Monday, March 20, 2006

Arrived in Los Angeles

There's a lot of bumpy air between Columbia and Los Angeles. We were a few minutes late leaving Columbia. The pilots were having an earnest discussion as the wintry mix started to fall at the airport. Finally they decided they could do it, and we headed off to St. Louis. Actually, their story was that they got in late last night and had to meet the FAA-mandated off time before they flew out. I think that was a PR gesture. The flight attendant mentioned that they were awaiting some weather data before they made their decision.

I arrived in LA on time, caught the shuttle, and made it to the meeting place with about 10 minutes to spare. Lunch was eaten literally on the run.

The software installation was about as turbulent as the flight out, but after debugging a few scripts, and googling for error messages, things finally coalesced into a working setup. Basically, this is all done on a laptop -- with webserver and tomcat (for Java-based web applications). All-in-all a productive, if sometimes frustrating afternoon and early evening.

I doubt I will have time to do much blogging, but we'll see. The hotel has free broadband, so I can do a little recreational web surfing.

Right now my strategy is to go to bed at an hour that will permit me to sleep until 6am local time. My history with West Coast travel is that I tend to wake up at my normal Missouri time (i.e. 4AM out in California). It gets really annoying.

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