My recent thoughts turned to airline security last night after learning of the flight coming in to Detroit in which a man tried to blow up the plane. (link and link, though I’m sure there’s thousands more now).
I’ve never subscribed to the theory that our US airport security did all that much in terms of preventing [...]

Posted in Business, Ideas, Society, Travel 3 Comments »

I’ve been in London most of the last week, and had a great time meeting up with people (DylanS and Sam from the Dojo project, Rajat from Yahoo, some locals putting on a minibarcamp, and others).  I’ve done some video and audio of some of these meetings and hope to put them up someplace in [...]

Posted in Conferences, Grails, Groovy, Travel No Comments »

It happened to me – the infamous white macbook laptop case cracking.  I’d read about this a couple years ago, but had forgotten about it.  Until last night.  I opened my macbook and the case had a crack in it.  Specifically, the area to the left of the left shift key had a larger than [...]

Posted in Apple, Travel 1 Comment »

I’ll be traveling the next 10 days, including time in London May 12-17 and Copenhagen May 18-20.  If any PHP or web people would like to get together for a drink/meal/chat/podcast/whatever, let me know.  I’m planning on attending one of the Dojo dinner activities (I think it’s Thursday May 14) so if you’re already going [...]

Posted in PHP, Personal, Travel, Web No Comments »

I’m in Vermont (near Thetford) for a couple days.  Beautiful foilage here.    (spelled like Marge Simpson pronounces it).

Posted in General, Travel No Comments »

Here’s a bit of proof that I was in Australia recently.  I’m not very good with pictures (by “with” I mean being in them or ever doing anything with the pics I do take), but I was able to do a couple here for posterity.

“Burger King” by any other name tastes just as scrumptious…

Posted in Personal, Travel 4 Comments »

The TSA recently (a week or so ago) put up a blog soliciting input on its operations. Within hours, there were hundreds of posts, mostly accusing the agency of either being incompetent or malicious, or of using the blog as a PR smokescreen. While all may be true accusations, the TSA responded today [...]

Posted in Blogging, Ideas, Travel 1 Comment »

I went to a bookstore in China and saw some interesting computer books.
I’m doing some Grails work these days, so was surprised to see this:

Bill Wagner is one of the organizers of the CodeMash conference, and the only name I could find in the Chinese bookshop that I knew personally.

Also, I chuckled a bit seeing [...]

Posted in Book, China, Travel 2 Comments »

What a trip!  I took my wife’s camera, and will be posting a lot of pictures in the next week or so.  I came back through Chicago , which was having a bad enough snow that many flights were delayed or cancelled, which seemed to impact my flight.  We sat on the runway for two [...]

Posted in Personal, Travel No Comments »

Yes, I was taken for a ride, literally and figuratively, my first hour in China.  A taxi ride from Pudong airport to downtown Shanghai, about 50 kilometers, ended up costing me 1280 yuan – about $200 give or take.  It was my own fault for not checking before I got in the cab, but I [...]

Posted in Personal, Travel 2 Comments »