Started off on the Big Trip. First to Cambridge to speak at EBI, then to Zurich for the perl 6 mini-conference and workshop, then to Munich for YAPC::EU.
The few days before the trip were stressful--because of some communication issues, I got the due date of my OS X conference slides wrong, and found out way late. Bad. Plus the usual pre-trip stress. Things never go well around the house the few days before a trip.
The first snafu of the day happened in the lobby at Bradley. I was fixing up my slides (something the OS X conference had pushed off) and broke my damn power adapter for this iBook. iBooks have a cool little glowing plug where the adapter plugs into the laptop. Well, it's fragile. The silver cover is only held on by pressure, and after a while it comes loose. Then when you unplug it you do it by tugging on the wires that hold the cable into the plug assembly. (Which needs some sort of strain relief, though it doesn't have any) Went to unplug and snapped one of the wires. Bad. Of course it happened a half-hour before boarding, so there was no way to get a replacement.
Luckily the plane has seat power, and I have a pair of batteries. I'm hoping to get a replacement power supply, or to fix this one, in Cambridge. Fingers crossed. (I expect I'll at least be able to borrow one for the presentations, if nothing else)
Then my flight was a half-hour late getting in to the terminal at JFK. Not normally a bad thing, but it turns out that while I got in at terminal 9, my connecting flight left from terminal 7. There's a shuttle but, as I found, it loops in one way only, so I got to hit terminals 1 through 6 too. Ech. And when I got to terminal 7, the security lines were dragging. My flight was boarding by the time I got to security, and the doors were close to closing by the time I got seated.
But at least things are set. My first rework of the slides is done, all 58 of the things. I think I may have to go on a bit, but these slides should be slow ones. May have to add to them if I can get power.
Posted by Dan at September 10, 2002 11:45 AM