As I write this, Gallery Furniture in Houston is on fire and, by most reports, close to completely burning down. Anyone who grew up or spent much time in the Houston area is will versed in Houston’s various furniture stores and their often crazy commercials, but Gallery Furniture has been somewhat of an icon over the last (almost) three decades of my life. Of course, I never shopped there because I’ve been heretofore exceedingly poor. That, and I don’t live in Houston anymore.

My wife’s father had a heart attack last week. And of course no heart attack is complete without the matching quadruple bypass and the upcoming stent to be placed in a carotid artery that is more than 90% blocked. I chose now to blaim the lack of writing on those events and the ensuing emergency trip to Phoenix last week, though it wasn’t completely responsible.

In the aftermath, though, it has set me upon thinking about things in my life that need to change. Combining these events with what Kevin went through last year have started to hit home. That effort was aided by my wonderful wife who was in tears at the thought of not being able to grow old with me. I thought then as I do now that the later would’ve negated the need for the former altogether, I think. But then, some of us are slow to listen sometimes and need several hints before we get the message. I’m not able to do things as I did ten or fifteen years ago. Those times are gone and while I certainly don’t miss them, their affects on habits and thought processes still linger.

In travel news, I was delighted to learn that my single night three room reservation at a Marriott property near Disneyland was turned, by the property, into three separate reservations that each earned an elite qualification night. Combine that with the double elite qualification night promotion that is all the rage of hotel and airline programs these days, I’m sitting in a great spot to qualify again for Marriott Gold at a bare minimum for 2010. I may actually be able to hit Platinum depending on how my business travel goes.

The move to Austin is still on the road map and my loving wife is continuing to make great strides in preparation for it. While it is certainly a good thing, I think my first task at the moment is to move myself into a position to stave off the impending myocardial infarction when I think about the amount of money that will be disbursed in the move effort. I’m not complaining about it or saying it’s a bad idea by any means, but it is a very real and very large expenditure for us right now. I suppose there is some solace in the fact that it will all be tax deductible, so I’ve got to remember to focus on that.

It’s been too long since I’ve been on an airplane. Thankfully I will remedy that in a couple of weeks.

One of the nice things about having a web hosting account that gives you statistics about the visitors you have to your site is that it also reports what search engines were used to locate your site, and what people were searching for when they stumbled upon it.

So far in May, I’ve had a few hits for my post on Continental’s usage of the 737-900 aircraft. But am I very pleased to report that Down To Zero is, amazingly enough, the number one source of beef prices in April 2009. My innocuous comment about angsty beef in the byline is probably to blame. I’m proud, disturbed, and somewhat hungry.

I’ve begun to rethink our moving plans again. Not whether or not we should move because we’re locked and loaded on that, but rather the actual implements that will be employed to perform the move. I’ve got a couple of quotes out to some local moving companies that have BBB accreditation. I have a feeling that they will still trump the costs that I’ve already calculated to move ourselves by half an order of magnitude. Still, I enjoy having options and exploring the road not traveled. I suppose it helps me give a reason for not traveling that road.

In other news, my wife’s birthday is this weekend so I’m taking her to Croce’s for dinner (one of her favorite places) and then over to the San Diego Marriott & Marina for the evening where flowers and a personalized Tiramisu will be waiting for her. Should be a good time.

Finally, this week has taken forever to pass by. I guess forward is progress, and progress is good.

Technically speaking, moving day is 44 days away, but it is certainly on my mind as of late. My wife and I are moving from the sunny skies and cool breezes of San Diego and into the somewhat oppressive heat and decidedly severe spring storms of Austin. We’re both excited about the move and everything that it involves, but generating the plan has taken considerable effort.

All in all, it means paying off our wedding a bit faster, being able to save and actually afford a house, and being able to travel more. I am particularly interested in the travel more aspect. I’m hoping to actually qualify for the lowest tier of elite status with Continental by the end of the year, so that I can purchase economy tickets for work travel and be automatically upgraded to first class, where I actually fit (somewhat).

But for now, the focus is the next six weeks and all of the stuff it entails. Misty’s birthday is coming up week after next, as is my sister’s first visit to San Diego. Tommy and his wife are also coming out to help us with the move, so we’re going to treat them to some touristy Southern California staples before we go. I’m looking forward to that as well.

And then, the 1350 mile drive across the desert southwest in June. That’s going to be just a super time, I’m sure. Gives me an excuse to dust off my ham radio skills for the trip. And really, it’s just one more thing in a series of totally unexpected but completely awesome life changes that would’ve never been possible without my wife. And for that, I am eternally grateful.

After sepnding the last couple of days at work in close proximity to our development team who all run Ubuntu on their computers both at work and at home, I found a renewed desire to resurrect my linux box at home and make an earnest effort to move from Windows to Linux for most of my daily tasks. I think I’ve mostly accomplished that goal, but the road to freedom was not the easy one.

There has long been a debate between Linux fanboys and, well, everyone else about why and how one operating system is better than another. At the end of the day, most sentient people agreed that while Linux had some pretty clear advantages over Windows, its fatal flaw was that it was too bloody difficult to use for the uninitiated user.

Now, I am anything but an uninitiated user. But, I cut my teeth with DOS and the Windows environment. Aside from an extended experiment with a Comodore 64 in the late 1980s, Windows was how my computer world was oriented. Because Linux has such a dramatically different structure, translating operations between the two is somewhat difficult, at least for me.

Ubuntu set out to change all that, and to some degree they have. I was trying to find a GTK+ compiler last night to compile the source for xchat but then realized I didn’t need to because Ubuntu has a wonder Add/Remove Applications manager that downloads and installs additional applications for you. This is a huge step forward in getting the home user acclimated to a Linux environment.

But it is not complete. I had a bad video card driver and it took three hours and some help from an extremely gifted Linux guru friend of mine. I was relating to Tommy that I felt very ignorant and meek in using this operating system. I haven’t felt that way around a computer in quite some time.

But things are moving forward. I’m making a conscious effort to use the command line where possible because I believe that an understanding of the power involved with the effective application of the command line is crucial to further understanding the GUI’s role in managing the overall system. That same principle applies to DOS: it is often easier and faster to accomplish some tasks in the DOS command prompt than it is to use a Windows GUI.

It’s a little exciting to move to a new OS where the tumbleweeds roll freely across the plains. Oh wait, that tumbleweed is lagging a bit. I think I need more RAM…

Apparently I’m not able to be seated at the cool kid’s table, so I get my information from a reliable second-hand source. Apparently my friends over at Continental have begun the process of adding their 737-900ER fleet to semi-long haul routes previously reserved for the 757 series of aircraft.

What does this mean for you, dear traveler? There is a high chance of being stuck on a 737 for trans-Atlantic flights in the future. I claimed this three years ago when the 737-900ER first came out, due to its range and ability to reach from the east coast of the United States to western European locales including Iceland, Ireland, and even the UK with some weight restrictions.

I don’t know about you, but the 737 is not something I enjoy being incarcerated in for longer than about four hours. Continental is rolling them out on the five hour LAX - HNL leg, and offering service to Maui’s OGG airport. As part of this process, the premium cabin offerings usually associated with the 757 and 767 aircraft normally flown to Hawaii are also off the table. And no word has come down relating to complementary upgrades, but I don’t get to enjoy those so I care slightly less.

In any event, it will be interesting to see how it all plays out. I’ll still be seeking out widebodies for my long-haul flights, thank you very much.

I’m not entirely sure what’s been going on the past couple of days, but I haven’t done much online. I think it might stem from a great deal of effort being put forth in the office. Apparently others particular failures to plan on their part actually do constitute an emergency on my part. Who knew?

I’m starting to get more requests for travel advice lately. I am fairly comfortable discussing travel options for almost any locale, and fairly comfortable explaining the ins and outs of airline travel, hotel bookings, and car rentals. But I am firmly in reality as it relates to the awesome amount of knowledge contained in the minds of some folks I know over at FlyerTalk. It’s like a whole other league. Even still, I enjoy discussing travel options and have a tentative plan to send one of my coworkers and his girlfriend to Mexico for her birthday next month.

Speaking of birthdays, my wife’s birthday is next month and I am at a loss as to what to get her. Wedding bills and potential moves have sucked cash reserves dry. Not that they were terribly wet in the first place. Though the weekend after her birthday, my sister and one of her friends are coming out to visit for the first time since I’ve lived in California. I’m out $350 and have 29 miles left in my frequent flier account, but they’re going to have a great time. And I got to book airfare, which is almost as addictive as gambling for commercial aviation nerds like me.

Even still, big things are around the corner. And for the first time in my life, I’m not worried. Well, I am, but only because I don’t have a clear plan of action yet. It will come soon though. Since getting married, some of that stuff has been a little easier for me than it has been in the past. I suppose it’s just one more blessing.

In keeping with our theme of wisdom and age, you would think that I would know better by now. I am not in college and haven’t been for quite some time. I go to bed before 10PM regularly and have been known to make a responsible decision from time to time. You would think.

I don’t believe I ate anything that was good for me the entire time I was in Texas. I enjoyed the fabeled Breakfast on a Bun™ from Whataburger one two separate occasions. I also was found at a fast food establishment on two other occasions due to scheduling and not so much desire. A fine BBQ dinner on Saturday night was extremely enjoyable, but devoid of vegetables. And last night, the hunger that drove my wife and I to a McDonalds in Aliso Viejo was the last bloody straw.

2:30AM last night arrived with a vengeance. I will spare the sensitive reader the gory details, but I will recount that my incredibly beautiful wife slept through the entire ordeal. After I put away the clogged drain opener and the 409, I sat on the edge of the bed, utterly exhausted. “Is everything ok?” she asked, concerned. I related the events of the past hour and laid down.

“I think I need a salad tomorrow.” Boy, did I ever.

It has become increasingly clear to me this weekend that my grandparents are really, really old. Health problems and general frailty are much more a concern than they used to be. It’s all part of life, of course, but it’s really hit home today.

In other news, I am worn out. I never sleep well my first night in a new place and I’ve had two of those nights in a row. I think I’ll make use of those fresh clean sheets while the making is good.

So I fell off again. So’s yer face. :P

I’m patiently waiting on breakfast to be delivered this morning. We spent last night in the Costa Mesa Marriott which has been turned into an all suite property. It’s not bad, a tad old, but most full service Marriott properties in this area are. They refurbish them but you can still see the markings of an older building. Well, that, and the living room TV is under the wet bar and next to the fridge. Color me confused.

We stayed here last night so that we didn’t have to leave home a 4AM to make it to Long Beach for our flight to Austin. I get another chance to enjoy 38″ of seat pitch in coach on JetBlue’s E190 service. A can of ginger ale and a combination of live TV should pass the two and a half hours easily enough. On to Austin!

I am not a fan of tags. Increasingly, they can be found in the World Wide Web version 2.0 (because the first one wasn’t pretentious enough). WordPress, which is the magnanimous confusion that brings you this fine web edifice, has a tag feature whereby I can specify some key words that help identify a particular post. The only problem is that I end up using dumb tags that don’t mean anything, hence my distaste.

My buddy Tommy just rolled out a homemade tag feature on his site. It does seem like a good idea up front, but I think the underlying flaw is that it requires willing participation on the part of the user for the system to be successful. While I am hesitant to call myself lazy, I am often first in the, “minimalist” queue. I want to write words on a website and don’t need a lot of extra fuss about it. That is, in part, why I so hate using systems like WordPress and MovableType which require, literally, thousands of individual files to work as a system. Surely it can be done simpler!

I digress. I’ve recently put some thought into writing my own blogging software in ColdFusion simply so that it meets all my personal needs. ColdFusion doesn’t have near the following it did a few years ago but it is extremely powerful due in large part to how simple it is. I bet I could pull it all off in about ten files and utilize the same SQL database that houses the data for this site. But that would require time and investment in a host that offers Windows Server systems that run ColdFusion, and there aren’t many of those around. There are fewer still that have affordable pricing.

Tagging seems to have its place, in my mind, on media aggregation sites like YouTube or Flickr. For example, the SNL sketch that includes Will Ferrell and several other SNL regulars as Blue Oyster Cult and has Christopher Walken as a guest star might have a file name of SNL_WillFerrell-ChristopherWalken.mp4. But almost certainly, it would have a tag relating it to needing more cowbell. I don’t know that textual content is a great place for tagging because it is already text; the only thing easier to search a database for is an integer.

I know, I know. I’m such a rebel. I’m the old grouchy guy who lives down the Internet street.

“Get off my lawn! Damn kids…”