I'm just trying out Ecto, a MacOSX based blog post editor. So far it looks pretty neat. It's well integrated in to the mac way of doing things and has a reasonably smooth feel to it.

I'd like to send out a congradulations to my friend James Todd who has just release his first game for the NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) -- Chunkout 2. Admittedly, he's a few decades out on game technology, but that's totally besides the point. I'm happy to say I had a small hand in the game - making the music (back in Highschool) and also debugging a tricky low level bug.

This is a big thing for one guy to do - from scratch to published. Good work James, keep it up!

michaell posted to S3:

Click the image for the full size image

michaell posted to S3:

Click the image for the full size image

michaell posted to S3:

Click the image for the full size image

Well the engineering planning meeting was done and it was time to head home. The trip would take me from Cincinatti to Dayton to Dallas (Texas) to Los Angeles to Sydney to Canberra. As usual we're talking about long than a days worth of travel and things usually go wrong.

This trip was no exception. When I arrived in Dallas, my first visit to Texas, I was surprised by how cool their airport is - very well designed I think. However, the plane we were going to leave on broke, so we were stuck there for an extra two hours. That was okay, I had five hours stop over time in LA anyway - so that was reduced to 3 hours when we finally got going. 25 people were left behind in Texas because several earlier flights were cancelled as well. Luckily, they found a spare plane to put us on and we were underway.

The rest of the trip went smoothly. I think perhaps I'm not cursed when it comes to travel.. i just have too many moving parts in my travel plans.. too many connections, too many things can (and do) go wrong.

I'm back home now, fighting off the jetlag.

Don't Panic - the immortalized words of Douglas Adams, may he rest in peace, uttered upon the back cover of the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, was a motto he invented when traveling around Europe and constantly hitting travel roadblocks of all kinds.

I take this motto to heart, because as many of you know I seem to have a bit of bad luck when I travel overseas. My last trip to Canada was almost incident free until I went to the USA for a week and got 'the treatment' from customs when I came back in to Canada.

I figured I had this travel thing down pat by now - and by that I expect the unexpected. I have a change of clothes, I carry all my Diabetes gear with me because I fully expect to lose my luggage and I fully expect to end up spending an extra day somewhere I wasn't intending to be.

n back at Sydney when a giant thunderstorm shut down the airport for several hours - resulting in my flight eing late. By the time I got through customs, my connecting flight had already taken off. Rewind - the trip hasn't been all bad actually.

I first wrote that I had hoped to get an exit seat. We, I say we because of the big guy in front of me questioning the counter person, were told that the exit seats wer blocked off and we had to ask at the counter. The person who assigned me my seat sent through a Text to the gate somehow.. well, needless to say when the big guy iun front of me had the same story as me I assumed I was out of luck too.

Apparently, the seats would have already been assigned long before we had gotten to the gate - don't get up your hopes the man said. SO I didn't - and as the delay lengthened and lengthened I just knew this was going to be a classic tale of Michael travel. I knew well from experience there was no way my connecting flights were going to work.

Let us not forget that top on the news was the grounding of half of American Airlines fleet due to maintainence problems. Yippee - but that seems to have been resolved. Okay, back to the story - obviously I missed my flight. After being bounced from line to line at AA I finally got my tickets - unfortunately, the earliest flight is now at 11:20pm pacific time which gets me in to Dayton tomorrow at 10am-ish.

Like I said though, I planned for this - I realize now what it was that I didn't do with my planning - pad the trip with an extra day at the front. Another useful lesson learned.

On the plus side, I got to see a bit of San Francisco which I had always wanted to see - though I want to come back and see it in more detail now. I got to glimpse some of the places Mythbusters have filmed too, which is fun.

It's a travel day, though for me that usually means a day and a half, not just a five or six hour flight. I'm heading to our engineering meetings in Cincinatti and my journey started from Canberra. It's lunch time now and I'm in Sydney Airport. I'm hoping to get an exit seat for the main part of the flight, fingers crossed.