Last night I had a great dinner at the Breuer residence, where I wished Noah a great time in his upcoming year in Kyoto Seika University to study Japanese printmaking. Good luck!
While I was there, serving as the Mac-fix-it-guy-in-residence pretty much wherever I go, I was able to resolve two problems Noah and his Dad were wondering about. The first was getting a clock program so that Noah and Dad could know what time it was in Berkeley and Kyoto at any given time without much hassle. A quick search of VersionTracker turned up World Clock Deluxe 4.0, a rather elegant program that has a floating clock from different time zones that just sits on top of everything if you want it to.
Not only can they know when it’s a good time to call across the world, but they actually can. Fortunately for me I’d been messing around with Skype earlier that day and showed it off to Noah. The New York Times and I both agree that this is a pretty rad technology, particularly now that it’s out for OS X. I’ve played with various iterations of VoIP over the last few years, including the AIM Voice Chat and other similar type things, but this one seems to just work beautifully — and it’s FREE! The sound quality is very clear and so far I’m very impressed. This has the potential to really destroy standard telecom — I wonder what it could do for places like Africa. Calls between computers running Skype, anywhere in the world, are free — and calls from computers to land/cell lines are dirt cheap:
$0.02/min to Canada
$0.02/min to France
$0.08/min to Zimbabwe
$0.06/min to Brazil
$0.02/min to Australia
$0.11/min to Thailand
Incredible.
Anyway, I decided that it would probably be better for me if I headed out to SFO early in the morning (thanks United/T-Mobile, for having open, free WiFi in your terminal!) to try to get a standby flight instead of getting into NYC early Weds morning. I called United last night and they told me that I could take any of 20-odd flights going from SFO to EWR (Newark) today. However when I got to the airport, the woman at the desk told me that the only flight I could get was a direct flight or a flight along my original route, via LAX. So I’m waiting for a standby flight non-stop in a little over an hour.
However, I called the United customer service line to make sure that this was right, because it directly contrasted with what they had told me the night before. It turns out that they’re both right — or at least just weren’t abundantly clear. I could fly, say, via Denver — but I might get stuck there. In other words, because I didn’t have a ticket from Denver, I’d just have to wait until something became available. Using my original ticket, then I can’t be made worse off than I was originally. So we’ll see. Had I known that my chances of getting an earlier flight weren’t as good as I had thought I may not have gotten up at 4:30 am to catch the BART to SFO. Yikes.
Huh, and it seems that my standby flight has changed gates. I need to investigate.
