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I figure that one of these days shaver and I will start a game company, and they’ll end up writing a comic like this about me soon thereafter.

We haven’t talked seriously about showers in about 5 years, so we are truly past-due.

Say what you will about my house — and there are several things that I would change, budgetary considerations aside — the shower is not at all one of them. It lacks the sheer pressure associated with my former shower, making it somewhat more pedestrian in that regard. Still, most people would view this as an improvement, if they didn’t go to school in Ohio next to an overachieving municipal water pumping facility. In any case, its pressure is more than adequate.

Its shower head is as close to perfectly positioned as it may be possible to achieve through purely mortal means. Not as in most Asian countries, where the shower head juts from the wall just below my shoulder blades, which is great for practicing the limbo while washing one’s hair, but not otherwise ideal. That’s my tip for the Asian tourism and business development organizations: raise the shower heads for taller Westerners.

The water temperature selector is one of the radial models, so it’s easy to set perfectly and consistently, every time. Much more importantly, once you’ve found the desired temperature, it doesn’t change. There’s no surer way to ruin a shower than for the temperature to oscillate between freezing and scalding every 35 seconds.

I’m glad we had this little discussion.

Really, though, The Sims is a really weird phenomenon. I think I’m glad I never played it.

Somehow I managed to get into my iCal the wrong flight time1. So instead of getting to the airport just in time to argue my way onto a flight that leaves in 30 minutes, I arrived just in time to hear that the door is now closing and that I am long past the argument phase. Fiddlesticks.

One very real perk of flying consistently on a major airline is the unbelievable route selection that this usually affords you. My flight to Dulles and connection to Columbus would have me landing at 10h30. But if I take this flight to Chicago an hour later, and make an illegal 25-minute connection, I can get there at 11h!

I don’t believe in checking luggage, so making it to the plane in 25 minutes was no problem at all. We landed 15 minutes early and I made the rest up in the rental car office and on the highway. I arrived right on time for my meeting; a perfect travel recovery, after starting off so very badly.

1 As a result of this incident, I have reviewed my personal travel process. Readiness level TRAVELCON 2 now includes as part of standard operating procedures a final confirmation of flight and airport transportation times.

I almost certainly already linked to this during my Katamari Phase, but it deserves a second airing.

My sisters graduated today. I have just a few constructive criticisms for the students and staff of Copley High School and the Copley-Fairlawn Board of Education:

• learn how to light the stage; even at ISO 1600 with my 300mm zoom lens, it was virtually impossible to get a good shot
• you need much better speechwriting. Not just from the students, from whom you might not expect such early speechwriting talent. But the superintendent, good lord, what a rambler.

I’ve been away from home for about six years now, and something odd happened between me and my twin sisters; I grew slowly apart from one, and rather closer to the other. It just happened. I don’t think I even talked to one of them more than the other.

Anyways, my sister Lucy is really quite special, something that is slowly dawning on me. It’s hard not to think of them as when I last lived at home, when they were twelve, but she’s much more capable and mature than I’ve previously given her credit for.

My RSS reader showed me the header for the dinosaur comic things to do while waiting in an airport while I was waiting in the Akron airport.

But I couldn’t fetch the comic itself, because I was waiting in the part of this airport which doesn’t have wireless access. Cosmic.

Just a week ago, I was telling Jacob that jwz really should just cork it and buy a Mac. I was admonished not to voice this opinion around Jamie, lest he attack me with a mannequin or otherwise maul me in some vaguely fetishist fashion.

I wonder how long before he starts to hate his Mac.

For the longest time, I thought Tycho was making a little fake moustache with his finger in frame two. You know, to make the story more mysterious.

If you were to teleport me into any random airport boarding area, anywhere in the United States or Canada, I could immediately tell if it belonged to a Lufthansa flight. Lufthansa to Frankfurt is the gateway for most people traveling between the US and Africa, India, or the Middle East. It will happen to some degree with most flights, but only for Lufthansa does everyone completely disregard — willfully or owing to poor local language skills — the announcements indicating who should now board the aircraft.

So there are 400 people trying to jam into two narrow lines, and when the agent tells someone that it’s not her turn, she just stands there so that nobody can get past. The agents don’t really do anything to try to alleviate this situation, they just laugh at the carnage and watch while we prepare to depart more and more behind schedule. This has happened on every Lufthansa flight that I’ve ever taken, originating anywhere in the US or Canada. Good times.

I used one of my bountiful United system-wide upgrade certs on this flight, and call me snooty, but I am now officially not a fan of the Airbus A340.

Keep in mind that my only comparable experience has been on United’s 747-400 fleet, so it’s not like I’m comparing Lufthansa’s configuration to one of those year-after-year award-winning airlines, like Cathay or Singapore.

The seats are way too close together. Not only do the people in window seats have to engage in complicated gymnastics routines to reach the aisle without disturbing the person sitting next to them — which may not, in fact, be possible without engaging in accidental intercourse with the person you’re climbing over — but you can’t even extend the bottom half of your seat all the way. If you’re taller than about 5′8″, your feet will hit the fully-reclined person in front of you.

I have a seat in row 15, and to my unbelievable surprise, the bulkhead doesn’t allow it to recline fully either. As someone who used an upgrade for this seat, I’m probably in no great position to complain. If I were one of the people who had paid upwards of four thousand dollars each way for this seat, however, mere words would not suffice to describe my rage.

Fortunately, Lufthansa operates three different configurations of international A340, without any way to distinguish between them in advance, so good luck if you want to avoid the bulkhead row.

United’s steak is fine — sometimes really good! — but order whatever else Lufthansa has to offer. Dried pasta, German lawn weeds, fried carpet, anything but the steak. And bring your own earplugs.

The service is excellent. I have nothing snarky whatsoever to say about the service.

Scotch scotch scotch.

AirPort:  Link UP:  "any" - 000785b3f976 - chan 6
AirPort:  Link DOWN (AP deAuth 2)
AirPort:  Link UP:  "any" - 000785b3f976 - chan 6
AirPort:  Link DOWN (AP deAuth 2)

This has been happening a lot. “AP deAuth” had better not mean what it sounds like, given that I’m paying for this wireless, and I’m having a very hard time using it with all of the deAuthing.