Awful story of the day:

My mother joined Facebook, and tried to "friend" me. When I ignored the request she got pissy and commented that my brother ans sister accepted her request. Well, they also live under your roof, I don't. Also, I tightened up my public profile after that.

Geez. Moms and social networking pages.

Damnation to United.

I traveled to Atlanta and Alabama this week. For some reason flights out of Reagan seemed more expensive than usual, so I had to take one out of Dulles. Specifically, a United Flight, which I rarely use. I was to leave on Monday at 1230, but my was flight canceled and I was re-booked on a 2150 flight. I found it odd that there were not ANY flights out of Dulles to Atlanta until then, but whatever.

That later flight didn't board until 2230, I came stumbling into my hotel room at 0130 for a early morning site visit. I was pissed off, but these things happen.

Fast forward to Friday, my flight out of Alabama gets canceled. There was no announcement over the intercom, or a United rep at the gate. How did I(and others) find out? With an email notification. Then I was informed I had been rebooked for a 1800 the next day. After going to to the ticketing counter(because I guess United can't afford to have any personnel behind the security checkpoint) I ended up waiting in line for a good 50 minutes while the one person there handled the 60 or so people. I go ahead and called the United customer service number, and I get some asshole overseas who is not in the mood to search for a flight that would get me to DC quicker. In fact, he flat out said "no, sorry, can't help you."

The poor guy at the ticketing counter, judging from his uniform, is actually some kind of baggage handler rather than customer service rep. He manages to get everyone a flight that would get people to their final destination quicker than the automatic computer booking service did. Kudos to him.

Goddamnit but I hate United. Whenever I have these long-ass delays, it always seems to be United.

Meanwhile, on the USS Bunker Hill....

My old ship, I recognize one or two of the players.

Huzzah.

Monday. 1st of the Month so rent is due. Left my Blackberry on all day so the battery died. Flat tire on the beltway on the way home. Huzzah.

This trip...

Has been unnecessarily rough. I had hoped to make it out to the Cahokia Mounds today, as my flight doesn't leave until the afternoon, but the weather has turned bad.

As it happens, I had hoped I could be going on a Hawaii trip the next couple of weeks, but that got pushed off. I'm going to be going to some of the Garden Spots of the American Southeast instead.

Idiots in security.

I was listening to this week's NPR Technology podcast and the first story was about passwords. Specifically, about idiots who had trouble with their passwords. There was a montage of idiots telling their stories about what idiots they were with passwords.

One gem came from a guy who said "I had to throw away my laptop. I couldn't figure out my password, my company couldn't help me, Apple couldn't help me."

That right there is a good example of the difference between Apple users and PC users. First off, PCs have a much higher "support" industry than Apple does, so someone somewhere could have resolved the issue, even if it came down to moving a jumper on a motherboard or enclosing the HDD and pulling the information off that way. Or they could have formatted the HDD and reload the OS. Certainly there was no reason to throw away a laptop because of password difficulties.

The guys tone also really pissed me off, as if he thought it was funny. Hell, I wish I had enough cash to throw away a Apple Laptop after some password problems!

I might be a little narrowminded in this case, as I've spent such a long time in government(either as a sailor or a contractor) that I'm used to keeping track of multiple passwords...but man, seriously? I honestly think this is not that hard.

Emotional Investment in your pet.

My cat Willy had a stroke Monday morning. He was throwing up something fierce, and stumbling around like he had no control of his hind legs. I took him to the vet who, among other things, determined that he had an enlarged heart that was probably the root cause of this problem.

I was pretty tore up about it, and as I was sitting in the waiting room at the Vet clinic I mostly stared at the floor trying not to cry. One of the things that came through my mind was how much more emotional distress Willy's condition was causing me than dealing with the '04 Tsunami cleanup during my deployment. The most emotion response that work created within me nausea and a little fear during certain events. But that fear passed rapidly and didn't really cause me distress. How is it that I'm emphasizing more with my cat than other human beings?

As of today(Thursday) Willy has recovered quite a bit, he's returned to jumping up on furniture and many of his previous mannerisms. That cat has already gone through like 8 of his lives, and it's frankly amazing this 14 year old animal has made such a recovery. He's still stumbling around a bit, and I wonder if that stumble will ever go away, but the worse appears to be over. I don't know what I would have done if the Vet had started to say stuff like "he's in a lot of pain". Probably would have done what was best for Willy, but it would have killed me a little inside.