How to Spend 14 Hours Stuck in a Chair

I’m heading to the airport in a couple hours, with a very long plane ride ahead of me (well, two, but the second is next week). How long? Well, if United is to be believed, it’s thirteen hours and forty-four minutes long. This will be the longest continuous flight I’ve ever been on (Dulles to Bangalore is twenty hours in the air, but there’s a four hour “break” in the middle). Since I almost never sleep on planes, I’ve compiled a list of things to occupy my time:

  • A bunch of DVD’s including the first season of The X-Files, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (so I can finally watch it with Wizard People, Dear Reader) and a bunch of other stuff that I can’t remember at the moment.
  • I downloaded a ton of TED Talks and stuff from iTunesU.
  • Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky and The Writing Life by Annie Dillard.
  • The old standby, the DS Lite
  • A bunch of silly programming things to play with:
    • I’m going to try to write my own queueing server, or if that fails, play with Starling
    • Work on the blog re-write
    • Work on another top secret thingie I’ve been meaning to play with.
    • Adobe AIR
  • A bunch of podcasts
  • And then, if I do all of those things, I can always watch whatever movie the airline provides.\
    Hopefully, that’ll be enough to keep my occupied from Dulles to Beijing (for the W3C AC meeting). I’ll let you know how it goes (if I can get to the internet from China… I hear they have some version of it).