Author: Kevin Lawver

I made it home. What a week. I posted before about what I did on the flight to China and that was the last you heard from me. Well, Saturday night, my laptop died. It suffered a complete hard drive failure. Even using Arun system disk, it couldn’t find the hard drive controller. Hopefully, this means the drive itself is OK and I can get the first day of pictures and all the stuff I worked on on the flight there off.\
But, that left me in a tough spot. I had no laptop, spotty access on my blackberry (which is OK for staying semi-connected and consuming small chunks of data, but doesn’t work very well as my primary connection to the “collective”), and I usually charge the blackberry with the laptop. Thankfully, I’d thrown a little USB power thing in my backpack just to see if it would work for charging the DS Lite.\
So, I took notes in a W3C meeting longhand, on paper… yes, I stood out. Yes, my fellow nerds gave me a hard time about it (good-naturedly, of course). Yes, it sucked not to be able to upload photos, browse the web, read feeds and hack.\
But, the worst part of the trip was my asthma. Beijing is extremely polluted, and I was affected by it. A couple times, I took a walk around the neighborhood (the hotel and conference center is right across the highway from most of the major olympic venues), and came back wheezing. The one free day I had, I took a “test” walk in the morning to see how I’d do, but had to cut my walk short and take multiple hits on my inhaler to stop the asthma attack that followed. So, I didn’t really go anywhere or see anything outside of a four or five block radius of the hotel. I didn’t want to get stuck somewhere having an asthma attack where I don’t speak the language and didn’t know where I was or how to get back to the hotel.\
There was a great dinner, with entertainment provided by students from Baihong University, and I love hanging out with W3C folks. We even got a game of werewolf together. Doug Scheppers and I cleaned up the village as werewolves and won handily. It was only slightly unfair as Doug and I are both seasoned werewolves, and we “feasted” on a game full of first-time players.\
Now, I’m home and it’s going to take me a few days to get back on schedule. A twelve hour time difference is crazy, and I don’t think I ever got quite adjusted to it, so maybe it’ll be easier coming back.\
I’m off to bed, hopefully to sleep for many many hours. I’ll hopefully post pictures tomorrow once my laptop situation is taken care of.

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).