Today (in Pune, India), a funny thing happened on the way home from work:

Take a closer look….Do you see what you’re supposed to see? Try this one:

That’s right — that’s an elephant on the street. My driver pulled over so that I could get a better look at the elephant. This photo was taken outside of the window I was sitting next to:

Then, the driver did something I wasn’t expecting. He rolled down his window and let the elephant stick his trunk in the van!

I kid you not — and then he told me to touch the elephant. And I did this — and the elephant’s skin was very coarse. (I did wash my hands as soon as I got back to the hotel.)

So then the elephant removed his trunk, we rolled up the window, and got back on our way. Here is a picture out of my window while the elephant’s truck was in the van:

I must say — I’ve never seen or experienced anything like that before. Figured it was worth posting Guildford, UK in two days — one last stop on this circumnavigation of the globe before landing back in the States.

I’m only in Brisbane until tomorrow evening. It’s actually quite sad, as I’ve grown quite fond of Brisbane during this time. I would love to get the opportunity to come out here again.

The people have been wonderful, the climate is great, and I’ve learned quite a lot. The food has also been superb.

Everything is pretty Western here. It didn’t take that long to adjust to the differences between here and the States. People drive on the left side of the road, and that’s taken some getting used too. When you cross the street, you have to think in reverse.

IT is kind of odd down here. The 2.4 Ghz band that wireless cards (802.11b) use is the same band as cell phones and cordless phones run on. As a result, the hotel wireless would be up for 2 minutes and down for 20. It was unusable, so I’ve been using the internet at the office or at Athene and Wade’s.

Athene and Wade have been wonderful people to know down here. They’ve been very hospitable towards Mark and I. Turns out that Wade helped out with Breakmygentoo back in the day, and also worked with the same crew on the Gentoo Server Project. What a small world it really is! Crazy that he knew who I was based on my work with that project.

Next is Pune, India — it will be very interesting. If you haven’t registered with flickr and given me your yahoo so I can add you as Friends or Family, then now is your chance! I have lots of good pictures in Flickr of Brisbane.

It’s quite crazy to think that next week I’m working in Brisbane as opposed to Raleigh. It was one thing when I had to go to Westford, MA for a week, but to go to three different locations around the world for the next 3 weeks is going to be interesting.

Not to mention the jet lag will probably be pretty bad.

Honestly, I am a bit nervous about the whole ordeal, and in one sense am just ready to get this going as I imagine my nerves will calm once I’ve made it to Brisbane. Hope my luggage gets there.

Anyways, this spot will serve as my official blog during this trip. I will also be taking a Flat Stanley along. This portion of my trip will be blogged at http://www.99b.org/flat-stanley. I’m doing this for my Mom’s 2nd and 3rd grade class, who apparently are ecstatic about this. I get a kick out of hearing how excited they are that they know where Raleigh, North Carolina is.

Still busy packing and all. Next blog will probably be from Brisbane.

Flying is supposed to be the single most convenient and easiest method to move around the world. In fact, some would claim that it is the only viable method, and frankly, I find myself in that group.

The issue with flying still remains baggage. The planes can only support so much weight, and as a result, you are only allowed to take so much on. The limits for checked baggage are usually pretty acceptible, but in some places the limit on checked baggage is 7kg (~15 lbs).

This would not be a problem in and of itself if airlines were actually able to ensure that bags destined for Point B arrived at Point B on time. Airlines have a horrible rate of losing bags. They also have a low rate of the bag being returned within 24 hours of your arrival at your destination.

So what happens when you now need to move rapidly arround the world from one destination to another? What happens when you are only in a locale for at most 7 days? How easy is it for the airline to get you your lost luggage? And then who is to say that it won’t get lost on your next flight?

Also, what about this situation:

If you fly from Brisbane, Australia to Pune, India, you have at least one connection. At this connection, you probably change airlines. So you can fly Singapore Air to Singapore and then fly Indian Air to Pune. All of this is fine, but you have to collect any checked baggage in Singapore, leave security, and now you can recheck your bag with the next airline and re-enter the secure area of the terminal. That’s if your bag made it to Singapore to start with. What if the bag is in Bangkok or some other location in the Pacific at that point? How does your bag then know to go to Pune when it hadn’t been checked out of Singapore Air and into Indian Air?

So you can see the dilemma with airlines having such low success rates on checked baggage and how the situation gets exponentially worse when going international.

So the obvious solution is to pack light and pack what you can in carry on. This would be fine if you only travel in the US, but with a 7 kg limit and some countries possibly not even allowing you to carry liquids on, they are making it insanely hard to pack all into carry on.

The bigger problem, is that carry on is a traveler’s only insurance that the bag will go with them from Point A to Point B. By limiting what can be done on carry on, the airlines make it excruciatingly hard for passengers to fly with any sort of confidence that they will arrive at their destination with everything that they need.

If airlines continue to tighten the rules on carry on luggage, then they need to step up and become accountible for their poor handling of checked luggage. The current situation is simply unacceptable.

For those of you who are curious on what I’m up to, here are the highlights:

• Bought a new car.
• Working on selling the old car.
• Visiting Brisbane-Australia, Pune-India, and Guildford-England in late February for work.

So I’ve been a bit busy as of late. If you haven’t heard from me, I wouldn’t take it personally.

As for the Wyneken project, well — a lot of plane time is required to circumnavigate the globe, and if they have 110 outlets on the plane, then wyneken-0.5_alpha1 might just get released sometime this year Honestly, work has been keeping me too busy to work on Wyneken. I’m hoping to get back into working on it soon as to release the 0.5_alpha1. I’ve also been kept busy by the Legend of Zelda - Twilight Princess (Wii). I typically don’t pick up the longer video games, but as a Zelda fan who last played Link to the Past (SNES), I had to try this one out and have been pleasantly surprised.

Pictures of the new car, the first snow in this area for the year, and of my trip (once it happens) can be found on my flickr account if you are a friend or family. If you have flickr and are not in my friends or family list already and want to be, then email me and let me know.

I just discovered this great cross-platform media player built on the same XUL base as Firefox. It’s called Songbird and it’s a nice alternative to iTunes from an OS X perspective. For Linux, I think I still like Amarok, but it’s always nice to see apps with versions on all major platforms.

Worth the mention. Especially for the masses that read this blog.

http://songbirdnest.com

Flock Start Page

Testing the flock tool to see if it works with 99b.org.

Remember the days when having a guestbook was a must have feature on a website? Or when having clickable images was mind blowing? What about the days when Netscape 2.0 introduced frames to the world?

Now we live in a Web 2.0 world. Whatever Web 2.0 means….nobody has really defined it, save for it needs to use some type of Ajax, have annoyingly big fonts, and connect you to someone else in a unique way.

As a result, we now have facebook, flickr, google chat, writely, and that awful cesspool known as myspace. So much of people’s content has gone towards these means that the days of having a personal webpage seem to be waning. Much like pets.com, webcrawler, the online tour of an old missile shelter, and those magic eye images that made everyone stare at them for hours on end, so too is the personal webpage drifting out of relevance.

Anyone remember portals? Sure, yahoo.com is among the best examples of a portal still in operation, but remember when everybody had a portal? There was even one point when this site had a portal. It seemed like a good idea, but in reality, the only good that came out of it was the removal of the vast majority of portals that sucked.

And then there was AOL…sure, it’s still around, but how relevant is it these days? Outside of a few jokes (ie. Crank Yankers: “I’ve got AOL….yay!!”), I’m not really sure it has a purpose anymore. The cable and phone companies sure have seemed to pick up the pace, and for those of you still dialing in, Earthlink seems to be the way to go.

So here’s to slightly more than 10 years on the internet. The virtual world is changing, but just as in real life, the more things change the more they stay the same. It’s just that now instead of writing in someone’s guest book, you post to their wall on facebook or myspace.

So I’m supposed to keep this thing up.

Sure haven’t done the best job of that. I’m also supposed to keep up with all the people I’ve ever met. I guess I’m not too good at that either. Or maybe it’s just that I find 100 other things to occupy my time, leaving me always 100 to do items away from updating this blog.

So now, at midnight, after a long day at work, I am updating my blog.

To all of you who I am supposed to keep in touch with, and haven’t contacted recently — hi, how’s it going? I have an email address. If you don’t know it, let me know by putting a comment here. I’ll then try and contact you and give you my email address — ah…to do #94.

It’s not that keeping up with people isn’t important to me, it’s simply my lack of prioritization. It pretty much sucks when I can keep up with someone, but can’t go hang out with them on the weekend or something on those lines. If any of you are coming near Raleigh/Durham (and yes as far away as Asheville or Ocracoke counts), let me know. I would love to catch up in person with everyone again. And quite frankly, catching up with people in person is more like #10-15 on that to do list of mine.

So what have I been doing?

Well, first of all, spending time with my wife. Moving as many times as we did in as little of a time as we did sure leaves one feeling unsettled. It’s nice to finally feel like we’re settling in up here.

Enjoying this part of the country — it’s awesome….you have the mountains to the west, the coast to the east, and we’re in the middle of the urban part of this state. Couldn’t ask for much more….

The Blue Ridge Mountains are really nice — I enjoy the Blue Ridge Parkway a lot and have taken up learning about that road as a hobby of mine. North Carolina waterfalls also fall (no pun intended) under this category.

For those of you who don’t know, I also run a small open source software project named Wyneken. It only runs on linux, so don’t bug me if you aren’t willing to run linux. Besides, if you’re anti-linux or pro-microsoft, you’re likely to only aggravate me while talking computers — no need to go there as I’m right and you’re wrong (Don’t all arguments start and end that way?). This small project has over 5,000 lines of code and as one developer, it’s a lot to manage. I’m actually finishing the documentation this weekend, and it’s rounding out at close to 200 pages. It will be available for sale at some point in the near future. But right now and after the product goes on sale, it’s available for free as a pdf online! I don’t believe in restricting the flow of information. Where do I get the time to do all of that? I’m not sure. One thing for me is sure — the 0.4 release is coming out soon and then I’m taking a break from doing Wyneken stuff for a month or so (at least, so I say).

I also serve on a board at church and have been deemed the technology czar. So far, my czarship has not entailed much, but that can always change at the drop of a hat. Besides, we are getting a new vicar soon and it will be my responsibility to get him set up for working at the church.

And yes, I also have a job.

So that’s where my time goes. I really do wish I could keep up with everyone better, and my guess is that most people could write statements very similar to what I wrote above. That’s what happens when College ends — though I’d be hesitant to go back — if nothing else because College feels like one great big limbo in life where you’re just not going anywhere. Classroom education only works when you have professors who are passionate about what they teach and who can convey that passion. Outside of that situation, real world experience, high demands, and our own desires for knowledge are the only things that can truly teach us the things we really need to know — like when it’s time to go to bed. I’m still trying to undo the college bed time of past midnight thing.

So good night and hopefully you, the faithful reader, feel enlightened.

Vacation is nice to get from time to time. This time, Amanda and I have come to the Williamsburg area to take in Busch Gardens and some local museums. We were at Busch Gardens yesterday and had to fight off the rain. There was one point where it started pouring really hard and so we just used the train to get around and then did lunch. After that, a lot of people left the park and the weather cleared off and became quite nice. It was also nice being able to get on a ride within 15 minutes of getting in line. Some rides we were able to ride back to back, which was really cool. So, the rain was there, but it ran enough people off, and it wasn’t enough to stop the park, so we ended up having a great time there.

For dinner last night, we ate at Jimmy Buffet’s Cheesburger in Paradise — if you get the chance, I highly recommend it!