Scripting News: Homeward bound

Scripting News, the weblog started in 1997 that bootstrapped the blogging revolution.

Homeward bound

My clock is all kablooey again.

After the very nice blogger dinner in Milano on Wednesday night, I got a ride with Gaspart, a blogger from Como, to a hotel near the Malpense airport, where after logging in, I got three hours sleep before I had to wake up, shower and get over to the airport to make a 6:15AM flight.

On the way to the airport Gaspart asked what was the most impressive thing I saw in Italy, and I hesitated, explaining that I figure things like that out after I have a chance to walk and sleep and process all the events. But I answered anyway. The ruins of ancient Rome. (And I was thinking the beauty of Italian women.)

Anyway when I woke up this morning, it was 7PM Wednesday night in Berkeley. That's important because in a few minutes, when I board the plane to SFO, I'll switch my watch to that time zone. At that time it will be 2AM. I still will have only slept 3 hours in the last 24.

By the time I get to Berkeley, it will be 3PM local time (which is midnight in Europe).

Will I sleep on the plane? Should I try? (My guess is not. It would be better to arrive exhausted, and then, again, try to stay up as late as I possibly can, to get my sleeping clock synched up with local time.)

But we'll find out.

And it's also worth mentioning that KLM said my return reservation had been cancelled and rebooked six times since I arrived in Europe. I had a major panic in Pisa when I saw that my reservation had been cancelled on the KLM website. It took two long calls over two days to get it reinstated, but when I arrived at the airport today in Milan, it was cancelled again. It took a lot of insisting I wasn't going to leave without a boarding pass to actually get one, and they had to issue a hand-written one because the system wouldn't let them print a boarding pass.

Then it occurred to me that it's possible that somehow someone who reads this blog and saw I was returning via Milan, guessed which flight I was on (not too hard, there's only one way to connect from Milan to SFO each day) and it doesn't require a password or mother's maiden name to cancel a reservation. Scary thought. Reading in yesterday's WSJ or IHT (can't remember which) that printed tickets are going to be completely phased out soon, this is not a pleasant thought. Seems they'd better get some kind of identity system going for the online ticketing system before making the full switchover? Not sure about this, obviously. It's totally possible that it was a computer glitch or a leftover Y2K bug that kept knocking my reservation off the system.

Last update: Thursday, June 3, 2010; 4:00:51 PM

~About the Author~

Dave Winer, 55, is a visiting scholar at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in New York City.

"The protoblogger." - NY Times.

"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.

One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

"Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.

"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.

"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.

Mail: scriptingnews1mail at gmail dot com.

May Jul