Got some photos; more to follow.

The Marriott Hunt Valley Inn appears to have an extremely frakked-up wireless network -- it's assigning client addresses in a completely different netblock from the default gateway. This problem appears to be popping up in Linux for some reason, although my Android phone works fine. The solution:

sudo route add -net 172.30.1.0/24 ath0
sudo route add default gw 172.30.1.1

You will now be able to type a random URL into a browser and click through to teh Intarwebs. THIS HAS BEEN THE VOICE OF THE MYSTER-OPS. WE KNOW YOU CAN HEAR US, EARTH FEN.

Cranky Flier reports on a United talk at the PhoCusWright travel conference. This quote says it all:

Josh had a good question that seemed to be almost an afterthought, but it was important that it was asked. He wanted to know what “class” the airline was trying to be in when it said it wanted to be “best in class.” Were airlines like Singapore and Lufthansa included?

Tim responded that no, they weren’t. They’re only looking at North American carriers. And then he said, “For us to say we want to be as good as foreign flag carriers is overstretching.” Ouch. So they want to be the best of the worst, apparently.

Full article here.

...until the 2008 Japanese Language Proficiency Test (日本語能力試験). Yes, that means it's scheduled for 7 December. SOAS has charged my credit card, so now it's time to book train tickets and hotel.

Last week, I bought a Mamiya 645 1000S and a few lenses off a contractor at work. Looks like I'm back to shooting film¹ now; although if I'm going to deal with all the negatives of film (no pun intended), 35mm is something I don't ever plan on going back to, other than to run some Velvia rolls on a friend's Canon PC lens. (He's got a 5D, and I'll dust off the old Elan II body for this occasion.)

Unfortunately, while I exposed one roll of Provia 100F and got some good pictures, my shiny new scanner won't arrive until next week, so JPGs will have to wait.

Next on the agenda: Maybe head up to the quarry or Birdlip once it stops raining—which could potentially happen as early as Thursday.

¹Not exclusively, of course — I still like my D300.

Maytag Cheese

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United is dropping their service between Denver and London, but is delaying the effective date so as not to affect Worldcon. Details from the Denver Business Journal.

Just as I get elite status somewhere, they start going to heck. (I'd much rather be elite on BA, but UA's the contract carrier LON-WAS, and anyhow DoD employees aren't good enough to fly EU airlines under the partial repeal of the Fly America Act, so the trips for work made the decision for me.)

OSS's Simple Sabotage Manual, written in 1994, has been declassified. (Although it looks like it was declassified a while ago and nobody actually noticed.) Definitely the most important business book of the year.

Actually deciding to offer services that customers are willing to pay for. Podcast on an Aviation Week blog.

Today's dinner, compared with expected price for same in the UK:

Item	US price	UK price
Ribs, rack, 3/4	$15.50	£13 ($26, at least)
Iced tea	$2	£2 ($4, if you can find it)
Iced tea (two refills)	$0	£4 ($8)
Slice of pie	$4.50	£4.50 ($9)
Tax	$1.30	£3.50 ($7; included in above prices)
Tip	$5 (20%)	£2.50 ($5; 10%)
Total	$28.30	£27 ($54)