista Woes

I visited my friend Pat in Chicago over the weekend. It was a blast. Chicago is a really nice city, with really great people, and most of the time I was there, had a Seattle-like feel, especially the weather. Anyway. While I was there I discovered that Windows Vista Beta 2 has been released for public download. Being without my Microsoft corpnet access these days, I jumped on the opportunity. Plus, Pat wanted to find out if his DonorQuest software would run on Windows Vista; it did. All that aside, Vista is like a really cute blonde twink, pretty but dumb. All the window trimmings run great on my brand new laptop with its ample graphics processing capability. That is, if you can ignore the fact that the explorer crashes all the time, that the beta version of Media Center is essentially useless, and that every 10 seconds, the explorer is stopping to ask you a security question. So to my Alma Matter, you have about 6 months to get this right before you hit the latest slipped ship date. I really hope you make it because it still seems like you’ve got a long way to go.

By the way, one of the best things about a Dell laptop is that they don’t give you your recovery CD unless you call them and order it (for those non-techies, I am being facetious here). If you do manage to hose the Dell boot records by installing another operating system like I did, the PC restore partition on your hard drive is lost like genie in a bottle. Thankfully, I found a wonderful tool on the Internet to fix my problem (God bless Google “lost access dell pc restore partition”) while the Dell tech support folks were useless. If you ever find yourself in a similar situation, this worked like a charm: http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/.

Oreo Thin Crisps are not Oreos

James and I flew to Kansas City on Southwest today. We are in Lawrence Kansas visiting our friend Dave. Now there are things about Southwest that I love and that I hate. Queuing up in lines for a seat, not so much, but I do like how, even though Southwest does not serve meals, that they give you descent snacks. I was surprised when they passed out the 100 Calorie Pack of Oreo Thin Crips. Now I love my Oreos and these are not Oreos. They look like Oreos, they even kind of taste like Oreos, but they lack the soul of an Oreo, and the most important part, the cream filling! Instead you have some wafer like substance with white sugar crystals on them. So I just have to say, why do the people who can't go to the gym have to ruin it for the rest of us? Don't mess with my Oreos! Eat everything in moderation and go to the gym!