Yes, I know, it's been...well, over a year since I last posted. I think I may have actually been in Paris then. In which case I've managed to have consecutive posts from different places in Europe with an entire year in the States in between. I rule.

Anyway - I'm sitting in Frankfurt airport as we speak, waiting for my connecting flight to Berlin in a few hours. I'm bored. But at least they have wi-fi this time - when I was here just about three years ago, they had "wi-fi", btu it consisted entirely of an airport webpage. Now there's real net access. I'm happier.

EDIT: Ok, the last post was the one saying comments weren't working from the day before my birthday in '05. That was probably made from San Francisco, possibly Boston. Comments still aren't working, for what it's worth - I could rename the comments script back to the original name and have it work again, but then I'd get flooded with comment spam again. If I actually get back to blogging in any meaningful sense, I'll go get some sort of passkey system to keep those buggers out, but for now, it's probably not worth it. More babble below - I moved it to the extended entry in case there's still anyone out there subscribing to my RSS feed, so as not to dump a giant megapost on them out of the blue.

EDIT: Ok, the last post was the one saying comments weren't working from the day before my birthday in '05. That was probably made from San Francisco, possibly Boston. Comments still aren't working, for what it's worth - I could rename the comments script back to the original name and have it work again, but then I'd get flooded with comment spam again. If I actually get back to blogging in any meaningful sense, I'll go get some sort of passkey system to keep those buggers out, but for now, it's probably not worth it.

The truly surreal thing about sitting here in Frankfurt is that I just had an IM conversation with a friend back on the West Coast - and it was 10:25pm there when he logged off to get ready for bed. Meanwhile, it's 6:25am here, my body had finally adjusted to Eastern time (and DST) by the time I left today, and I somehow managed to sleep about four hours on the plane. This is, without a doubt, the weirdest set of time changes I've ever been through - Saturday, I woke up on PST and fell asleep on EDT for a four hour difference, and then last night moved another five hours forward to CET - which isn't on DST yet, because the Europeans aren't raving idiots, unlike Congress with its fiddling with DST.

The gate screens and flight monitors in the terminal in Boston were all borked in re: DST - my flight's departure was listed as 4:40pm when, in fact, it was leaving at 5:40, until they fixed it. Meanwhile, the other flights in the area also had the wrong times listed until they were individually fixed as well. Dad mentioned various issues they were having at his office with Cisco voice products going bonkers with the time zone change, and a friend in the office in Boxborough was having all kinds of problems with his Linux mail/calendar client getting its scheduling straight. I'm convinced there were more actual things that went wrong in the aftermath of the DST juggling than did after Y2K - Y2K, after all, was just the result of short-sighted programming shortcuts that were easy to see ahead of time. The DST stupidity was less well-known and, well, not the coders' fault, exactly. Yes, almost every system that cares about time zones/DST/etc isn't set up to handle changes as it should be, but what rational reason was there to change the damned system in the first place?

I'm sitting about 30 feet, I think, from where Arwen and I were sitting for our similarly-timed layover on the way to Prague three years ago. I recognize the bar to my left - when we were here then, they allowed smoking there, and seemingly everyone in it was smoking a putrid cigar. The air circulation took the fumes from the tables jutting out of the bar proper straight into our faces. Good times. I wouldn't have cared if it was cigarette smoke, but cigars just annoy me. Now smokers here are confined to what seems to be one or two smokers' kiosks per floor. I just took a picture of the one downstairs - the smokers are clustered immediately around the ashtrays. It's kind of sad. There's what looks like an LCD tv sitting in the middle of the kiosk showing nothing but a Camel logo. I'm hoping it's just a lit display and not an LCD tv, 'cos, well, that'd be a waste.

Oh, I saw the Telepresence (not sure if I should capitalize that, but, well, hey) setup Cisco's put in at the office in Boxborough. It's whacky: three giant plasma screens right next to each other, with the ones on the right and left slightly at angles to the one in the middle, and then an expensive looking table with expensive looking chairs in front of 'em. I'm not sure what exactly the big deal about "telepresence" is - it just looks like really badass video conferencing to me. Of course, I violently hate video conferencing. My ex-boss tried to get me to do video conferencing, since it integrates with our phones and such. I laughed at that: even when I'm in the office, which is rare enough, I'm not really into the idea of having to worry about people looking at me while I'm on conference calls. That's the advantage of working remote to the rest of my group: I can scratch my ass or play videogames while in meetings.

I'm babbling a lot here. Guess I missed blogging more than I thought. I'm still not sure exactly why I stopped blogging, but looking at when my posts started to really taper off, I think there's a connection between raiding in WoW and my blogging rate. Once I was basically logged into WoW whenever I was home and not working, there was a lot less time to just ramble for 20 minutes at a time on a blog post. I haven't been that sucked into WoW since last summer (though it still absorbs what's probably an unhealthy portion of my time), but I guess I just got out of the habit of posting here. I'll definitely be picking it up again for the duration of my stay out here - my pictures will all end up on my photo gallery, and, honestly, I'm betting that being on another continent, unable to actually talk to quite literally any human being that I know, will result in me feeling a compulsive need to talk to some sort of audience, even if it's just the largely hypothetical one represented here. So if you *are* still reading here, expect more. I promise it'll be boring.