The flight from New York to Chicago takes two hours in the air, and is on-time if it takes three hours from gate to gate. Yesterday my flight was not on time:
- Late crew arrival: boarding starts at the scheduled departure time.
- APU inoperative: mechanic inspection and sign off takes 40 minutes.
- JFK on a Friday evening: 55 minutes from push-back to take-off.
- ILS inoperative on one of O'Hare's runways: take a 10-minute holding loop over Michigan.
- Landing runway 9L: spend 17 minutes taxiing to the gate.
- Friday night at O'Hare: 35 minutes from gate arrival to bag delivery.
- Friday night at O'Hare: taxi line takes 20 minutes.
- Cabbie forgets the biggest traffic news in Chicago: miss two available exits because the Ohio ramp is closed.
Total time from leaving my hotel in New York to arriving at dinner an hour late: 8 hours, 28 minutes. (On average, my door-to-door time from New York is just over 5 hours.)
And none of it was American's fault, except for the bit about being one of 40 airlines to schedule a 5pm departure from Kennedy.
I chose the departure from JFK because, using miles, my options were limited, and spending 20 hours in my third-favorite city in the world seemed like a good end to the week. It wasn't until I tried to leave that random events started conspiring against me.
Still, it was a fun trip. I read four books entirely, got most of the way through one and started a sixth. And I had two new beers at Southampton Arms: Jones the Brewer's Abigail's Party Ale and a special pale whose name I forgot to write down, apparently.
My bag has arrived at Gatwick. This means, instead of sleeping in, getting a leisurely brunch, and hopping on the Eurostar at St. Pancras (just a few blocks away), instead I have to get up now, hop the Victoria line from St. Pancras to Victoria, spend £40 on a needless trip to Gatwick, then reverse the process back to St. Pancras. And brunch will be some kind of pastry and some tea on the run.
My friends assure me this is why they hate traveling. I don't think this has anything to do with traveling per se, simply because it hasn't happened to me in 30 years. I do think this has something to do with MCO.
I am here:
Actually, despite being content to read on most flights, and despite being without a full-time job until Monday, I actually have some work to do for my oldest surviving and most loyal client. If I'm lucky, Orlando has WiFi, and I can upload the changes I'm making right now. If not, I'll have to do it tomorrow night in London.
This will be an unusual trip for me. Because I didn't know for sure if I'd have this week off until just a few weeks ago, it was challenging to book this trip on miles. I wound up booking two one-way trips, with indirect routes and with the return trip originating in a different country than the outbound arrival city. So today I'm going to London's Gatwick airport via Orlando, then Wednesday I'm taking the Eurostar to Lille, France, Thursday on the TGV to Paris–De Gaulle thence New York's JFK, finally returning Friday, again through JFK.
This will be the first time I've traveled through Gatwick since 11 June 1992, my first visit ever to Europe. American no longer travels there, and British Airways doesn't fly many North American routes from there. In fact, my flight tonight will be on the rare 3-class 777—so rare that SeatGuru doesn't even have the right seating plan for it.
Other than this patch that my client needs this week, I plan to do nothing of value for the next three days except read and ingest. (Writing blog entries counts as "nothing of value.") Allons-y!
Busy day, so I'm just flagging these for later:
Back to the mines...
I got home with no difficulty and bypassed the dead El train at O'Hare through the simple expedient of taking a taxi.
I'm catching up on work right now, so further comments will issue later. It also turns out, apparently, that a virus had made a beachhead in my nose, so I will have to fight that off before my wit and verve returns.
In totally unrelated news, today is the 30th anniversary of the fictional Breakfast Club.
I'm now at Heathrow where I've got a really great perch overlooking the approach end of runway 9L. A JAL 777 has just floated down to the runway and a BA 747 is taxiing past the window. It's a little piece of aviation heaven in Terminal 5 as I wait for the 787 to Toronto.
As I mentioned earlier, however, my trip home tomorrow morning may end a little differently than usual because of this:
(Photo credit.)
Fortunately, no one was hurt. Unfortunately, the El still missed its flight. Never try to carry too much baggage up the stairs; use the elevator instead.
Boarding starts in a few minutes. Time to boogie. But I'll wait for this BA 777 to land. They're really amazingly graceful when they touch down.
It's 11pm on Sunday and everything is closed, so I'm taking a break from my break. My body still seems to think it's on Chicago time, which will help me rejoin American civilization on Tuesday, though at the moment it means my body thinks it's 6pm and wonders what it will do for the next three and a half hours or so.
I have accomplished what I set out to do this weekend. I visited the British Museum, the Southampton Arms, and another pub a friend recommended, The Phoenix. I've also finished Clean Coder, read Snow Crash cover to cover, and have gotten mostly through High Fidelity. The last book in the list connects Chicago and London—specifically, Camden and Gospel Oak, two neighborhoods I spent time in this weekend—more completely than any other book I can think of.
Tomorrow evening (morning? it's hard to tell) I'm flying out on a 787, about which I will certainly have something to write. I'm quite jazzed about it.
Now, back to Nick Hornby...
I debated this question with someone at a dinner a couple weeks ago. She suggested higher megapixel numbers told you more about the ego of the camera buyer than about the quality of the images.
I said it depends on how you're using the photos, but generally, more data yields more useful photos.
Here's an illustration, using a vaguely-recognizable landmark that I happened to pass earlier this weekend, and just happened to have photographed with three different cameras. All three photos are from approximately the same location at approximately the same time of day. Obviously there are some differences, but the illustration should work regardless.
Let's take a look at three images stored as 600x900 JPEGs and displayed at 500x750, the standard size for this blog. First, let's see one from a Kodak DC4800 in February 2001, 13 years ago. The original size was 1440x2160 at 3MP:
Now skip forward to August 2009, using a Canon 20D shooting a 2336x3648 JPEG at 8 MP:
Finally, two days ago, using a Canon 7D shooting raw at 3456x5184 (18 MP):
The photos look pretty comparable at this resolution, don't they? So let's zoom in on a 150x150 pixel view of each:
So each one has successively more data than the previous, which becomes obvious when you zoom in.
Another difference: I shot the one from this weekend using the raw format, which preserves all of the information the camera had available at the time of the photo. JPEG images are lossy; they always leave some information out. And because raw images are easier to manipulate using software, I was able to make the third photo a little bit better than I could make the other two.
So are more megapixels more useful? Not if you're just putting up blog posts, but for serious photography, absolutely.
I had planned to post some photos tonight showing the evolution of digital cameras, using a local landmark, but there's a snag. The CF card reader I brought along isn't showing up on my computer, even though the computer acknowledges that something is attached through a USB port.
As I'm visiting one of the most sophisticated and technological cities in the world, I have no doubt I can fix this tomorrow. Still, it's always irritating when technology that worked a few days ago simply stops working.
For those doubting my troubleshooting skills, I have confirmed that the CF card has all the photos I shot today; that the computer can see the CF card reader; and that the computer can connect effectively to other USB attachments. The problem is therefore either in the OS or in the card reader, and I'm inclined to suspect the card reader.