Transatlantic Near Death Experience
As I write this, I am on a very crowded plane crossing the Atlantic. British Airways heavily overbooked my flight, and my friends and I checked in near the cutoff, so the check-in person had to scramble to find us seats. She was successful in averting the catastrophe of our being upgraded to business class, and all she had to do was split up our party’s seats! There isn’t an aisle seat among us, sadly, and I have the additional misfortune of being unable to stow my backpack beneath the seat in front of me (due to a very unfortunately placed metal box).
Unfortunately, the trip got off to a fairly glum start earlier when Josh was paged at the airport only to find out that his beloved (but elderly) cat had gone into a coma. On the spot, Josh made the only agonizing decision he could: to put her to sleep. Later, disaster was narrowly averted after I boarded the plane, only to realize that I had forgotten my camera bag and the bag containing my headphones and iPod. The airline personnel would not allow me to leave the boarding area to retrieve them, and instead went looking for them themselves. I just about had a heart attack when they came back with my iPod and headphones, but no camera! Fortunately, I really pushed the issue, and they checked again, only to find that some other airline employees had found it and were holding onto it at the gate.
To pass the time on the flight, I’ve done a little bit of work on a Perl-based EXIF parser I’ve been wanting to write for some time. So far it is successfully reading the initial header data, but I’m afraid I’m going to need additional information about the EXIF data format to get much further. How did people ever program without the Internet as a reference?
The lights are out, so reading the copy of the New Yorker I brought is out of the question. My only distraction is Harry Potter & The Chamber of Secrets, which the flight attendants are showing at the special request of some precocious children on the flight. To be honest, it’s a better movie than I had expected—I think what the Harry Potter movies really have going for them is not their stories (which seem to me fairly pedestrian), but rather the marvelous atmosphere they cultivate. The flying Ford Anglia was also a nice touch.
My PowerBook battery is getting low, so I’d better knock off and try to get some sleep. Only five hours to London…