Thursday: Went to Milwaukee to see Weird Al in concert. The show was on a stage outdoors, with a bunch of benches for people to sit on. However, the entire audience stood on the benches for the entire show (presumably to see better). My ankles aren’t so strong so I had to sit down for a couple times. The wall of people was so strong the music was severely muffled when I did. (Of course the rest of the time it was insanely loud; my ear rang for a day afterwards.) The show itself was good. Lots of costume changes and video clips to cover for them. He played some new songs and a medley of old ones. All in all, pretty fun.
Friday: The biggest-Apple-store-yet opens downtown at 6pm. We head over around 4 or 5 and the line is already 3 blocks long. By the time the store opens its gone around the block once and a half. We’re ~450 in line but we get in pretty quickly. It’s nice, a lot like the NYC store. They had a DJ playing tunes from an iPod and much more space for hardware. They also have a really big Genius Bar and an “Internet Cafe” where you can use a Mac for free as long as you like. We played a bit with the iSight which was fun.
They were having a contest where when you tried the iSight they gave you a little envelope; 20 of them let you win a free iSight, the rest just said Thank You. My two younger brothers were with and really wanted to win, so they played every trick they new to get as many as they could. One would distract the guy while the other grabbed a handful of envelopes; they tried to change appearance and pose as new people to get another envelope; etc. The guy giving them out really wished someone would win one already, so he played along. But despite going through like 300 of the envelopes, we didn’t win.
Yesterday: I’ve got an 8am flight to San Francisco. My Dad is driving me there and just as we get on the highway I realize I left my wallet in my other pants at home. We turn around and get them, then come back and get to the airport with only 20 minutes until takeoff. Unfortuately, that seems to be a couple minutes too late because the computer won’t give me my boarding pass.
I find a gate agent and explain my problem. He’s incredibly sympathetic and kind, and schedules me on a 8:20am flight. The thing is, this flight Officially Does Not Exist. It’s not on any of the monitors; the gate agent muttered something about it being a “Special Section” flight. When I get there, I find a 767 with a full Business Class and First Class and an essentially empty coach. (There are about five other people on.) I overhear the flight attendants complaining that they were woken up at 2am and told they’d been put on this new flight.
What is going on here? The whole thing is very bizarre. Did someone important need a quick flight to San Francisco? But if they knew about it at 2am, why didn’t they take the 8am flight? I begin to worry that we’re part of some stunt to motivate the “War on Terrorism”.
Ah, the flight attendant says that they need the aircraft in San Francisco and their other flights to San Francisco were overbooked, so they put that passengers who would have missed their flights on here.
Today: ILAW at Stanford!
Wednesday: Illegal Art Exhibit Opening (If you have pop-ups turned off, you’ll miss their hilarious EULA: “You agree not to modify, adapt, translate, reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble or otherwise attempt to discover the inner motivations, dreams, aspirations, or weird, possibly sexual fantasies of the Website.”)