Out of Cheese

A couple days ago I finally found the time to figure out how we’d get from Oxford to Edinburgh on June 26th. Merely booking the travel has been an interesting experience. To wit:

1. Late Thursday, go to a variety of British train companies’ web sites and search for direct trains from Oxford to Edinburgh. Find only one train, from Virgin Trains, leaving Oxford at 8:34 a.m. and getting into Edinburgh at 2:29 p.m.
2. Mail Adrienne, explaining that we’ll have to leave Oxford somewhat early if we want to take that train and making sure it’s OK.
3. Early Friday, get Adrienne’s confirmation that it’s OK.
4. Mid-day Saturday, head on over to Virgin’s site to make the reservation. Note that the train no longer exists. Since it didn’t appear to be close to being sold out on Thursday — many classes of tickets were still available — get very confused. Spend lots of time looking for the missing train and come up empty.
5. Start investigating alternatives. Find that there are no direct trains from Oxford to Edinburgh on the morning of June 26th. Look into other options.
6. Find a train getting into Edinburgh at 3 p.m. with two changes for 138 pounds, one getting in at 4:30 with one change for 116 pounds, and another getting in at 6:15 with no changes for 150 pounds. Resign myself to not having any free time before dinner in Edinburgh, which would be a shame because we really don’t have much time in Edinburgh.
7. Decide on a whim to start looking at trains from London to Edinburgh on that morning. I mean, you’d have to be insane to take the bus from Oxford to London — going away from Edinburgh, mind you — that early and then take the train from there.
8. Find a train leaving Kings Cross station at 10:15 a.m., going directly to Edinburgh, for 106 pounds. Of course, doing that would require leaving Oxford at 7 a.m. and then taking the tube from Victoria Coach station to Kings Cross station. Completely ridiculous, but at least the train ride would be direct and we’d get to Edinburgh at 3 p.m. Mail that and the other options from Oxford to Adrienne.
9. A few hours later, talk to Adrienne. Recommend the insane Oxford->London, Victoria Coach Station->Kings Cross Station->Edinburgh route. She’s OK with it.
10. Head on over to TheTrainLine to make the reservation. Log in with the account that I used on Friday to make our train reservations from Edinburgh to London. I reserved those tickets to be picked up at a FastTicket kiosk at Kings Cross station because the tickets can’t be mailed overseas and we wouldn’t be here to get them anyway.
11. Select the Kings Cross train and choose to get the tickets via the FastTicket kiosk again. Get all the way up to the billing screen, and be told that my billing address is invalid because my postcode isn’t known.
12. Try a whole bunch of permutations of postcodes, trying to figure out what worked before. Clearly something worked before, because I have a confirmation number for the previous pair of tickets. Fail miserably. Only UK postcodes are valid. Shockingly, I don’t have one of those. Get rather annoyed at their system’s insistence that even though the account setup page allows you to select a country from a popup menu and let me set up my account with a U.S. address and I’m not asking them to ship anything, my billing address must be invalid.
13. Try to set up a new account. Fail because it’s impossible to enter either a blank postcode or a non-UK postcode, even though the field right below that is for the country. I have no idea how I managed to set up my account in the first place.
14. Try to purchase the ticket directly from GNER instead of from TheTrainLine. Same problem.
15. Try to figure out how to call TheTrainLine. You can’t. Send them a slightly snarky email message about how today it’s impossible for me to order a ticket through their web site even though I successfully ordered one from the same site yesterday.
16. Try to figure out how to call GNER. Progress — you actually can call them.
17. Try to figure out how to call internationally without paying a million dollars a minute. My home long distance plan is essentially the “don’t use long distance or else we’ll empty out your bank account” plan, so that’s out. Wonder about international calls through my cell phone.
18. Look at Cingular’s site. Hmm…$1.84 a minute for calling the UK. Not so good.
19. Ah, but if you call internationally “frequently”, the rates are $0.06 a minute for calling the UK. Much better. Cost for signing up for the “frequent international caller” plan: $3.99 a month with no activation charge and no requirement to keep the plan for more than a month.
20. Do the math and realize that if you make any call to the UK that’s at least three minutes long, you come out ahead if you sign up for the “frequent international caller” plan. I guess “infrequent” means “two minutes or less”. I love the cell phone industry.
21. Call Cingular. Wait 15 minutes or so for the $3.99 plan to be added to my account.
22. Call GNER, where the nice woman on the other end who must think that my accent is terribly weird is perfectly happy to place an order billed to a US address with pickup at the FastTicket kiosk at Kings Cross station.
23. Rejoice.

And to think I thought that the only complicated part of getting from Oxford to Edinburgh would be the actual process of getting there, not the process of booking the travel. Silly me.

Today I was all set to ask Andrew if he could take me to the airport on Sunday and pick me up on July 5th when I realized I didn’t remember the exact flight times. I switched over to Mail, searched through my Southwest ticket confirmations, and didn’t find the ticket. I searched some more; no ticket. I tried different search terms and found all Southwest tickets I’ve reserved in at least the past seven years, but nothing for Sunday.

Confused, I called Southwest to see if perhaps they’d mailed the confirmation to the wrong email address. Nope; they didn’t have it at all. I was rather busy when I was making the reservation a couple of months ago, so despite checking the flight times twice with Adrienne, I apparently never actually filled out the ticket purchase form at all.

Fortunately, Southwest still had tickets available from San Jose to Burbank on Sunday night and coming back early on July 5th. I’m glad I checked now rather than, say, waiting till Sunday afternoon….

Today, for the first time ever, I opened the blinds in my office. That worked nicely for a few hours until the sun starting coming in directly through the window late in the afternoon and, despite the air conditioning, the room temperature rose rather quickly. Also, the direct sunlight was reflecting off of various things, blinding people who walked by in the hall. Neither of these effects is particularly desirable, so I closed the blinds again.

We’ll have to see if I open them for a few hours every day, or if I just give up on them until the first day back after whatever the next thing I work on ships. I’m a programmer, after all…if I’m exposed to sunlight for more than a few hours per year perhaps I’ll just shrivel up and turn into a pile of dust.

I’ve seen a couple folks write up things about the difference I’ve made in helping along the transition. That’s rather nice of them…but it’s far more attention than I deserve (and a lot more than I’d like). I’m just an engineer. I don’t manage people, I’m not a tech lead, and I don’t provide project direction. Many people worked on this in a variety of capacities. I’d prefer not to be singled out, especially in the context of “Eric’s team” or things like that which imply something that isn’t true.

In other words, if you’re happy with Apple’s products, thank all of Apple, not just one engineer. And please don’t look to this site as a resource similar to what Dave Hyatt does with Surfin’ Safari; this is my personal weblog and I’d rather take it down altogether than have anyone consider what I say here as being semi-official or have this be a place to look for Apple announcements.

What a week…everything went incredibly well. I gave part of a session, met a ton of developers, and helped quite a few folks get things up and running on the Intel-based systems. Lots of fun all around.

I also ended up very short on sleep and far behind on email. This weekend I’ll try to catch up on both of those. Then I get to head back to work for a week and then take a real break by heading off to England with Adrienne for a week and a half.

Our team’s project shipped today. You might have heard the news.