andrewgibbons.us it’s what’s playing through the in-flight video

United Services – San Francisco, CA

Members of Flyertalk were given the opportunity to tour United Services’ San Francisco Maintenance Base last Friday.  It was an outstanding event, showing the inner workings of what it takes to support the 460 airplanes in United’s fleet.  One of the cool things, besides walking beneath a 777 as shown above, was to meet the many non-customer facing employees of the facility.  They are proud of what they do, and who they work for.

Thanks to United, the SFOMC, and everyone else that made this tour possible.  It was everything an aviation geek could hope for!  Can I have one of those PW4000-series for my car?

Auckland, NZ

The Labor Day holiday found me down under, in the lovely country of New Zealand. Highlights of the trip: I enjoyed the city of Auckland, drove south to snowboard on a volcano called Mt. Ruapehu, and visited friends. As usual, the locals were fantastic! I’d love to go back for an extended vacation.

Photo Gallery

iPhone happy, Safari Beta 3.0.3 not, with WordPress

I installed a beta version of an iPhone plug in for WordPress. Not too bad (although I need to go fix some URLs that cause some known formatting issues). And on this subject, I intend to write some sort of review. I still love it!

It appears that the editor inside WordPress and Safari Beta 3.0.3 do not co-exist very well. All of the formatting tags get stripped out of the post thus making one huge blob. This is not acceptable, back to bloated Firefox for my occasional post.

What are retailers thinking?

My universal remote’s LCD screen met an untimely demise last week when it was submerged under water. I’ve been thinking about getting a Harmony 880 or 890 for a few weeks, and this was an excellent excuse to execute the purchase. Instead of ordering it from Amazon and having it here, um, today, I got busy and forgot to buy it. No problem, I’ll head to Fry’s and satisfy my impulse-buy needs now.

Or not. I get there, and naturally Fry’s is selling both models for MSRP. Amazon has them for 44% off. I hadn’t paid attention to the price online, I just assumed Fry’s would be close. Stupid me, there’s a reason why I’m an Amazon Prime member. There’s no reason to pay Fry’s an extra $170 for the pleasure of ignoring the receipt high-lighter next to the exit. Oh, and I used my iPhone to verify the savings, as well as find out that Best Buy was similarly ready to overcharge me.

I went to Cold Stone instead, and will now enjoy it while watching a Disney movie with my LCD-less remote.

The Harmony will arrive Friday.

Let apg & VA fly

Despite my enduring United fanboy status and an overloaded webserver on the first day, I have managed to acquire a seat on what appears to be Virgin America’s inaugural flight from SFO-JFK.  In coach.  *sniff* Unfortunately, I cannot attend SFO-LAX later that afternoon. 

iLife complete

I finally got my iPhone activated, after ~four hours of frustration Friday evening with AT&T. They eventually fixed my account Saturday morning, hours after my intended debut with it up in SF. The speculation was that I would ‘get laid’ quite easily flashing it around bars as I texted and checked email. I think the shirt I wore got me closer than the phone did. No matter, it turned some heads, and many people were curious on my first take. So here it is… yes, the iPhone is incredibly cool. I really love it! It’s got a great interface, and so far I’m annoyed by very few things:

• EDGE is pokey when loading big web pages. No surprise here.
• Safari keeps crashing. Mostly when I’m navigating around Facebook.
• I haven’t figured out to subscribe to specific folders in the IMAP client instead of all of them.
• Battery life sucked today. I only got about 6 hours of overall use out of it before it died. 4 email accounts checking mail every 15 minutes might be it, or maybe it’s because I was in a low signal area and the phone spent lots of time hopping and searching for towers. Or perhaps I browsed the web a bit too much this morning.

This completes my complete transition to Apple products. I don’t primarily run Windows anywhere, now that my Smartphone is gone. I’m pretty darned close to getting everything happily syncing at home, work, and on the go. I estimate I’ll have that finished and operating smoothly in the next few days. The rest of my weekend was awesome, and today was a beautiful day in San Francisco:

Palo Alto, CA

  With CNBC TV’s Silicon Valley Bureau Editor Jim Goldman outside the Palo Alto Apple Store on Thursday.

Here’s a rather scary shot, and another.

30 years culminated with this…

Off to Orlando…

Notes from the Autobahn

The nice german lady that lives in my dashboard and barks directions from the map is demanding service. What is one to do in these instances?

The Real, Final, Squirrel Launcher Video

Now if only we could do this with cats! hehehe

update: apparently someone thought that was inappropriate and the original was taken down. bah.