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From winters past...

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Tonight for my sleepless jet lag rant I will cover the subject of flying.

Airline preferences are a funny thing. My mum likes to fly United because on any given flight she has a better than even chance of getting a free upgrade to business class because she flies so much for work. Of course if she’d been flying Qantas/American all of this time I am sure she’d have all the same perks with them. I prefer Qantas, because I will never fly enough for the airlines to treat me any better than the turd that your dog poops out when you walk him around the park, and I think their cattle class is better. I have to say though, if you do have to fly United, their economy plus is definitely worth the extra cost. Ty at work complained bitterly about United my last day at work because they failed to clean the toilet once. Given Ty is an idiot I doubt it is as simple as that. My godmother hates Qantas because she says the service is terrible. She usually flies business class too, although in her case she is wealthy enough to pay for it. Until recently the only choices for flying to the states from Australia was Qantas and United, so favour for one usually implies disfavour for the other if you frequently go to or live in Australia.

My girlfriend shuddered at the idea of flying Delta to Australia because she said their domestic service sucked. I figure the LAX <-> SYD flight ought to have better service than the domestic flights and I actually used to fly Delta SWF <-> SLC via CVG all the time and on average I thought the service was pretty good. I even have a frequent flier number with Delta. I usually don’t collect enough miles to get a free flight before they expire though. My friend E says that they suck for international, so who knows, since I haven’t flown the new Delta LAX <-> SYD route yet.

America Worst was hands down the worst airline in history. I don’t think I was ever on one of their flights that was on time. TWA stranded me once in STL when I was like ten (or thereabouts). I wasn’t sorry to see either go bust. Mum liked TWA because she had some of the same perks she has now with United, but they didn’t transfer well into American when they took over TWA. It was probably a mistake on American’s part not to woo their TWA customers in that transition.

People talk shit about Southwest because all they serve is peanuts, but I have always had a soft spot in my heart for them because they

1. serve Dr Pepper.
2. have pretty much the fastest turnaround time of any airline, and an on time record to be envious of
3. go out of their way to let the passengers know when something goes wrong and what they are doing to fix it

Generally flying domestic in Australia is a fricking dream compared with flying in the US. The two major reasons for this are the lower volume of traffic and the lack of TSA. Flying in Hawai’i was less emotionally draining than mainland US, but still not as pleasant as flying in Australia. Mum mentioned that Henry hadn’t flown in 8 years and I don’t know why, but I wondered if it was because of September 11. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time I knew someone who didn’t fly because of terrorism. Statistically its way safer to fly than it is to drive, but you don’t see people not driving because they might get in an accident. In part I think this is psychological and has to do with a sense of control, but I also think there is a media connection. The number of deaths on the road ought to be scandalous, given the death toll threshold established by other “newsworthy” disasters, and I think if it were news then Americans would do something about it. Whether or not it would be effective or not is another thing, I personally don’t feel any safer with the TSA than I did under the previous system, although I do definitely feel more harasses by it. In Australia the road death toll actually is reported as news, especially around the holidays, maybe because people in Australia fly a lot less. Clearly that is my thing only. I think most people shrug at the inconvenience and feel safer for it. Maybe they even are safer for it.

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Today mum and I went shopping on our own for various essentials.

The guy at Whole Foods commented “Meat and berries huh. Must be some kind of northern diet.”

“Just the essentials” I said.

Later we were after a CD and a bed, and I immediately responded “Just the essentials.”

It was good to spend the day with mum.

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I am feeling very irritable, but I just snuck upstairs to grab a ice cream sandwich for a midnight snack, and I think this will help.

Speaking of things which usually you can only find in either Australia or America, but not both, apparently they have TimTams in America now, and they seem to be authentic, although they are incorrectly referred to as “cookies” here, and the other day I saw Ben and Jerry's down the street in Potts Point in the fancy food store.

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• 15 December 2009 09:38pm: Clearly writing this code was easier than having to explain it.
• 16 December 2009 04:46pm: I am actually going to miss "at the end of the day" guy.
• 17 December 2009 01:54pm: Off to America today. First I land in Salt Lake City. Then 25 minutes later I depart from Sydney.
• 18 December 2009 11:58am: In SFO waiting for my next flight.
• Yesterday at 05:05am: It's 5am can't sleep and I'm really hungry.
• Yesterday at 12:51pm: If by awful you mean DELICIOUS!
• Today at 01:12am: Still keeping weird hours thanks to 48 hour Friday.

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The last episode of Magnum PI (set in Hawai’i) was called “Resolutions”. I went to Hawai’i in October 2009. I made a New Year’s resolution for 2009, although technically I don’t make New Year’s resolutions. This may sound like a conspiracy, it is just a coincidence.

My New Year’s resolution for 2009 was to take more photographs (as documented here – I had to check because technically I don’t have New Year’s resolutions, at least “usually” I guess since I pretty clearly stated in that entry that was my resolution for 2009). To accomplish this, I set the goal of posting at least one photograph to the Interwebs once a day. Although I was late a few times, and sometimes they were old photographs that my grandpa had taken in the 60s and 70s or I had taken early in the decade, but for the most part I had something, and the idea was to become reacquainted with the idea of working with a camera, and the post processing stage, so I didn’t feel as though that was cheating at all. I definitely posted things that I on reflection were not up to the usual standard, but on the other hand I also posted some things that I ended up really liking that I wouldn’t have looked at as closely if I hadn’t devoted the time. Recently I have been playing with black and white digital photography which is exciting now that I have figured out how to do it properly, and with much of the expressive capabilities that I had in the dark room (real B&W is still better of course). I’m also interested into experimenting with infrared photography. I got my feet wet in IR years ago when I was shooting primarily film. The trouble is that to do it with film is time and money consuming, and to do it properly digitally means moding a camera. Even though the sensors in most cameras are highly sensitive to IR light, most of cameras made in the last five years have filters that remove the IR light since it isn’t good for general photography. Even when you remove the IR filter, there aren’t any digital cameras that are good at doing IR for one reason or another. The trouble with digital is that there fewer choices to make. When film was king there were lots of different formats and lots of unusual film types. Now that digital as lowered the bar to entry (both in price and in technical competence required), mass production is driving the industry, which is to say, driving everything to look the same. Most new lenses today don’t have depth of field or IR focus indicators, which is a shame. None of this is the “fault” of digital mind you, these trends have been happening for decades (autofocus was a similar watershed), and I am not a Luddite, I like and shoot digital all the time, and I think it has its place; I just miss the variety and the look of film. That said, I brought my medium format RolleiflexTLR with me to America on this trip and I’m going to use it when I’m in New Jersey to take some square 6x6 format snaps. Should be fun. I found a stack of old Aperture and Blindspot photo magazines that I am looking forward to browsing over the next few days for inspiration :)

But what was the question again? Oh yeah, I did keep my New Year’s resolution for 2009 (although technically I do not have New Year’s resolutions), but I don’t think I will make one for 2010.

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Sydney black and white