From Portland, [Not so] Briefly

It's very busy here at PDX this evening, where my flight to Oakland is delayed 45 minutes but not oversold. The former meant that I had time to go have a relatively leisurely dinner after checking in, but it also means that I won't be able to take the Capitol train home because I won't connect to it. Instead, I'll have to take BART and a taxi home from there. Oh, well, such is the way of travel.

Unfortunately, I didn't have an opportunity yet to download either of the Rugby World Cup semi-final matches, so I don't have a match to watch on the flight tonight. (I tried setting up a download while I was eating dinner, but it said that it would take about three hours.) I do have a match from the New Zealand national league, though, and Cheryl says it's a good one, so all is not lost. And I loaded the half-battery into the CD-ROM bay, so there's no chance of running out of power partway through. (But it isn't a very long flight anyway.)

I've always thought that PDX was a nice airport, especially since the Concourse B/C renovation was finished. It appears that other travelers thing so as well, as Conde Nast Traveler awarded PDX Airport of the Year status for 2006.

Update, 18:40: Good thing there's more than one way to get home from OAK. We're still stuck here waiting to go. The delayed inbound equipment was first announced as "needing additional servicing," followed by "we have swapped equipment; the new plane will be here shortly," to the new equipment taking a lot longer to get ready than expected. As I write this, they're saying, "Ten more minutes," but they've been saying things like that for the last half hour or so. At least PDX is a comfortable place to wait.

Home Again

As it happens, that "ten minutes" in my last update was finally the right one, and we finally got under way about 1:15 late. By the time we'd boarded, I'd watched the first half of the rugby match from the Air New Zealand Cup, and I watched the second half on the way to Oakland. I wondered why my battery seemed to be draining away so quickly, and realized I had the battery management set to maximum performance, which you don't really need just for watching videos like this. I reset it to "Maximum Battery" -- which put the processor into slow speed but didn't affect the playback -- and the drain rate slowed considerably.

Bags took a fairly long time to get off the belt at Oakland. The AirBART bus was right there as I was coming out of the terminal, but unfortunately I missed the train for Fremont by fifteen seconds and had to wait the full twenty minutes until the next one. Then it was a short taxi ride back to the apartment and I am finally home. Current plans have me being able to stay here the next five weekends, although that may change if, as threatened, my department ends up holding an all-hands meeting up in Portland in mid-November. I think I'd rather they do it then than early December, because I'd be unhappy if the meeting ended up colliding with the trip to SMOFCon for which I already have airline tickets. (OTOH, as the SMOFCon trip is on frequent-flyer miles, it's possible I might be able to rebook it without penalties. But I'd rather not have to even try.)