Travel Jinx

At LXF Towers we are sticklers for tradition. The old ways and customsr must be preserved, even as we embrace progress. And so it was not entirley unexpected that any travel that involves me should have some element of drama. In the last year various mishaps have befallen me in the line of duty - from the mundacity of train delays (and the odd fire) to the exciting and new experience of riots outside my hotel ("The dark side of Libre Graphics" will make a full chapter in my autobiography).

So it wasn't altogether unexpected when a few days before my trip to LinuxWorld Expo SF, Heathrow was the subject of much police activity. It is too tedious to go into the finer points - the waiting around, the queues to join other queues, the sickening feeling as I saw my bags taken away and thrown into the bag of a large truck which would follow on to Gatwick, from where my flight was rerouted. The confiscation of my sweets was a cruel blow.

Still, when they stick you on an 11 hour flight with no posessions save a passport and a boarding card, it givers you the opportunity to give the in-flight entertainment system a test. Virgin use Linux on their seatback device, and I was curious what had changed in the few years since I last had the chance to see them. The answer is precious little. The films were new, but everything else was pretty much the same. A depressing selection of games that may once hace graced a compilation tape for the Amstrad CPC was the only mental stinulus I had. If the future of airtravel includes denying carry-on lifesavers such as laptops and MP3 players, we at least deserve some real games. I was thinking a network-play version of Counterstrike would have gone down well...