Today (2/29) checked into United Airlines online and zoomed off to the airport. As I walked up to security and the guy said that my boarding pass was for March 1 not February 29. Yikes!
People who know me know that this is a very likely occurance – screwing up my own reservations and getting the wrong day. Sometime I will have to tell you about the worst travel screw-ups.
I went to the counter and she quickly reissued my pass for today (2/29) and apologized. Whew! A programmer bug – kind of neat.
By the way if you look at the URL of the image, my cell phone camera has no such problems.

This rocks. Free wireless Arialink sponsored by Smart Office Systems (SOS) – no entry fee.
This absolutely rocks. I will start flying out of Lansing more often and start coming to the airport really early rather than waiting until the last minute.
This is very cool.

I went to the Miracle movie about the 1980 Olympic hockey team starring Kurt Russell. I am of course a hockey player and hockey fan so I should have liked the movie. I lies Mighty Ducks, Slap Shot, and even Mighty Ducks II. But something about Miracle kept me from engaging.
First the good stuff. Kurt Russell is superb in the role of Herb Brooks – clearly an actor who has absolutely polished his craft. The acting was good in the supporting roles as well. it was nicely shot for the most part.
There were three things that bugged me: (1) There was just oo much Kurt Russell – it was as if this were a vehicle for him to scowl a lot – it got tiring just watching him do the scowl thing one more time. (2) There was not enough footage of the time period between the selection of the team and the Olympics – I can imagine that there could have an a number of ways that we could have watched the team growing closer and more confident. (3) The hockey sequences were pretty badly choreographed – they felt repetitive and not at all engaging.
On my scale, it gets a 3 out of 5 – worth a rental at the $2.50 level as sson as it hits the video stores.
Chuck’s Rating System: 1 – Worthless, 2 – Worth a $1 rental on the budget shelves, 3 – Worth a one night $2.50 rental, 4 – Worth seeing in a movie theater once, 5 – worth going to at least 2 times in the theater. Unlike most rating system – this tells you what to do with the rating.

I will add a picture once I have a faster connection.
I made it to Scottland – slept overnight on planes twice once SFO->DTW and once DTW->EDI – a shower and bed looks really nice after that.
tMobile rocks here – I am using the wireless internet (internet2.voicestream.com – my US configuration works perfectly in Einburgh). I have not yet made phone calls but sent a lot of Picture SMS – just fine – take a look at for the pictures.

Well I got to fly the A330 again – wonderful. But it has a problem where too many people are trying to press their keys at the same time and the response gets really slow.
My guess is that there is a slow network that keystrokes are sent across. In a steady state there are probably only 10-20 keys per second. But when the whole plane is trying to fire up their screens unsuccessfully and pounding on the keys – it probably gets to 200-300 keypresses per second – the whole thing slows down – the keystrokes seem to queue so perhaps TCP/IP is involved.
This is interesting because game usage creates a LOT of keypresses. This may limit the number of games which work effectively on the A330 – a whole plant full of kids doing FPS will be very unsatisfactory…
I talked to a friend David Tomanek and he said that he was on a A330 flight when they first came out and they had some technical problem and the Linux logo came up on the screens – pretty cool.

I had to rush a bit in my trip from Urbana Champaign to Detroit Metro Airport today. Originally, I had planned to leave at 10:00 (Eastern) to make my flight at 7:22 (Eastern) in Detroit about 360 miles away. I figured six hours on the road making cell-phone meetings plus lunch on the road, followed by an hour in the Worldclub catching up on E-Mail would be a good way to spend the day and get to Washington, DC in the evening.
Well, lots of little discussions started up and when I realized what time it was, it was 12:40 Eastern and I had not left yet. Yikes! There goes lunch and the Worldclub. I had to hightail it – I made good time until I hit Chicago where at the junction between I-80 and I-294 the traffic Stopped for about 40 minutes. There was an accident at the junction of I-294/I-94 and I-80/90 (this is pretty much the most congested intersection on the planet). I was frustrated watching all of the spare time I had slipping away while I was not moving.
Once I was moving again I had to step up the pace a bit. I will let the reader do the math, but I finally arrived after parking, taking the shuttle, being first in line at security(Tuesday is a slow night) – I arrived at Gate A65 at exactly 7:10PM.
I had to go to the bathroom since about 4PM, but figured that I could not afford the time to stop. I was right.
Whew!

Well the long trip has begun. The first stop is at UIUC to kick off Integration Week for the NEESpop version 2.2 – We worked on lots of little things – did some design reviews of upcoming software and generally kicked the tires on the stuff in 2.2.
One of these pictures in MINI-Most and the other is a design document of how to build a new DAQ-control capability into CHEF as part of the experiment browser as well as how to store data from the DAQ into the repository in the most natural way and using Data Turbine as the transport for the live and/or stored data. It is a lot of software, but we are finally starting to come up with tools that both work technically and fit the user’s needs and work-style requirements. There is a LOT of work left to do but the hardest part is understanding what to do – this picture may look simple but it took a lot of work between the IT folks and engineers on the project and experience with our earlier versions of the NEESpop to get us to the point where the way forward is clear. There are a lot of people who get credit for getting us to this point: Kincho, Jim, Jun, Ken, Tim, Drew, Chen, Jerry, Paul, …
Today I have to leave and go off to Washington DC tomorrow for the NSF PI Meeting for the NMI Portals project. That should be fun – for the first time, I will see the rest of the NMI PIs and get a sense of how we can best fit in.

I play Hockey on Sunday nights and tonight the game is at 10:55 PM. Way too late – any I have to drive down to UIUC after the game.

I had printing working on 10.2 through windows to a LaserJet 4 with Postscript.
But (like many things) it broke on 10.3. 10.3 should work better becuase I did not have to remember weird strings like
smb://teresa:fred@severance/compaq/hplaserj
However when I would type the ID/PW it would hang forever.
Then I checked my notes and made the following change to my file /etc/smb.conf file – I added a line as follows in the [global section]
name resolve order = bcast lmhost host
Perhaps the lmhost and bcast should be flipped – but I figured what-the heck. The I rebooted and all is good.
Why does Apple not even test the simplest things before they ship software. No mortal human wants to ever read the smb.conf file. I whould send them a bill for two hours wasted. Perhaps I could get half of my $129 back or something..

Two years ago, I went to the local stock car track and participated in spectator drags. My Good buddy Richard Wiggins came along to tape it for me so I could have A Stock Car Racing Video Memory.
My brother Scott, his son John, and my son Brent also watched the spectacle – they all appear in the video as well. The crazy thing is that I borrowed Scott’s car (all in great secret) and had to promise to give him my car if I smashed his car up. It all worked out with a happy ending – nobody got hurt.