Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

Home again, home again

First off, I'd just like to say "Damn you, British Airways!", or at least a quiet "poot!" to the checkin clerk at SFO, who after carefully listening to my gentle request for an *outside* aisle seat (i.e. one in the outer block of seats rather than the godawful central block of 4 - BA's 747s have a seat layout of 3-4-3 in economy) and, if possible, one with a decent amount of legroom, cheerfully went ahead and put me in 33G. Now, on some aircraft 33 is a bulkhead row, but it turned out that on this one it wasn't, so I ended up jammed in the middle of economy in a seat with no redeeming features at all. The sequence number on my boarding pass was 009, which means I was one of the very first people to check in, so there can't have been a shortage of seats. And the seatback entertainment means that there's a box slung under the outside seat of each row, and the woman in the seat next to me decided that the overhead lockers weren't for her and stuffed her bag under the seat in front, but it was so big that it was partially under my seat as well. The flight was full so I wasn't really in a position to ask if there was a chance of changing seats either.

But anyway, after 9.5 hours of purgatory and gentle rage at the annoying assumption that everybody can sleep on planes so they turn all the lights off leaving folks like me who simply can't sleep in an aircraft seat with a choice between sitting in the dark or turning on the overhead light, at which point other people huff at you because they're trying to get some sleep.. uh, this rant is getting out of hand.. look, let's just accept that long-haul flight in economy class sucks and the best way to deal with it is to edit the experience out of your memory, okay?

But ANYWAY! After all that, the flight was mercifully early and Speedbird 286 landed on Heathrow runway 09 at about 1258. Not bad going given that the scheduled arrival time was 1315 - thank heavens for Atlantic tailwinds.

I'm now back at work although still rather riddled with jetlag, and I've marked the occasion by going ahead with something that I'd mentioned to my employers before going on leave (and considered for a long time before that) and handed in my notice. No new job to go to yet, but the computer biz being what it is the only way to handle a three-month notice period like I have (academia, you know) is to resign and start looking for jobs afterwards. It's time for some new challenges, so if anyone happens to need a generalist UNIX sysadmin/operations guy who enjoys bringing order where there is chaos then please feel free to drop me a line.

There are still a couple of entries from the US which I need to write up, and they'll follow shortly.