At 5.55am, I was picked up by the SuperShuttle for the trip back to Denver International Airport for the scheduled 8.20am departure of my flight to San Francisco International Airport. The scheduled arrival time, with usual pessimism, was 10.10am (2hr5 in the air, gain an hour from timezone changes).

After being picked up we drove around the city a bit visiting other hotels, as these shuttles do, until we got to the Hyatt where we waited 20 minutes. This was because a driver doing the route for a different set of hotels had only one passenger too, so they decided to meet up and we’d both go in the same one! The New Yorker who got in next to me was very talkative. In fact, he didn’t stop for the 50 minutes the journey to the airport took.

I had breakfast in a hurry so I could get down to the gate at or just after its opening time (7.50am). After boarding, we could see through the window that the engine under the left wing had its cover off and men were working on it. This, we felt, was a bad sign and made the continuing assertion that the departure time was 8.20am appear optimistic. It was only a bit of a pool of oil collected in the bottom of the engine which often happens during maintenance. Apparently. Except that when they sucked it all out, more appeared. The engineers decided a little valve had to be repaired and this was to take 20 minutes. At this point, the cabin crew offered everybody drinks of water. It had not made a good impression that they were standing at the galley at the front of the ecomony section drinking water & coffee themselves whilst we were just sitting there. Of course, once they took the little valve out there was obviously a lot of head shaking and sharp intakes of breath and we were told it would be at least another hour to fix the fuel leak they’d discovered. At this point, things got a little chaotic, although I hesistate to blame the plane crew because they did the sensible thing which was to invite people to return to the gate area, where they could buy food and drink and use the terminal’s facilities. However, as we were disembarking, we were given a message to go to a different gate where a replacement plane was waiting. Naturally, this was at the opposite end of the concourse, so we marched down there sharpish. The moment we arrived (it took a good 5 minutes to get there), they announced that we should return to the original gate as they could fix the original plane. A lot of very irritated people returned to the original gate.

After a lot of messing about, we boarded the aircraft, just as we had done over two hours earlier. Looking out the window, the signs were still not wonderful: the covers were still off the engine. However, after a couple of minutes the cover was replaced and the engineer went to the cockpit and they ran the tests on the engine for a good 10 minutes before declaring it safe. At this point, the cabin door was closed (it had been left open the whole time previously, which was another good move by the staff) and the captain reported that all we had to do now was wait for the little bit of paper to arrive to go in the plane’s maintenance log book. This duly arrived - 10 minutes later.

We finally departed at around 10.50am - 2 and a half hours later, which put my 12.45pm game in jeopardy. Since the flying time was only 2 hours though, I suspected that I would get away with missing just the first inning or perhaps the 2nd. The flight itself was uneventful and smooth, and we got some good views of the scenery as we flew past the Rockies and over Yosemite National Park (which I’m doing a tour of on Thursday). We duly landed at SFO and taxied off the runway as far as holding point B3 on taxiway B. Since we were two hours late arriving, our gate was no longer available and no other gates were available either. At this point, perhaps in an attempt to avoid a mutiny, the captain informed us that he was going to keep complaining to the controllers until they gave in and he was given a gate. Listening in to the cockpit communications, a feature of most United Airlines flights, he didn’t press them that much. I was half expecting to hear a bidding war for gates (one bottle of scotch, two bottles of scotch etc.) in the manner of the Punt & Dennis Air Traffic Controllers sketch.

The baggage didn’t take long to come and I took the BART to downtown and made it to the hotel, checked in, dumped stuff in room, took a taxi to the ballpark (instead of 10 minutes walk, which might have been quicker!) and arrived … at the end of the 6th inning. I reached my seat just in time for the 7th inning stretch. The game had been a quick one, but I saw about an hour of action before it ended.

Not a lot to write about recently. Work is going OK - I have a whole team of 4 people to manage now. I’m missing the baseball on 5 a lot - with the demise of Setanta, there are question marks about the future of ESPN America as well with a risk that we could even lose that too! The Giants aren’t doing too well this year, which is disappointing to. Poker’s been quiet - very quiet, as the numbers drop at the weekly games at the pub. Not having much success online either.

I didn’t get around to blogging about the ACCU conference this year. I gave a lightning talk about character encodings, which seemed to go down well. I presented a longer version (the 10 minute version) at work the following week, where it also went down well.

I like being an independent traveller - it’s really quite a lot of fun planning your own holiday, particularly nowadays when so much information is available about potential destinations. I’ve got my spreadsheet drawn up for my baseball tour of the US in the late summer - all the home games played by all the teams for August and September. Now, I can start planning the route, deciding which teams I want to see. I’d like to see both Shea and Yankee Stadium in New York, both in their final years with their respective teams moving into brand new home for the 2009 season. Having made it to Fenway Park last year, I’d like to catch Wrigley Field this year so that I’ve done all three of the major league baseball cathedrals. I need to catch my Giants somewhere along the road - Cincinnati seems to be the only place to catch them this side of the mid-west, though.

I was just sitting having my breakfast this morning, when there was loud thump from the blocked up fireplace behind my gas fire. After a few seconds, the sounds of furious flapping started. I don’t know how the stupid bird managed to fall down the chimney - it must have had to prise the protector off the top, no doubt whilst eating the berries off the tree out front so that it could drop the stones down the chimney as well as down the roof to clatter into the greenhouse and patio too. It was clearly trying to get out, but couldn’t fly back up the narrow chimney for all the frantic flapping.

After giving it a chance to wear itself out and perhaps calm down a little, I opened the patio doors fully and then I managed to pull the gas fire out far enough so that the vent, which pokes through the metal sheet blocking off the chimney, came away from the sheet to leave a small letterbox-shaped gap. After a couple of minutes, the frantic flapping started again, and thankfully, the bird managed to get through the tiny hole, and it headed straight out the door into the garden and away - what a lucky escape for it!

In this era of multi-channel television, I find little of interest to watch nowadays, although my Sky planner might beg to differ. Most of the dramas out of the USA don’t interest me; more of the comedies don’t make me laugh. Some of the UK dramas are OK; few comedy sketch shows are funny. However, I did notice that Paramount channel has started showing the old Kenny Everett shows from the 1970s and 1980s. These were some of my favourite shows from when I was growing up. Granted, I didn’t understand some of the humour 25 years ago, but looking at them now, they seem mostly tame and much of it’s almost children’s tv material — even the sketches featuring Cupid Stunt! Maurice Minor was a personal favourite - it was brilliant, and you can still only rarely see the join!

There’s plenty of TV to go around on Paramount Comedy, Dave, UKTV Gold, Bravo, even Challenge. And when you get bored of those, you can usually guarantee that you’ll find Logan’s Run on TCM or Total Recall on ITV7+9.

I can’t remember the last time I spent a weekend at home. In Oxford a fortnight ago, Newcastle last weekend and now away for a special family birthday party this weekend. I’m signed up for the DTD Team Challenge, which will lead to a live game at Dusk Till Dawn in June. Hopefully, this will go somewhat better than the Ladbrokes WSOP Team event, which hasn’t been filled with glorious results except for TonyCorbett’s heroic efforts. Now, even he is running bad, so we’ll probably not bother playing until the final money-added event.

I finally got my old XBox out of storage at the weekend to play one of my other old favourite games: Voodoo Vince. This is one of the colllection of XBox games that I have that are not compatible with XBox 360. In fact, none of the games I have are compatible with it, so I’m glad I didn’t ditch it when I updated. It is a fantastically funny game, mostly untaxing, 100% completable in just over 6 hours (I haven’t managed to crack that 6 hour mark yet). The sarcastic comments are spot on, as are the various self-destructive moves that you pick up along the way. I just wish that you got to see them all a bit more evenly - the laxative one turns up far more frequently than it should, IMO.

I’ve been trying to catch up on TV to stop it becoming too much of a weight around my neck. I am a slave to my PVR nowadays - it tells me what to watch; it tells me I have to watch it soon before the disc fills up. I may get around to watching the Doctor Who Christmas special (2007) before the new series starts this coming Saturday night. The Colour of Magic is still consuming 25% of the disc, but that requires 3 hours (I’m accounting for 1 hour of advert breaks) to watch from start to finish. I have finished watching Ashes to Ashes. I’m completely up to date with Torchwood. I’m almost up to date with Around the World in 80 Gardens, and now …

The 2008 Major League Baseball season has started, which means 5+ hours of recordings twice per week. I’ll have to start coming home from work sooner so I can see it all. It just reminds me that I should pull my finger out and get on with booking my summer holiday before everywhere gets sold out. I got tickets for the NFL game at Wembley in late October, so that should be exciting too - I might try to see if I can get to an NFL game in the US whilst I’m there, but tickets are harder to come by for that compared to baseball.

In a bored half an hour, I fixed the theme templates so that my blog validates as XHTML Transitional - whee! I mean, it doesn’t look very good if somebody whose day job is web standards and their implementation in a web browser doesn’t have his own websites validate properly now, does it?

A few weeks ago, some utter cretin decided he’d break into my house and go through my belongings and remove any cash and all the smaller, expensive items. In an amazing stroke of good fortune, the police nicked him doing another place later that day before I even knew about the problem, so I will get my iPod and USB memory sticks back eventually (I mean, *why?* they cost less than a tenner) Finally, all the physical damage has now been repaired and, to be fair, it has required very little organising from me to get all the work done as the insurer (Norwich Union) has dealt with it all quickly and with a minimum of fuss.

Of course, this has still totally disrupted my work, as I’ve had to stay home to deal with the various tradesmen. In the end, it’s probably cost my employer more than it’s cost me, in terms of having to do without my efforts for several days in total. So now with all the locks changed, security beefed up, everything security-tagged and logged, I’ve basically lost a month of my life.

Holiday is still unbooked, still haven’t qualified for the Virgin poker festival at Newcastle (donked myself out of the tournament just short of the seats this evening), and still haven’t scored any points for my team in the Ladbrokes WSOP league.

I don’t know where December has gone this year - it seems only a week ago that it was December 1st and I was putting up my Christmas tree.  Now it’s Christmas Eve, and even though I finished work for the year on the 14th, that seems just like a couple of days ago.  I’ve played a few carols on my piano, usually when the neighbours are out or with the headphones attached - I’m not sure whether or not they appreciate various string orchestra and pipe organ combinations shaking the house to Hark! The Herald Angels Sing or O Come All Ye Faithful … at midnight. Yet in two weeks, it’ll all be over and work will be back in full swing.

I’ve not been playing many online games in the past week - mostly offline games like Lego Star Wars II, and replaying the Jak & Daxter series, trying for 100% completion in the fastest time I can manage.  I played one sit’n'go at Chan’s but got donked out of it, so gave up with it again.

The Miami Dolphins finally won a game.  Now they have 1 win and 14 losses.  I saw them play the New York Football Giants at Wembley stadium back in October, and they had chances to win that game, but putting away the close game is what’s been their problem this season.  In half the games, they’ve lost by 3 points or fewer!  Still, my 49ers aren’t doing much better, although Hill seems OK at QB in relief of Alex Smith, so we’ll probably trade him away and he’ll go on to be a superstar somewhere else.  5-10 isn’t bad from where they were, but ultimately, it’s going to be a disappointing season.  Most of the rest of the league will be pulling for them to win their final game of the season next weekend, as their 1st round draft pick was traded to New England, and nobody wants them to get a high pick!