the bouncey zone

We’re in Kentucky again for the New Years holiday!

I’ve written a few times about how I like to fly, but I don’t like airports. This time they let me travel with no hassle. No pat-down, no extra screening, no long delays. It was all going so well.

Then we picked up our luggage. My suitcase had a black “TSA Approved” padlock. I hadn’t put any locks there…

When we opened it (using bolt cutters), it looked as if our friends in Transportation Security had opened the suitcase and let wild baboons frolic inside. I had brought four jars of apple preserves, wrapped neatly in a sweatshirt for padding. Two of them had dented lids, one of them pretty badly. Amazingly, the dents didn’t break the seal. The glass jars themselves were okay. They were still wrapped in that sweatshirt.

Several plastic packets containing bars of homemade soap were roughed up a little. A box containing a child’s gift was squashed flat. Luckily the thing inside the box was already mostly two dimensional.

On top of the flattened box was a polite “hey we thought you might like to know, we dug through your stuff” note, which cited a particular bit of federal law. I’ll have to look it up sometime. Since they didn’t include a copy of their search warrant, I suspect it’s probably unconstitutional.

The good news: Now I have one of those “approved” locks. I’ve been wanting to get my hands on one, so I can try to figure out how it works. But I didn’t want to pay actual money for it. They gave it to me for free.

Already I don’t trust these new locks. Am I the only one who remembers the Clipper chip debate back in the 1990s? The basic principles are similar, except in this case there is no trusted third party to hold the keys.

I took a few pics of the lock and damaged items. I’ll post a them in the gallery when I have more time.

I must’ve been a good boy this year. I got a Palm TX for Christmas. I’ve only had it one day, but I’ve already tested the more interesting features.

Reasonably good players for pictures, movies, and sound files come with the Palm. TCPMP can be added to play more movie formats as well well. This has a lot of potential for travel entertainment.

The included web browser and document viewer are nice. Last night we went to IHOP, one of the few restaurants open in Norman on Christmas Day. IHOP also has free wireless internet access. While waiting for a table to open up I got online, picked up a copy of Kipling’s Jungle Book from Project Gutenberg, and opened it in Documents To Go. Thus I had something to read with supper.

This thing is fun. I’ll have to load it up with my favorite MP3 songs before the next trip to Kentucky.

The experiments continue! In the gallery there are several new pics of recent batches of soap. I’ve been trying different molds, shapes, fragrances, colors, and processing methods. Getting better at this…

We’ve been busy getting ready for Christmas. This year many of the gifts are homemade. Yesterday we made granny smith apple preserves using a recipe from the National Center for Home Food Preservation. It looked and smelled like spiced applesauce while cooking.

Some of the pics from our recent trip to Kentucky are now in the gallery. These were taken by Ben Blake, Dana’s father. I’ll add the other Thanksgiving pictures after I remember where I put the camera.

Here’s what happened last Sunday night:

We were flying home from Kentucky. This meant departing from Louisville (SDF) at 7pm EST, having a reasonably long layover at DFW, then arriving in OKC around bedtime. We got to the airport an hour before takeoff.

The flight was delayed due to stormy weather in Texas. Eventually we boarded the plane a little after 11pm, after waiting for the plane and crew to fly into SDF from DFW. At least we waited in a spacious terminal building with plenty of bathrooms. Our poor counterparts at DFW had to wait on the tarmac.

During the flight I couldn’t sleep at all. Our Embraer regional jet had horrible seats. The padding was too thin, the headrest wouldn’t stay where I put it, and everything was too close together. By the time we landed, everything hurt. My right foot still aches a few days later.

We arrived about 1am CST, missing our connecting flight. Because it was a “weather” delay, the airline didn’t want to pay for our hotel bill. Actually, their agent didn’t want to do anything at all, beyond booking us on the 9am flight to OKC. Dana finally succeeded in pestering him into a voucher for a “distressed traveler” rate at the Radisson. The hotel had shuttle bus service running all night. We got to our room about 2am. It felt like 3am due to jet lag.

They kept our luggage. Good thing my contact lens kit was in my backpack!

Slept 4 hours, crawled out of bed… Our room had free ethernet, but I didn’t have time to do much with it. No change of clothes, so I had to wear the previous day’s pants and sweater without socks, undies, or undershirt. Hooray for layers!

Back to the airport. DFW is, in my opinion, the worst airport layout ever built. It’s arranged in narrow pods encircling a dense maze of roads, parking garages, and (judging by the signs) business parks. A wall in each pod separates the gates on one side from the baggage claim and ticket counters on the other. A security checkpoint is in the middle.

Thanks to ever-expanding security precautions, the checkpoint butts intrusively into both sides. As a result, the line for the security checkpoint stretches along the baggage claim area. Apparently this is normal. The start of the line is just a few meters past the end of the baggage carousel.

On the other side I found myself thrust, barefoot and beltless with baggy pants, into a high-traffic walkway. There were many ways the situation could have turned out badly. Luckily, I was able to secure my pants and protect my toes without incident.

We found the gate, though it took a while to figure out that it had changed. I think we almost went to Cleveland. Then we waited for boarding.

That’s when I noticed the music. One of our fellow travelers had brought a violin and was using the time to get some practice. She wasn’t playing perfectly, but it was good enough. Heavenly even. At that moment I decided that all major airports ought to have a string section.

We got home in time for lunch. Our suitcases arrived a few hours later. The trip back to Norman took the same amount of time that driving would have — assuming a leisurely supper and a good night’s sleep at a motel.

This reminds me of the Great Suitcase Incident last year. But that’s another story.

Scott and I watched the Baby Einstein Language Nursery DVD together this morning. In general, it’s a sequence of poems and songs in several languages, recited or sung while colorful things happen on screen. The goal is to expose little ones to foreign sounds, thereby improving their future educational potential.

The concept is good, but the implementation could be better. The recitations and the actions have almost nothing in common. They just wave random toys around. Sometimes there are moments when the toy makes sense. Mostly these moments are when a jack-in-the-box pops up and says the equivalent of “hello”.

Sometimes it’s worse than random. The counting is almost unbearable. Voices will count up to 20 while a hand slowly takes away five items, or a clock’s hands spin out of control, or a rattle shakes with no apparent rhythm. In another scene, a voice recites the Hebrew alef-bet while blocks with unrelated Roman letters are stacked up and toppled over. I wanted to scream.

Scott loved it when I counted along with the Japanese voice. Ichi, ni, san… What a smile! Daddy is so funny!

The special features include some video flash cards in the various languages. It shows a picture, then shows how it’s written, and finally has a voice say it. I found it interesting that the Japanese parts are written entirely in the hiragana script — not kanji characters. Of course, Scott was trying to eat the remote control instead of watching the flash cards.

Honestly, I was bored silly through most of the DVD. Scott was interested at first, but soon he was acting bored too. Maybe we’re just spoiled by Signing Time. I must admit that this DVD is far less annoying than any purple dinosaurs or technicolor lemurs. The technical quality of the filming and audio recording is excellent. Maybe this one would be good for a little variety.

I don’t recall seeing any other Baby Einstein videos yet. I’ll have to watch more of them sometime.