Trip
Mailing a couple of postcards, I flew to San Francisco from Logan via Midway on ATA (famous for being cheap and also for being the only U.S. airline whose name is a Hayes modem command). Midway seems extremely lame and boring compared to O'Hare. For one thing, all the concessions are run by the same company! So for example you might see five shops which sell sandwiches and drinks, but each of the shops is selling exactly the same sandwiches and drinks. At O'Hare, there are artworks on display, there are several different restaurants (although I didn't actually find any I was extremely enthusiastic about), and there's more of a variety of things other than terminals. When you have to spend some hours inside a building waiting, that's helpful.
I promised to forego the security discussion, so I will.
On the planes, I took a nap, and watched most of Along Came a Spider without sound (amazing how you can still understand it -- I once watched The Hot Zone without sound on an airplane and similarly managed to understand it). The only tricky part was the occasional plot twist, because sometimes the details are explained only through dialogue. I also read most of The Fellowship of the Ring, after buying a paperback copy of The Lord of the Rings in an airport bookstore at Midway.
It was amazing that the airport bookstore had almost no books I wanted to buy. Practically everything was either recent novels (trade paperback, mainly mass-market mysteries and thrillers and romances) or self-help or tips for business executives. Is that really all that bookstores sell to "regular people"? I noticed that there were no technical books and no non-fiction about anything (nothing narrative, nothing polemical, nothing historical or critical). What's up with that?
Right before my trip, I bought Bamford's Body of Secrets, which is his updated book about the NSA. So now I have both The Puzzle Palace and Body of Secrets and am strangely unenthusiastic about reading either one. Maybe I have soaked up too much NSA history and passed into a cypherpunk mode in which I only want to hear about contemporary legal and technical issues in privacy and surveillance. On the other hand, one thing that's irritating about many cypherpunks is their lack of knowledge of history -- so I should be sure to avoid the trap of paying attention to the present day to the exclusion of the past.
