The trip out west

3/5/2003 5:33 AM Well, the trip started off easily enough. I set two alarms, just in case. Fortunately, the kids didn’t wake up in the middle of the night, which I expected, as it was the middle of the night before they fell asleep. Got up at 4:00, was out by the curb at 4:25. I wanted to take a picture, but before I could the cab showed up. Got to the airport at 4:50, and was sitting by the gate at 5:05. Glad I didn’t get here the recommended 2 hours early. Walked down a few gates and got a sausage, egg, and cheese sandwich. I didn’t leave myself time to eat this morning.

 3/5/2003 8:44 AM: I’m in Chicago’s O’Hare airport. Of course, here it’s 7:44. I slept through the beverage cart delivery on the 737 from BWI, so I grabbed a Pepsi between gates (need my caffeine this morning). My cold is almost over, but some of the pressure changes in flight were kinda painful. While waiting for my final flight to board I decide to listen to some tunes when I discover DAMN! My MP3 player fell off my belt in Baltimore!!!!! You have no idea how much time I spent getting tunes on that thing. (It was a Compaq IPaq PA-1 that I upgraded to 128 Mb RAM.) I downloaded the latest version of Rio on my company’s XP notebook, and it crashed every time I tried to download tunes. So I copied the entire contents of the MP3 share on our server to my Maxstor external hard drive, brought all 8Gb of tunes home, and used my personal Windows 98 notebook to update the songs on my player. This whole process took about  7 hours, all of this so that I could listen to tunes while traveling. Oh well, I’m already thinking about a replacement. If I get another IPaq I’ll have an extra download cable. The only thing I didn’t like about the Compaq is it stores the music in a proprietary format. What this means is it has to translate the MP3 files as it writes them to the memory card. This takes time. Also, this means you can’t just use Explorer to copy songs either; the unit won’t recognize them. I may look at a Sony model, as I already have three Memory Sticks for my DV camera.

The flight continues

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