Flight and car booked, I'm going out of town for my aunt's funeral.

[feren]

I got off the phone with my father about an hour and a half ago, shortly before I arrived home from the commute. He's green-lit the trip to Texas and also clarified on why my mother pushed back the way she did about my travelling. Once I was home I called my uncle's house and, receiving no answer, called the cell phone of my other uncle. I felt bad calling him since I knew he had just arrived in Texas with his wife this afternoon (after a 25-hour straight drive splitting shifts all the way from Northern MN). I was quickly passed to my now-widowed uncle and cleared my visit with him. I hung up with a plan of action in mind but was partially balked as it seems absolutely none of the airlines offer discounts for passengers traveling for a funeral service. What the fuck is up with that? Are their margins really that thin that they can't shave $60 off a $600+ dollar round-trip ticket? This will dent my pocketbook plenty -- $609 for the airplane tickets alone and another $100+ for the rental car, but I have to do this. Still, it doesn't change the fact that I feel like I'm taking a complete ass-beating on the price.

Price gripes aside, as of this very moment I have my plane tickets booked and my car reserved. I leave on Thursday and I'll be back on Saturday. Work is just going to have to cope with my taking emergency bereavement leave.

mephit -- I know you offered crash space while I was in the state and I really appreciate your generosity. Given that my uncle lives 2 hours outside of Houston I'll just stay at his house and lend whatever hand I can during my all-too-brief stay.

[Addendum at 2108: USB 2.0 can suck a bucket of ass. FireWire 400 (aka "First generation Firewire", not to be confused with FireWire 800 aka "Second Gen Firewire") is about five orders of magnitude faster than this shitheap of a protocol. It's taking forever to copy my entire MP3 collection onto the iPod in preparation for my flight, all because Apple completely abandoned FireWire on the video (5G) iPod because their user market is expanding so strongly in the PC arena and all the Windows mouth-breathers were confused by the shining beacon of hope that was IEEE-1394.

Comments

[youngvanwinkle.livejournal.com]

*hug* Man, I just wanna make sure you're taken care of. Have a safe trip.

bleh

[markvd.livejournal.com]

Take care of yourself and your family, we'll hold down the fort.

Re: bleh

[feren.livejournal.com]

Be sure to keep the opertators in line for me while I'm gone. I don't want them thinking they're suddenly climbing the evolutionary ladder.

[daf666.livejournal.com]

I don't care for the term "mouth breathers."

See, there are a lot of us out here with such horrible allergies that sometimes entirely clog our nasal passages, and for whom no medicine can help.

It's not our fault. And believe me...

My lips are still moist. almanzo can vouch for that.

[feren.livejournal.com]

[I don't care for the term "mouth breathers."

See, there are a lot of us out here with such horrible allergies that sometimes entirely clog our nasal passages, and for whom no medicine can help.

It's not our fault.]

Suck it up, buttercup.

[daf666.livejournal.com]

I'll interpret your snarky comment as

I completely understand your plight, and I sympathize with you."

:D

[yakko.livejournal.com]

First, my condolences go out to you and your family.

As for USB 2.0 sucking, well... I remember the USB 1.1 days, where there was UHCI (the shitty, stupid implementation that relied on software and didn't quite work at all) and OCHI (the much better hardware implementation that worked regardless of OS). Those days were really sucktastic. USB 2.0 is better compared to USB 1.1, but that may very well be akin to saying that solid shit is better than liquid shit.

Where else can I plug USB devices together and wonder why the CRAP they're so slow, only to find out that it's that way because my keyboard (which was made THIS year) is limited to USB 1.1 speeds and my iPod is hooked through it? This would never have been an issue with Firewire. And another thing I'd miss if Firewire went away: Ethernet over 1394! Because until USB keys get bigger than 2GB, that's the fastest way to sling data around... or at least between a couple of laptops that have no regular Ethernet in common...

[tetragon.livejournal.com]

USB suffers from two issues it takes a beating for which technically isnt really its fault. The speed of the media it connects, and the Windows usb framework.

I think Apple were monumentally f*cktarded for removing 1394 support (I wont upgrade my 6gb mini) but really the drives they put inside of ipods are not faster than usb2.0 running properly. Which brings up the second point, often windows itself is stupid about USB. Ever plugged in a new device, and lost *every* non-HID usb device? Or had windows bitch to you constantly about a high speed device in a low-speed port, even though the PC has no high speed ports? Or plug a drive in, and windows just gets too confused to assign a letter? Or plug another drive in, and windows tries to map it to a letter in use, knocking that device off the usb tree and corrupting its FAT filesystem? Nuff said I think, windows does it poorly yet again.

[yakko.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's probably just a crap implementation at work. Compared with the old USB, USB 2.0 has just worked (albeit for varying values of "worked") no matter what OS I'm on.

[linnaeus.livejournal.com]

Have a safe trip. If there's anything need taken care of while you're gone, let me know.

[nekosensei.livejournal.com]

Again, I'm sorry about your aunt. I'm glad that you decided to attend the funeral. It sounds like you made the right decision.

[fiskblack.livejournal.com]

I've alerted the Texas Rangers that a Feren is on the way. You'll be missed!

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

But I thought the Texas Rangers never missed.

[captain18.livejournal.com]

Actually, I heard at one point that telling the airlines you need tickets for a funeral was a guaranteed way to get charged more because they knew you'd pay.

Of course, in general I'm of the opinion that the airline industry at large can choke on a bucket of dicks, to use your phrase.