Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Friday, 4 January 2002

# 7:20 PM

I'm going to Minicon. The time has come to make airplane and hotel reservations.

It costs US$666.00 for two people to fly non-stop from San Francisco to Minneapolis. If you're willing to make a connection through Denver it goes down to $476.

Flying out of Oakland (much closer to Berkeley, my home town) is approximately twice as expensive, and you have no choice but to make connections. These connections involve airplanes with model names like "Fokker 100 Jet."

You might think taking a train would be cheaper, but it isn't. It costs $646 for coach fare and an additional whopping $1684 to upgrade to a sleeper cabin. You need a sleeper cabin, because the train takes three days each way. And people wonder why Amtrak doesn't make any money.

# 6:30 PM

Everyone has a weblog these days, why not me?

It's somewhat disturbing just how much time one can waste trying to write "clean" HTML. After an hour and a half, I'm declaring this bastardized version of the Electrolite template Officially Good Enough. Next, I spend a day or two vacuuming the cat writing clever scripts to generate updates.

Other entertaining discoveries for today include:

• The Docbook packages for Red Hat are laid out completely differently from the ones for Debian.
• Jade is not the same thing as OpenJade.

Why yes, I am repackaging software. QMTest, specifically.