Spectacular Spectacular

http://awwproject.wordpress.com/2010/01/03/i-am-for-sale-who-will-buy-me/

I don't have very good descriptive words for this...

One of my Christmas presents was an Arduino Projects Pack which is a nifty kit with lots of neat little components and things. Anyway, I was building the Proto Shield which involves soldering some buttons, LEDs, resistors, etc to build a little prototyping board.

I just realized now that I'm 14 solder joints in: I've got the pieces on the wrong side of the board. Yep. I've got them soldered firmly (and nicely) to the back of the board, not the front.

Dammit.

Delta Air Lines Baggage Services, upon being called just now, says there's nothing they can do about sending our bags to our house. We have to physically go and file a "Delayed Baggage File" or something like that. But they were happy to tell us our bags are in San Francisco.

The big kicker, though, is that our Oakland flight is now delayed by two hours. It was originally scheduled for 8:34 AM, then at 8:00 AM they announced it was delayed to 10:00 AM. We went up to the desk to get more details and found out that it hadn't even taken off yet (from Omaha).

Let me get this straight ... the flight hadn't even taken off yet and they didn't tell anybody until it was time to board the non-existent airplane. I know that weather happens, so the fact that the plane isn't here isn't their fault, but the fact that they knew over an hour ago that it was delayed and didn't tell anybody? 100% totally, completely their fault.

It looks like the flight is delayed to 10:30 AM now, though. But our bags are still in San Francisco. Nicole is going to drive to Oakland to pick us up (oh my god THANK YOU) and then Janine has volunteered to drive up to SFO to pick up our bags instead of relying on Delta to get something (anything) right and deliver them to us in a timely fashion.

I attempted to get us on one of the half dozen other flights. San Jose, San Francisco, Oakland, and Sacramento all had earlier flights ... all full. Packed. They offered to put us on a later SFO flight... we said no.

Oh yes, and the Ramada Inn's breakfast was terrible. Fake eggs (we think, they were pretty bad) and the bacon was bland as well.

My mom says this is turning into a regular ol' Griswald Family Vacation.

This is probably my first experience flying Delta, and I have to admit I'm rather surprised at just how terrible it's been.

Let's start out with Fargo!

Janine and I got to Fargo well early of our flight. First problem: we tried to check in to the flight, but it only showed one seat available on the plane. Janine got an assigned seat, but I got a boarding pass that said "SEAT REQUEST". I did not get a boarding pass for my second flight. The person behind the counter had to get someone else to figure out what was going on, and the answer was "well just go talk to the gate agent". Great.

So we went there, past security, 75 minutes before the scheduled departure time of 5:30 PM. But there was no gate agent. It's a small airport so I figured one would show up sometime later, before the beginning of the flight. When 5:00 PM rolled around and we still had no agent and no boarding time, I went to find another gate.

At gate #1, I found a helpful, friendly agent who told me that she was scheduled to go operate our gate, but she was busy with the gate she was at. A gate that was oversold and she had to arrange vouchers and flights for four different people.

It wasn't until 5:30 PM that someone actually showed up at our gate (a different woman). Then there was some major confusion as they tried to sort out seats for Janine and me. One quote was, "Delta's computer systems have put us 18 years into the past" and it was obvious just how terrible Delta's computer system is from the trouble they were having releasing seats, assigning seats, and basically managing their gate.

We didn't leave until 6:15 PM, much later than expected. The pilot tried to make up a little bit of time, and we made it to Salt Lake City at about 7:30 PM. With our next flight scheduled for 7:50 PM. We landed in terminal E, our flight was in terminal B.

Janine and I took off, going as fast as I possibly could for such a long distance. We made it to the gate (B06) at 7:45 PM, but there was no agent. We could see the airplane, and see people in the jetway getting on, and there was an airport staff member there too. We tried to get him to go down and tell the agents (who were down the jetway) that four of us (FOUR of us!) were standing here, ready to board.

He refused.

A few minutes later, Mike M. and someone else came up out of the jetway and us (the four of us) tried and begged to get onto the plane. Nope. Refused. Wouldn't help. The airplane was sitting there, all of us with confirmed seats, and he refused to let us on.

We watched the airplane roll away. The four of us then tried to get tickets onto another flight -- nope, the next SF flight was oversold by 7. San Jose flight was similar. Oakland flight was oversold by 1, but nobody on Standby, so we put ourselves on the list and went over there.

I'd like to reemphasize at this point that if the gate agent had taken 60 seconds to run us down there and put us on the plane, we would have all made it home tonight.

Next we waited two hours until the Oakland flight was ready to go. We watched it board, board, final boarding, final boarding, and then it was full. No flight for us, but our baggage "probably" made it to "either SFO or OAK or it might be here and will go with you tomorrow". Monique (at E79) couldn't tell us. Had not a clue. Although she felt sure our bags would be waiting for us in Oakland tomorrow and if not we could call someone or file a claim.

Great.

She hooked us up with a voucher for the Ramada Inn and four $7 "meal vouchers". Because you can really buy a meal for $7. Yes, right.

We then went outside and waited for the shuttle in the freezing 10 degrees Fahrenheit weather. Eventually it showed up and it was packed and rattly and uncomfortable. We got to the Ramada and the only had one agent at the desk and it was a long line, but I almost ran inside and we got second in line, so the wait wasn't so bad.

Of course, the Ramada has got to be the worst hotel around. No elevators. Stairways that creak, creak, creak. They didn't ask if we wanted one bed or two, or if we wanted smoking or non, just tossed us in a room. The appliances are ancient, and they have no shampoo. "Shipment was delayed due to the holidays." I'm sorry, in my book you know that Christmas is on the 25th every year, so you plan around it!

That brings us up to the present. Sitting in an old Ramada Inn waiting for the morning to come. Have to get up at 5AM, yay. Or not.

Don't get me wrong, the Delta agents were nice enough in theory, but the complete failure to get four passengers onto the plane they were standing in front of watching be boarded is just maddeningly stupid. The further failure of their computer system (or training system), causing our original flight to be delayed as much as it was, just compounds the problem.

I pray that we actually can get on the flight tomorrow, and that we actually make it home. And that our baggage makes it with us.

Grrr. Next time, people can come to me. Screw us always being the ones to fly to visit people.

Muse is coming to the Oracle Arena up in Oakland on April 14th, 2010. Anybody interested in going to see them with me?

If you don't know who Muse is...

http://www.youtube.com/user/muse?blend=1&ob=4#p/u/6/j8WP7aOD_9Q

1:12 in it really gets going and it's just amazing. I love this band.

Comments like this:

http://dw-news.dreamwidth.org/15300.html?thread=1590980#cmt1590980

That makes me feel so warm and fuzzy inside.

...

In other news, I'm in North Dakota now staying at my parents' house. Today we played some Fluxx and Munchkin and tomorrow I think Ryan, Janine, and I are going to do some Warhammer 40k/War of the Ring model building and painting.

We're just taking things easy and generally relaxing. Think we're going downstairs to watch Dollhouse now, so, g'bye!

I've learned how to express something in Perl I don't think I've ever used before. To express the highest index of an arrayref, the nomenclature is $#$foo. Nice.

I unsubscribed from thereifixedit_feed due to the blatant advertising in the feed. Quite annoying, as I rather liked that feed otherwise.

While I'm procrastinating the weekly Dreamwidth update, you get a real life update.

This past week has been exciting in real life ways!

I participated in the "Battleforce Challenge" which was a Warhammer 40,000 event taking place at the local game store. The idea is, you buy a battleforce (army in a box) for $90 and then you are entered in a tournament event. You come and play and at the end of the tournament whoever has the most points gets their money back (or gets a second $90 box).

The bad thing about battleforces is that they're not all created equal. There is one for each army (Warhammer has a bunch of armies) and they all have a "box of models" but they're not all the same point value. (In Warhammer, units cost points. More points = better.) The rules of the tournament were that you could field anything that came out of your battleforce, in any configuration you want.

This means that my Tau Empire battleforce hit the field at 733 points. An Imperial Guard battleforce could only barely get to 500 points. The Space Wolves battleforce clocked in at 1,430 points. In theory, an army with more points will win, all things being equal. I didn't expect to win, and it turns out that I didn't.

My first game I played against Necrons. I managed to fight them to a draw, but only because the hour time limit was up. Had we gone the full length he would have whittled me down. (Necrons have a close to 1,000 point battleforce.)

The second game was against a guy named Ryan who fielded the Space Wolves. It was a grotesque slaughter and he beat me. That's typically what I expect when fighting an army that has twice as many points, though. In retrospect, I might have been able to get a tie out of him as well (due to the time limit) had I planned a little ahead, but I didn't and lost.

By the third game I knew I was going to be losing the tournament and I was up against someone with Imperial Guard (very weak battleforce), but he was also a really new player. We spent the game just going slow, very carefully and thoroughly going over rules and tactics, and basically turned it into a teaching game. He was very grateful for that and in the end we tied, so that was good.

I really like going to the games store, and try to make it over there for a few hours every couple days. The people there are very friendly -- and actually, a large group of Baptists, interestingly enough. Gives me some pangs of regret for no longer belong to a church -- not because I miss being religious, but I miss that sense of belonging to a group of people that are friendly and nice.

Anyway.

Another new thing that I tried, from hearing about it through the game store: LARPing. Yes. I went to a LARP. I've never done it before and I wasn't really sure what to expect, but it turned out to be amazingly awesome.

One of the guys from the game store, Chris, helped me roll up a character. I'm Tom Peters, a Malkavian who was a photojournalist (read: paparazzi). Carries around a camera and notebook. Ends up being turned in Florida and then runs away as fast as possible, ends up in Mountain View. Then some Things Happen. I don't have time to go through it, but it was great and I had a lot of fun.

I've also played a little EVE lately. Mostly I'm trying to get the alliance I'm in (Antaeus Combine) sorted on their web properties. I did lead a roaming gang out tonight but there were only four of us (and one was a covops with no guns or scrambler) and we lost the covops and a Cerberus. And killed a Punisher+pod. Oh well, better luck next time. (Morsus Mihi scrambles quickly... lesson learned.)

...

Time to go write the update.