Three Years on Dreamwidth

It's my 3 year anniversary of blogging on Dreamwidth. Oh, I've been blogging longer than that.... I started on LiveJournal over 12 years ago. And I do still blog on LiveJournal. I cross-post (manually 😡) to both.

Having a shorter history on Dreamwidth makes it easier to pull recent statistics from there. For example, I know from my profile I've posted 2089 blogs in 3 years and 768 in the past 12 months. That's an average of 2.1 posts per day this past year (1.9 over 3 years). I can also see which tags I've used most frequently in that time:

Most Used Tags, Past 3 Years

Rank	Tag	Uses
1	In Beauty I Walk	354
2	Planes Trains and Automobiles	241
3	Coronavirus	212
4	TV	160
5	Waterfalls	159

What does it mean that these tags are the top 5? Well, first, I'm happy that "In Beauty I Walk" remains my most used tag. It's the tag I use with all my posts about hiking. It's also my all-time top tag from 12+ years of blogging.

I'm happy, as well, to see "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles", about the trials and tribulations of travel (the name's an obvious reference to the classic 1987 Steve Martin/John Candy comedy) rise to the #2 spot. Along with that goes Coronavirus dropping to #3, and I'm happy about that, too. Good riddance!

Notice, as well, that a new tag has pushed its way into the Top 5: Waterfalls! Indeed I have written a lot about waterfalls in the past year. That shows up when I filter tag usage by the past 12 months:

Most Used Tags, Past 12 Months

Rank	Tag	Uses
1	In Beauty I Walk	129
2	Planes Trains and Automobiles	94
3	Waterfalls	78
4	No Rest for the Wicked	63
5	Weather	62
6	TV	51
7	Politics	49
8	Taking it Easy	48
9	SF Bay Area	46
10	Current Events	44

Waterfalls was my #3 tag this past year with a whopping 76 uses. Yes, we've visited a lot of waterfalls!

No Rest for the Wicked nudged up into the Top 5 this year. It even nudged out Weather to reach #4. That aligns as No Rest for the Wicked is my #4 tag over my full history of blogging.

I enumerated this table out to 10 places to show what happened to some of the other tags. You can see that while TV dropped out of the top 5 for the year, it didn't drop far. It came in 6th. My TV watching is down this year from the year before, when I watched the whole Game of Thrones series. Earlier this year I did watch a few miniseries and the current season of various shows, which is how I found 51 things to write about. Though even that seems like a long time ago as I've barely watched any TV the past 6 months.

What happened to Coronavirus? On the basis of the past 12 months it not only dropped out of the top 5, it did not make the top 10 or even top 25. It came in at 40th place, in a 3-way tie with Beer Tasting and Family, each with 20 blogs.

Back to the Airport, 12 Hours Later

Vegas Travelog #1
SJC Airport - Mon, 27 Nov 2023. 11am.

Just 12 hours after getting home last night from a 9-day Thanksgiving trip I left home this morning for a 4-day business trip. So much for my stretch of 7 stay-home weekends!

This trip I'm going to Las Vegas for the AWS re:Invent trade show. I'll be staffing my company's booth there.

Transitioning from a week+ leisure trip straight into a business trip can be rough. I've taken some deliberate steps to make it saner.

• For one, I booked an itinerary for last night that had us not getting home super later. Ideal would've been to get home around 6pm but 9:30pm was the best I could do without having to leave too early in the morning or spend several hundred dollars more.


• Two, I don't have to leave first thing this morning. An 11:30am departure gets me there in plenty of time for the mid-afternoon kickoff of the trade show.


• Three, I used my work hours this morning before heading to the airport to pack for the trip rather than trying to squeeze in too much computer-based work. I did use some of my downtime once at the airport to catch up on email and Slack.

So far, so good. Of course that's easy to say as I haven't even boarded my flight yet. 😅 Boarding begins in a few minutes. We'll see how the rest of the week goes.

Update: ...Aaand We're Delayed

Just a few minutes after I posted this news came that our flight was delayed. It was all too easy, wasn't it? But unlike most Southwest delays which are them falling behind schedule because their schedule is stupidly optimistic, this delay was a mechanical problem. (Details moved to separate entry.)

A Little Dent Will Do Ya!

Vegas Travelog #1½
SJC Airport - Mon, 27 Nov 2023. 11:30am.

Just minutes after I posted that my trip to Las Vegas was off to a smooth start, as my fellow "A" group passengers and I were lined up for boarding, the bad news came.



Our flight was delayed.

But this wasn't the normal Southwest falling-behind-because-the-schedule-is-too-aggressive delay; it was a mechanical delay. That's both better and worse!

The gate agent explained over the PA system that the ramp crew (the people loading bags, etc.) spotted a small dent in the cargo hatch. When that happens they consult a "Dent Log", a book of all known dents, to determine if it has already been certified safe. If it's in the book, the process takes 15 minutes. If it's not, it takes longer to clear it— and way longer if it can't be cleared.

Update 1: It's not in the Dent Log

The agent came back on the intercom a few minutes later. Our dent was not in the Dent Log. That meant the ground crew would have to take pictures, send them to safety engineers at HQ in Dallas, and wait for a certification. That process would take an hour.

The good news? Our dent was tiny, "about the size of a pea", the agent explained. It seemed he and/or the ground crew had experience with this process. They were confident it would be cleared to fly. But they needed to follow the safety protocol nonetheless.

Ultimately the dent— a pea-sized ding in the sheet metal— was found to be safe. We lined up again for boarding
Well, it's good I planned an earlier flight than strictly necessary to get to the trade show in time. ...That's part of being a pro traveler, BTW. You might think pros are the ones who dance in at the last moment, wasting no time. No, those are the gadflies who miss flights and arrive late to appointments whenever anything bad happens. Pros build allowance into their schedule for ordinary delays that occur so they're always prompt and fresh when showtime starts.

Update 2: 90 Minutes Later...

Safety inspectors cleared the new, pea-sized dent to fly. The pilots conducted a pressurization test to ensure the door wouldn't explode because of the tiny ding (more safety protocol). Now I'm aboard the aircraft waiting for boarding to complete. It looks like we'll get out here 90 minutes late. Though it's a full flight and everybody's hunting for places to store their carry-on bags, so it may stretch a bit longer than that.

Trade Show, Day 1

Vegas Travelog #2
Hilton Resorts World, Las Vegas - Mon, 27 Nov 2023. 8:45pm.

Day 1 of the trade show is done. Well, it's almost done. I'm back at my hotel, dressed down, grabbing a casual dinner. Yes, it's almost 9pm and I'm just now eating dinner. That's how things often roll at trade shows.

I'm in town for the mammoth AWS re:Invent show. It's drawing some 65,000 attendees this year, I've heard. Everything was a madhouse with crowds this afternoon. Getting a car from the airport was slow. Traffic was slow. The trade show floor was packed shoulder to shoulder.

Shows like this are always tiring. And no, it's not because Las Vegas is the epicenter of 24/7 entertainment. I find very little of Vegas entertaining anymore. It's tiring because it's many hours per day on my feet answering the same question over and over— "So, what does CompanyName do?"— for people who don't really care about my company's products but only want a free t-shirt or other giveaway. In other words, a typical big trade show.

That said, while 90%+ of the visitors to our booth will be freebie seekers, it's the other 10% we live for. Those are the folks who work in software and struggle with challenges of the kind we can fix. They'll see value in what we offer, and we're there to help them understand it.