The office can be fairly quiet during the holidays and occasionally people forget to remove themselves from calendar invites for meetings between Christmas and New Years.

I had a meeting like this last week… not wanting the time to go unused I still experimented and brainstormed. 

Here are the meeting notes:

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29 Dec ‘08: Meeting Notes

attendee: Jasson

Brainstormed and Experimented

• Successfully created a Higgs particle!
  To reproduce…
  • Create a Higgs field between the VC monitors by setting the contrast to high on one and low on the other
  • Remove the VC camera, point it at the monitors, and set it to emit gauge bosons
  • Dial the VC unit into itself
  • That’s it!  [video]
• Solved Goldbach’s conjecture that every even number larger than 2 is the result of adding two prime numbers
  • [see conference room whiteboard for proof]
• Experimented with cold-fusion… no luck  :(
  • Apparently mixing cold Earl Grey tea, Trident, and shredded post-it notes does not produce excess energy as most people would think
• Pondered the Sorites paradox
  • Is a search results page still a search results page if one removes an item from the list?
• Internally brainstormed ideas for YouTube

Open Questions:

• Where is everyone?

The Buffalo Niagara International Airport (BUF) is apparently part of the United States “border” and is staffed with border agents… even for domestic flights!

After getting my boarding pass, I headed over to security only to find two border patrol agents standing in front of the standard security screening.

They ask to see my ticket and ID and after a few random questions they ask my citizenship. In my head I thought, “What? I just handed you a US issued passport, what do you think my citizenship is?” but not wanting to hold up the line of holiday travelers, I only responded with “American”, grabbed my ticket, and walked through.

The airport is at least ten miles from the US-Canada border… what the hell are there border patrol agents doing here? (FYI: “International” was added to the airport’s title a few years ago because they now fly to Toronto… a two hour drive away.)

Constitution Free Zone

The ACLU has dubbed this the Constitution Free Zone and has pending lawsuits against the issue, but this was my first time experiencing it, and I have to say, it’s infuriating. Since when do I have to provide paperwork to travel within my own country?

The security at our airports is nothing but a bloated theatrical productions and if it wasn’t such a hassle, I’d probably never show my ID. Why not take that money wasted on these productions and spend it on something useful like education, infrastructure, research, et al.

This is getting ridiculous… I truly hope the new administration and congress work on these Bush inspired constitutional issues.

Related: Your papers please: TSA bans ID-less flight

Traveling during the holidays fucking sucks. 

With all the delayed and canceled flights the SFO domestic terminal was in chaos. At the United counters where I was, people were dismayed, swearing, and a few were actually weeping. For some unknown reason, United had only six agents running all counters with a few bag handlers and no one directing the flow of people.

After queuing for an hour and a half at the online checkout area, most of us were told that it was now too late to catch our flights and that we needed to requeue in another line and wait for an agent (they had one agent at the online check counter trying to serve well over a hundred people).

Trying to expedite the situation, I called their customer relations number three times only to get frustrated by their voice-only menu system. Apparently United never tested their system in real-life situations because speaking to a computer was utter useless in an airport with ambient noise, but that’s a UI discuss for another post.

Three lines and nearly three hours later I was put on standby for another flight and the situation around me only compounded as tensions rose and more people missed their flights.

Jump-forward four hours and I had been on standby for two different flights and was now being told I wouldn’t make it on the third. Staying with the days theme, I was asked to stand in yet another line for over an hour and half.

Reaching the counter I was polite as possible but as luck would have it my agent was cousins with the Wicked Witch of the West. So instead of trying to help me, she repeatedly lied to my face about the availability of other flights until I pulled out my phone and read her the available airlines and flight numbers.

Agreeing that they were available and that a change was possible, she started citing that there were a lot of people in line and that it would take some time to change the ticket and that I need to go to the other airlines myself (to stand in yet another line).

After asking her politely to change my flight she suddenly changed gears and started telling me that she had no sympathy for me because I showed up for my flight only 2 1/2 hours before it was going to leave (the flight was delayed over an hour so technically I was 3 1/2 hours early).

I’m usually a nice guy but everyone has a breaking point and this was mine.

After spuing a small rant that was about 50% expletives I turned around and to a line of smiling faces that were nodding with approval. 

Officially out of options in the airport I found a quiet corner and tried my luck with the United’s phone number. Five minutes after connecting to an agent I had a new flights booked was good to go… he did more in a few minutes than all the other agents combined.

After thanking him multiple times, I went home… now I get to try it all over again bright and early tomorrow morning! 

Just read a post on 23/6 that brought up some good points about the Secret Service and the Iraqi shoe throwing incident:

Questions That I Have for the Secret Service - Jon Friedman

1. Shouldn’t you have jumped in front of that shoe?
2. Shouldn’t you have jumped in front of that second shoe?
   more…

Through small progressive changes by outside forces the sketch on my whiteboard has slowly evolved into this:

Someone carved JASSON into a tree in the woods near the family farm. I say ’someone’ because I don’t remember doing it. The tree is fairly large, so I may have done it as a kid but I really wasn’t the type to run around carving my name into things. 

The lettering has warped a little through the years and its hard to make out all of the letters, but through the magic of Photoshop I tweaked the photo to make them stand out.

Whoever carved my name into the tree, it’s nice to know that I have a “monument” to my name… even if this one is deep in the woods of WNY.

While I’m not going to start listening to Toby Keith or visiting Dollywood anytime soon, I definitely have a new found respect and understand of the South.

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Now… who wants to go to Anchorage, Honolulu, or Fargo with me?

After touring the city I spent the next couple days in the French Quarter of New Orleans exploring. Most of the time I only carried my pocket camera but on my last night I broke out the big-boy complete with tripod and started wandering.

Walking around with my camera equipment drew a lot of attention, especially on Bourbon St. I was asked everything from…

• “What TV station are you with?”
• “Who’s in town that you’re shooting?”
• “Can you take our picture?”
• “What are you taking a picture of?” And once I pointed out the building I was shooting, three-quarters of the time they would pull out their camera phone and take the same picture. 
• I even had one person walk by, give me a dirty look, and say “fuckin’ paparazzi!”. The funny part was that I was only walking down the street and hadn’t taking any pictures of the area yet!

The People

I had variety of people asking for the picture to be taken and they all had their own stories:

• “Hey, hey, awesome camera… how come you’re not drunk?”
• “Take another one with my… this beautiful lady… come on, take another one…”, after taking another shot, “come here… I’m wanted by the FBI so don’t put this on TV, okay?”
• “Did you get me licking her ass?”, showing him the picture, “Dude, you got the group but… here take another one.”
• “You want the best fuckin’ picture you’re going to get all night?”, playing stupid I asked of what, “Me! Who else did you think I was talkin’ about?”

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The Architecture

I love the old-country look and feel of the French Quarter. Its mix of decaying historic buildings refitted and repainted definitely add character.

With all of those layers, you can basically point the camera in any direction find something of interest; one block may be next to a cathedral another by a red-light district and all of these are surrounded by local shops and restaurants.

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The Signs

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After leaving the Smoky Mountains I spent ten hours crossing Arkansas and Mississippi to get to New Orleans at a decent time.

I didn’t get a chance to check out much on the way, but I did run across an odd sight, a towing caravan.

While filling up I saw a van and two closely parked cars and what I didn’t notice at first was that they were all connected!

Towing two cars at the same time doesn’t seem like the most stable thing to do, but this guy was brave enough to take all three cars on to the thruway!  :)

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Touring New Orleans

Before hanging out in the French quarter, I really wanted to explore New Orleans to see how it has recovered since the hurricanes.

What we saw was very dishearting.

Years after the fact there are huge parts of the city that are still in ruins. Some areas are struggling to recover but there were multiple wards that are nothing but smashed houses and flattened city streets. More houses than I could count still had waterlines stains above the windows and doors and hand-painted search-and-rescue X’s on the walls denoting what agency searched the house and if any bodies were found.

The entire area is a macro Chicken or Egg dilemma… people won’t move back because there aren’t any stores for miles and stores won’t rebuild because there aren’t any people.

Back when Katrina hit New Orleans my friends and I had flights and hotels for the following Mardi Gras. We looked into volunteering but all of the agencies were only accepting people who could stay for multiple weeks. We had only a week in New Orleans booked so we end up canceling the trip.

Seeing it three years later, looking back on it, I really wish we had made a stronger effort to take more time off and help.

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