I’m off to Boston once again, to attend a Creative Commons meeting. My Mom dropped me off at Midway, Chicago’s “other” airport. The line at the counters was incredibly long — they were tagging passengers to see just how slow it was — so I decided to try my luck with the self-check-in. It didn’t work, but I was able to go to the help desk instead of getting in line, and thus was done pretty quickly. The people at the desk were very surprised I was fifteen and traveling alone — they even wrote “15 YRS. OLD” in green marker on my boarding pass — and they wondered where my parents were.
Oddly enough, there was a fellow nearby who heard had the same gate I did, and so he offered to take me over. He was off to Newton to see his nephew’s Bar Mitzvah, which was interesting, since the last time our family went to Boston we stayed over for Shabbat with a rabbi in Newton. When we boarded the guy was pulled over for a wand check.
Now I’m at the gate with 20 minutes before boarding starts, so I’m blogging and catching up on email. No wireless internet, though. Oh, shoot — I forgot my Ethernet cable. Gotta remember to pack that next time. Or my power adapter for the plane. Darn. Hmph, they moved me to the front seat on the plane (to keep an eye on me?) so I can’t put my back pack under the seat in front of me. We do however, have a good view of the minature LCD screen… it’s about the size of my palm. Looks like the airplane power adapter wouldn’t have helped — no electricity in this plane. A crew member came over and explained how to use the lights and air conditioning on the plane. I guess this is what it feels like to be disabled.
Met Lisa in Boston, we took a cab to the hotel. The hotel doesn’t have any sort of Internet connection, so I borrowed Lisa’s dialup number. Unfortunately that kicked me off after like five seconds, so I decided to go warwalking for open wireless hubs. After half an hour or so, I finally found one right by my hotel, they’ve got a cable modem and it’s very fast. >It’s awesome! Technology is great sometimes. Now I’m downloading my mail and blogging. Off to dinner with Sandro in a bit.
Dinner with Sandro was great, his kids are very sweet. I think I imparted a bunch of my W3C cynicism to him, he was playing the optimist, but was rather pessimistic. As he dropped me off he said, “We didn’t get anything solved tonight, I hate it when that happense.” “I’m content with raising questions on this trip, solving them can wait until the next one.” I replied, with a wink.