Seriously, catch the bus. Flying in or around America is no longer a feasible proposition. There are thousands of people milling around the front entrance trying to work out which queue to get in and where the hell the end of that queue is. Then there’s a few hundred police, customs officials and various other authority figures milling around looking for anyone who looks suspicious (which is everyone if you ask me). Then to try and sort out all the mess is one guy in a red coat with hundreds of confused potential passengers crowding around him asking where to go. It’s absolutely insane. Then when you finally get through to the security check, the metal detector is so sensitive it goes off when noone’s walking through it. So if you do have to catch a plane in America, here’s my survival guide: 1. Wear thongs. If you wear shoes you’ll just have to take them off anyway. 2. Follow the signs that say “first class” then get into whatever line is shortest. They’ll either check you in out of pity or tell you which is the right line to get into. 3. Arrive early. Really early. I’m also pretty unimpressed with the whole process. At 7am I got off a Qantas Boeing 747 400, went through customs, walked over to the next terminal, checked-in, came through security and at 9am finally reach my departure gate. I turn around to look out the window and see the exact same 747 400 no more than 100 yards away. Seriously weird. Other than that I’m having a ball wandering around the airport. There’s 2 starbucks within sight of each other (I always thought people were exaggerating when they told me that) and a Burger King which is kind of thrilling for an Australian because we have Hungry Jacks and everytime you mention it some smart alec always comments about how it’s really “Burger King” but they were paid by McDonalds to change the name overseas. I know that still won’t make much sense but I get a kick out of seeing a real Burger King anyway. Oh, and there’s an actual shoe shine guy too! I thought they were just in Law and Order…. This guys pretty upmarket though with comfy chairs and a shirt with “Marvin’s Shoe Shine” on the back. For now though I’ve got to run off and make sure I’m actually at the right gate.

Sun Thing Looking out the window at the moment I can see a glimpse of orange light indicating the sun is somewhere low on the horizon. I just can’t decide if it’s sun rise or sun set. It’s 10:30PM in Los Angeles and 3:30PM in Brisbane, I’m somewhere in between so I guess it must be a sun set. The trouble is I’ll arrive in Los Angeles at 7am so there’d need to be a sun rise in there somewhere and I get the impression this might be it. I guess it’s both then. UPDATE: It turned out to be a sunset as it then became dark and later there was a sunrise and it became bright again.

You have to be insane I’ve been happily sitting around on the only chair in this airport that’s anywhere near a powerpoint happily passing time, airport security has set up a barricade just next to me and are prechecking passports and boarding passes before people get to the boarding gate. I swear the entire plane is full of primary school children from the US who are here on some young ambassador program. There’s probably 20 kids for every adult with them and watching them frantically trying to hand out passports and boarding passes looks like utter chaos. It’s also amusing trying to watch the security guards sort out the mess caused by kids swapping boarding passes so that they can sit next to their friends. I guess this is the reason you have to turn up to the airport so early these days… As I type this another mob of children from what appears to be a different group is going through the same process. I’d really hate to be on that flight…

So I’m multiple thousand feet in the air relying on a hunk of metal to keep me up here – you’d really want to have some confidence in said hunk of metal. Sadly, this particular hunk of metal seems to be doing everything possible to instill fear, short of actually falling out of the sky. Since I’m sitting in the emergency exit isle, there’s two seats for the crew in front of me which have a phone between them so that the crew can communicate easily. As we’re beginning to acelerate down the runway, the crew tried to use it for the first time with no success. Apparently the crew’s communication system doesn’t work. Then as we cruise happily somewhere over the pacific ocean, we discover that the toilet door is about as well made as the comms system – it fell off. Fortunately the woman inside was fully dressed otherwise it would have been somewhat embaressing. On the plus side, watching the crew try to fix it was excellent in-flight entertainment.

Sometimes it pays to be persistent. I’d called QANTAS earlier in the week to request a seat with extra leg room because I’m very tall and have problems with my knees that makes it difficult to sit cramped up for long periods. I was told the best they could do was a back seat and they weren’t even sure if that had extra leg room. I asked again at checkin if there was a seat with extra leg room available and gave my pitiful story – the girl at the checkin counter was very nice and called downstairs to see if they could free up an emergency isle seat for me and they managed to find one. Should make the 13 hour flight a lot easier. I think the seat was really empty and was just being kept free until absolutely required but if you were told at the last minute that your seat with extra leg room was no longer available – sorry….

So I was invited into GMail today, particularly good timing considering I’m about to leave for JavaOne tomorrow and while I’m away I’ll also be moving house meaning that my home mail server will be going offline. I figure this way I can just redirect all my email to my gmail account for the couple of weeks I’m away and see how it goes. If I like it I’ll keep my mail redirecting over to Google, if not I’ll switch back. The biggest complaint I have so far is that GMail doesn’t have any support for PGP which I was just getting into the habit of using. Sigh. Guess that’ll be a feature request. Either way, I’ll get to feel cool because I have a GMail account. I’m just a little surprised it doesn’t come with a Mickey Mouse badge….

I’ve been browsing through the list of sessions for JavaOne. There’s 411 events listed. How the heck am I going to find time to read the abstracts of each of those let alone actually make a decision as to which I want to go to… Once I’ve gotten that far the schedule conflicts will bite….

Apparently there’s a JavaOne Blogger Meetup on Monday. I’ll definitely do my best to get there. I’ve still got no idea where I’m staying or how hard it will be to get home again after having a few beers but I’m up for the challenge. Besides, their drinking advice is superb:

And remember, Atlassian … doesn’t recommend any Australian alcohol starting with ‘F’ and ending with ‘osters'.

I just discovered that every email that passes through procmail is logged (I’d forgotten I’d set it up like that). A quick analysis of the log shows that 62.8% (5473 out of 8655 emails) of my email is moved to the spam folder by procmail (after being identified by spamassassin). There are a few extras that wind up in my inbox but no more than one or two emails a week and I’ve only come across about 5 false positives since I set up spamassassin (most of which are QANTAS’s flight detail emails). That’s a pretty sad state of affairs really. Fortunately, thanks to spamassassin, I use my email completely unhindered.

So apparently I’m off to Java One. The details are all very sketchy at the moment but apparently the flights involved will be something like: Depart Brisbane on Friday 26th June, to Auckland, then Los Angeles (I think) then “SFO” (can you tell I have no idea about where I’m going yet?). Should arrive at the final destination on Friday 26th June (apparently just before I left). Stay somewhere, do something of which the only certainty is going to the Moscone centre while the conference is on, probably get arrested trying to sneak into WWDC which is also on at the Moscone centre and watching the 4th of July fireworks from somewhere. Fly out on the 6th of July via Sydney (skip the New Zealand connection this time) and arrive back in Brisbane on the 8th of July. So yeah, pretty disorganized…. Any advice/pointers/suggestions/opportunities to meet up would be welcomed. More details as they unfold and I’ll do my best to blog as much as I can while I’m there, this is probably as good a place as any to store my notes.

Rich Bowen talks about his camping trip and it reminded me of something my Father and I used to do a fair bit of – spider spotting. In Australia we have a huge range of different spiders and they are literally everywhere – much more common than most people would be comfortable with. Most of these spiders are really small so you don’t see them in the light of day but during the night spiders are much easier to spot because of their brilliant blue eye-shine. Spider spotting basically involves getting one of those “pencil” torches (2 AA batteries and you twist the end to turn them on/off and adjust how focussed the light is). Turn it on and adjust it so it has a single focussed beam, then hold it just below one eye and look straight down along the beam of light. When you see a spider its eyes will shine back a bright turquoise color. You’ll find them everywhere in the Australian bush, around the ground, on tree trunks, in trees – pretty much everywhere you look there’ll be a bright blue set of eyes looking back at you. Just don’t do it if you’re afraid of spiders or you may never feel safe again. One other thing, Rich writes:

Every time I see someone talking about the wonders of GPG I think to myself, “I should probably at least have a GPG key” and then I promptly forget about the whole deal. When Bertrand mentioned he was getting into it I went through the same thought process but this time, because of the exceptionally convenient link to an exceptionally conveniently packaged OS X version of GPG, I actually got around to doing something about it.