Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

I guess in Mount Vernon, Washington, a town about 50 miles north of here, they no longer celebrate their honor students with high tea at the country club.  Instead, they were given a special dance.  Sometime during the evening, an argument broke out, resulting in one of the uber-achievers being pummelled unconscious by three adversaries.

School officials say they have no information on the subject of the disagreement, but Perils of Caffeine sources have discovered that the altercation started when one girl averred that another’s brother was a “standard normal deviate”.  The other girl responded that the first girl had asymptotes that were much too prominent, were perpendicular when all the popular girls’ were parallel, and that as a result her love life would always be a discontinuous step function.

Guidance counselors were still scoring the match when we went to press.

Whenever Boeing hiccups, the Seattle press rushes to its side with thermometers.  You’ll never read the words “Chicago-based Boeing” in a Seattle daily.  Thus, over the weekend, the Seattle Times ran an article about Boeing’s Connexion venture, which has developed a network and technology to allow airline passengers with wireless devices to plug into high-speed internet while flying.  At first blush, this seems like a great idea - to be able to hook into your corporate VPN, send or receive time-sensitive documents via email or even do blog updates.

However, there are several reasons why this looks like a non-starter:

• The Pricing - it’s gonna cost you 14.95 to log on for a short (less than 3 hours) flight, 19.95 for a 3 - 6 hour flight, and 29.95 for flights over 6 hours.  While I’m sure large corporations will drive better deals and award the privilege to valued road warriors, that’s a pretty hefty price tag for those of us who are small-business or leisure users.
  
• Cost to the Airlines to install - $500,000 to $700,000 per airplane.  Suppose Boeing kicks back $5 per user login, it will take about 150,000 hits to break even.  With airlines hitting up FAs and pilots for wage concessions and fighting every proposed safety retrofit, I really don’t see this happening to any aircraft except perhaps new purchases of Boeing planes, where they can throw it in to beat out Airbus.
  
• Ergonomics of use - I find coach seats to be so cramped that it’s often physically impossible to open a laptop and type.  Most of the time, if I don’t get upgraded and have to ride in coach, I leave the laptop under the seat and just catch up on my reading.  That leaves first class passengers to make up the bulk of the 150,000 hits, and they’re too busy loading up on the free drinks.

Beyond these impediments, the fragmentation of WiFi-for-pay pretty much discourages me from using WiFi unless I can get it free at a friendly cafe.  Here would be a typical trip for me if Connexion was available and I wanted wire to wire (no, that ain’t right - wireless to wireless) internet access:

• Check in 2 hours early at SeaTac, scurry to the Worldclub on the South concourse.  Open my laptop and - oooh! - a Boingo wireless signal is available.  I click in and get to surf for an hour+ for $7.95
  
• Board Minneapolis-bound flight, which is scheduled for a few ticks more than 3 hours.  Wait for takeoff, turnout, throttle-back over Republican neighborhoods on the east side that have bullied the FAA into noise reduction, power back up once we’re over Democratic precincts and, finally, the “electronic devices” announcement.  Light up laptop, access Connexion for $19.95.  We’re traveling with a jet stream on our tail, and actual flying time might actually be less than 3 hours, but you can bet Boeing will charge for the scheduled flying time.  Surf for 2+ hours (skipping the in-flight meal).  Shut down laptop on approach to MSP.
  
• Deplane at MSP, scurry to my Worldclub and open my laptop.  Ah!  A wireless signal is available that would have already been paid for if it were also a Boingo signal, but No-o-o-o.  MSP has switched its service from Boingo to another service.  Desperate, I punch in for another $7.95 and surf until I have to run to my gate for my next flight.
  
• Board Milwaukee-bound flight, scheduled for a little over an hour.  Power up, take off, cruising altitude, log on to Connexion (fat chance, though, of Northwest fitting out those old DC-9s with anything, even replacement light bulbs) for $14.95 and surf for 40 minutes before our planned descent into Beersheba.
  
• Check into my hotel and - yippee! - WiFi is free at the Baymont and Holiday Inn Express, for now.  The Hilton charges 9.95 per night, the same as a pay-per-view porn flick.  My wrists are screaming in pain from typing if I had to ride coach, so I pass on both and soak my hands in an ice bucket.

Total cost for about 4 hours’ surfing: $50.80.  I dearly love reading y’all’s stuff, but at that price I’ll wait and read you on my client’s time the next day.  If I could pay a reasonable price for universal access, I might be persuaded.  Oddly, I’ve gotten free wireless access in airports at Great Falls, MT and Idaho Falls, ID.  The savvy traveler might, in view of that, contrive to fly only with connections in cities with prominent waterfalls.

I had my biannual physical yesterday.  No, this won’t be an organ recital, there are no details to divulge.  As opposed to the company-sponored physicals that my Dad used to undergo in the 60s, which involved enemas, barium milkshakes, scopings and proddings, my physical seemed mostly like a conversation with inappropriate touching.

A certain portion of the exam consisted of the doc exchanging information with a PC workstation in the exam room, entering and expanding on my responses to a questionnaire they had given me when I checked in.  Halfway through completing it I had noticed that it was for “Women ages 50 - 60″, but had finished it anyway, demurring on the question of the date of my last period.  Even if I could remember, no way would I tell them.  I guess the computer-consultation is no different than the 2″ thick paper file the doc used to bring in to the exams, and an “expert-systems” approach will lead more quickly to focused diagnosis.  Still, when I asked at some point how that day’s blood pressure reading compared to previous ones, the doc clicked on the screen and said, “I dunno.  They didn’t enter it on your last visit.”  THAT they could have culled from my paper file for sure.  I wonder if it’s still around.

The worst part of these things for me is when they draw blood.  I get lightheaded, and have passed out on occasion.  It’s not the pain, of course, or the actual loss of blood, but the idea, I think, of breaching my circulatory system.  “This will be easy,” they say, “you’ve got great veins.”  Which is the most effusive anatomical compliment I’ve had since, I guess, the last time someone wanted to bleed me.  They tape cotton over the wound when they’re done, and say to leave it on for 20 minutes.  I remove it only when I have to shower that evening, and even then expect the worst.

Here’s a meme I caught from Paula .

Invent a memory of me and post it in the comments. It can be anything you want, so long as it’s something that’s never happened. Then post this in your journal so that people can invent memories for you.

We stole a summer evening from the cellar where July is kept last night.   If we’re caught, as Christopher believes we will be (see his comment to yesterday’s post), the penalty will be treble damages next winter.  It was midday warm, over 80 degrees, when we left the house at 5:30 to walk to Mona’s (above).  We had a drink and delightful appetizers there - ahi tuna seviche for me, an antipasto of carmelized onions, goat cheese, tapenade and peppers for my spouse, an arugula salad to share.  A Mariners game lurched into the tenth inning on the silent TV above the bar, and I snuck looks at it (The Mariners this season are like a traffic accident you can’t quit looking at) while she nudged herself back and forth across a line that divided liking and not liking so much Underworld by Don Delillo.  The book is 800 pages, which seems like it should have been bleeding meat in the shark tank of a good editor, and she, a fast reader, is having trouble making it to the end.  I’m supposed to read it next, but I’m a painfully slow reader, and I’ll splatter myself on it like a motorcycle-jumper on a 2-cycle scooter trying to leap a line of city buses.  To my credit, I was sufficiently engaged in this conversation that I missed the homer that won the game for Seattle.

We had carried jackets, being veterans of Seattle’s precipitous evening temperature drops, but when we left Mona’s, it was almost as warm as when we had entered.  We decided to meander the 3 or 4 blocks down to Greenlake.  Greenlake is a city park with 3-mile paved path that circumambulates the lake.  My visits to the lake are usually for the purpose of running around it, and I usually dislike walking along the busy path, with its complicated mix of skaters, bikers, runners and walkers.  Last night, however, the entire city seemed relaxed and full of weather-induced well-being, and walking along the path and perimeter of the lake was very pleasant.  We stopped often to regard details that we have passed a few thousand times in the hyperventilated tunnel-vision of an evening’s desperate run: a large man with probably the tiniest dog he could have possibly been with; newly hatched ducklings paddling along the shore, the sunset glistening through their fuzz, now and again lunging upward to capture a bug from the shore-hugging swarms; and a skater on the path who seemed to be a refugee from the easter parade, or a Jack Finney time-travel book.