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description= Originally a pair of views on gaming, it s now musings by Redbeard on video games (mainly MMOs), board games, RPGs, and other geeky hobbies.;
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i like my sleep too much from owlturd com urg pretty sure it s not the bard who says that but the dad from farstride and thunder dungeon oh freddie my old buddy from facebook s dndmemes posted by redbeard at 6 00 am 2 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels meme monday memes saturday march 15 2025 where s red non medical edition this past week i wasn t at home no i wasn t at the hospital again and nobody that i knew was in the hospital either i also wasn t on vacation i was traveling for work it poured in charlotte on monday and delayed my connecting flight by about 45 50 minutes if you know anything about me i m not a big fan of travel a lot of that has to do with the cost because we really couldn t afford to take regular vacations while the mini reds were growing up but there was also the proximity to other people and the overall lack of actual relaxation when on vacation to me vacation was a thing you do to just not be in any hurry to unwind if you want to do nothing do nothing to others glances sidelong at wife vacation is more about going places seeing things and above all keeping to a schedule to see said things when you re waking up at 6 or 7 am because insert locale here opens at 9 am and we d better be ready to go asap that s not a vacation to me that s work in just another form my dad insisted on that sort of vacation too because he loved to golf and wanted to make his tee time when we were on vacation so maybe that resistance to having a regimented vacation is deeply ingrained in me i never really travelled for work in the past either for starters i never had to the closest i ever came to having to travel for work was when my old team over 20 years ago had a disaster recovery drill and we were going to have to travel to the east coast to conduct it at a remote site i was slated to go until i got bumped for another person which was fine with me i was then slated to go on the next dr drill until i got moved into another team much to my surprise and that team and line of work never required me to travel at all so when i was told i was going to have to travel for work for this past week it caught me by surprise i m not here to talk about the work itself because that s a big no no but to muse about other things regarding travel from the perspective of someone who simply doesn t travel that much and maybe i ll tie this into gaming or something the last time i flew on a plane i was one of the first people to get patted down by the new rules regarding air travel in a post 9 11 world that was to attend a friend s wedding down in houston and we struggled to come up with the money to pay for the plane ticket and the hotel room if i were at the software development job i held in the late 90s i wouldn t have been able to afford to go but where i was employed at by then i could afford it barely outside of the wedding itself my traveling partner and i didn t do that much we saw the fellowship of the ring in the theater we went to the wedding and we kind of just hung around the hotel room and that was it beyond that i had more memories about the new fangled garmin in the rental car than i did of houston itself the city was just so large and so spread out that i really had no memories of the place i had more memories of the airport because at the time the greater cincinnati international airport cvg had our flight at a separate terminal for a low cost carrier far away from the rest of the airport itself you had to take a bus from the main terminal to get there and like i mentioned above it was on the flight home from houston that i got the detailed pat down process so with all those memories in my head i got authorization from work to travel and booked a flight a rental and a hotel room without further ado here s my notes tech has transformed travel much like everything else well duh tell me something i didn t know i just didn t realize just how much tech has transformed things even 23 years ago i was going online for air tickets orbitz anyone but now i can perform all the functions of a travel agent far easier than i ever could in the past travel agents still have their part to play but they re more of a niche market than they were before still tech has also transformed the travel experience in other ways the number of people i saw using their phones or tablets during a flight was simply staggering when i last flew smartphones and tablets didn t even exist and yet at the airport and in flight they were everywhere people no longer had to be glued to the arrivals and departures screens at the airport their phones could provide them an up to the minute status on their flights and even if their flight was rerouted to another gate with all this tech the flying experience became very well ordinary everything was presented to you to allow you to operate in the most efficient manner possible in much the same way that some addons such as questie do in mmos trying to avoid the easy mode version of doing things takes more effort now than simply just going with the flow i now know why noise cancelling headphones are a thing i had a connecting flight at charlotte north carolina to my final destination in florida that meant i had flights between cincinnati and charlotte on an embraer bombardier crj900 i knew next to nothing about the crj900 so i discovered that some people disparagingly refer to the plane as a flying trash can with wings this did not inspire any confidence in me but at least there are tons of them flying so how bad could it be not that bad but that s because i had really low expectations based off of reading the info i found online the seats were not very good but they didn t make my butt ache and i could at least relax a bit one of the armrests wouldn t go up to let me get out more easily but at least it was in the correct position for flying the person in the seat next to me said something about the lack of comfort but i mentioned it could be much worse to which he heartily agreed i was also able to fit easily into the seat without feeling squished thanks no doubt to my overall weight loss like i said not bad except for the cabin noise holy crap was the noise bad the culprit i had my earbuds snuggly in place but that cabin noise generated by the jet engines was pretty horrific i could barely hear whatever i was playing it was a podcast about the history of kissing of all things unless i turned the volume way up it was then that i realized that noise like this was what led people to creating noise cancelling headphones not the press of crowds at malls and other enclosed places when we landed i took note of the various shops in the concourse at charlotte and just how many of them had headphones for sale and not just headphones but the expensive noise cancelling variety if nothing else those shops do know their clientele my other flights were on newer airbus jets and while those jets were significantly quieter my old honda accord is quieter than these jets were if you ve ever driven a 90s era honda you know it is not quiet if i do this sort of thing again i might have to get a pair of noise cancelling headphones just to preserve my ears all these lists and i still forget things i m pretty sure this isn t limited to me but i d made lists to check off prior to my departure to prevent the one thing i was most likely to do forget something while it was plenty obvious that i needed to have enough underwear or shirts packed other items such as my mouse and my battery for my laptop might easily be missed if i hadn t written them down so i made a point to put them on the list when i finally got settled in my hotel room for that first night i d congratulated myself for a successful first part of the trip when i realized i d forgotten my toothbrush yes i was able to easily obtain another toothbrush from the front desk but since i actually had toothbrush on my list you d have thought i d have actually packed it away but i didn t so i spent most of the rest of the trip wondering just what else i d forgotten in spite of putting everything i needed down on the lists so far i haven t found that out yet although i did forget to bring my laptop charger with me on my last day at the client office that made things a bit dicey on making my laptop last for 5 6 hours on one charge but i somehow pulled that off i can tolerate being in a sardine can for a little while see my comments about the embraer bombardier crj900 above what you want more okay right i m not a germaphobe by any stretch of the imagination but being shoehorned into a jet plane no matter how luxurious or spacious doesn t endear me to my fellow man little eccentricities such as an occasional tic tic tic sound made by one passenger who can t sit still or that teenager hunched over hoodie pulled up playing a video game on their phone can get under my skin putting on earbuds and losing myself in music or a podcast helps a lot but that immersion is lost when you open your eyes and a woman in front of you starts watching one of the puss in boots movies the flight was just long enough however for that to not be a problem if the flight were much longer maybe not so much the seats were hard and had little padding so my butt was falling asleep just as we descended to land each way if we had to wait in the air it would have been kind of miserable the two airbuses were much more comfortable to sit in although there were more seats from side to side and because of the increased width there was greater overall headroom i m happiest with a book i knew i would likely get air sick if i tried to read on the flight but i brought a couple of books with me to read one was that ham radio license manual i ve been studying and the other was the color of magic terry pratchett s first discworld novel i spent most of my down time before bed and at the gate waiting for my flight reading the latter so expect a post out of that fairly soon however after my last work day i discovered a bookstore near my hotel so how did i spent that last evening yeah you knew that was coming i didn t buy anything but i certainly enjoyed the time i spent there you can find inspiration in the most crowded spaces in the middle of charlotte s concourse there s a food court and in the middle of the food court an airport employee played the piano he played some show tunes and popular hits but i finally spoke to him after he played the theme to hill street blues i m old enough to remember when that show was on nbc back in the 1980s and its theme music by mike post i walked up and gave him a tip and thanked him for that piece he told me that once in a while he gets some recognition by a passerby when he plays that tune so he was glad he made my day i then asked him what he liked to play some james bond among other movie themes because people liked to hear it here but what about at home what do you play when nobody s listening oh i mostly play religious pieces yeah i mused i can see where that might be a bit obscure to be played here then again hill street blues is pretty obscure nowadays too i thanked him and headed on to my gate with a bounce in my step i realize he was paid to play for the crowd but it was nice to have a personal touch when walking through an impersonal and under construction transportation hub the tsa lines aren t that bad there i said it i was thinking i was going to get held up in the same manner i did back in the day but that didn t happen the tsa line went quickly and i did what i should always do just tell them the info that they want to know and don t do anything else if they ask then you can say something it only took me 50 odd years to figure this sort of thing out still i did have issues in that no two tsa lines at different airports are alike at one location the tsa checkpoint didn t bother having laptops out of the bags and they took your photo id and ran it through their system at the other location the tsa chekpoint had you remove your laptop and you had to run your photo id through their system yourself oh and the place to put your photo id in was different than the other location i spent probably a good 20 seconds before the tsa guy explained exactly where to put your card in and then i felt quintessentially stupid for a guy who actually works in it i have major blind spots with using tech the airline people are tired of your shit or maybe it was because they had to deal with some less than charitable people in front of me but i took note of how they aggravated the aa employees as the desk and kept my conversation to a minimum bing bang boom done i didn t get a smile even once but to be honest i was just happy to not get harangued i want to make perfectly clear that i was not picking on american airlines employees here i did note that other airlines employees had the same we re done with this look on all their faces so it wasn t just american airlines for certain and it could have been that at 10 30 am the morning rush was over so they had just begun to unwind a bit after the stress of the morning still i made a point to not piss off those in power and don t get me started on the airline employees who got rightfully pissed off by people dropping travelers off picking them up in the drive only lane or other shenanigans that i watched while i had free time when it was time for my wife to pick me up after i returned to cvg i prayed hard that she would just pull in to the side and let me hop right on into the car which she did i am not familiar with modern cars you may laugh but our new car is a 2010 honda cr v backup cameras weren t standard until 2017 and large giant infotainment screens weren t standard on non luxury or sport vehicles until around the mid 2010s my own car wasn t even built in this century as that old 1997 honda accord just keeps right on chugging along and will not die so what did the rental agency give me a brand new toyota prius this thing from fremont toyota i got into that car sat down and couldn t figure out the gear shift for a good 3 minutes once i got to the hotel i spent a couple more minutes trying to figure out how to put the damn thing into park narrator it was a button he had to push same with the parking brake cardwyn so he was as clueless as i would have been and i didn t grow up around those things me shut up both of you i don t want to have to tell my therapist that i ve been hearing voices again cardwyn what voices me it took until mid week before i felt comfortable driving the car luckily for me the thing sipped gasoline so filling up the tank before i dropped it off was no big deal but i really had a hard time dealing with the sloped windshield and rear window you d think i was driving a lamborghini the way it was angled but no that was done for aerodynamics the interior was both spacious and cramped due to the seat angles and the roof aerodynamics and that also bothered the hell out of me still given the number...
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