Scottsdale, Arizona

I've just arrived in Scottsdale (not too far from Phoenix), Arizona. Staying for one day, and going back to LAX tomorrow for Friday's flight back to Ireland. It is a bit warmer here than Los Angeles!

P.S. Forgot to mention, my work email is fine now, actually it was back after a couple of hours...

Garden Grove, CA

My office VPN isn't working so I can't send or receive work email for now. The helpdesk are working on it, so should be OK later.

Anyway, I arrived, I'm in Garden Grove (greater Los Angeles area), in California. Warm and sunny, nice hotel room. Uneventful 11 hour flight. Aer Lingus have seatback video in the A330s now, but the movie selection is not great. I watched Syriana, George Clooney was great but boy was it depressing!

OTA Advisory Forum 2006

I'm going to Garden Grove, California next week. It is somewhere South East of Los Angeles, not far from Long Beach. I'm attending the OTA Advisory Forum 2006 meeting.
Agenda
Location - Google Map

I'll be flying out tomorrow and back on Friday. Luckily direct flights from Dublin to LAX, but what flights, 11 hours each way! I think that is Aer Lingus' longest route, though maybe the Dubai flight is longer.

I'm looking forward to this trip, the forum should be pretty interesting, especially because I'm involved in a large OTA based XML project SITA is working on. I'll be attending the Air Working Group on Monday, and most of Tuesday's events, participating in "OTA and its Industry Partners" and "A Suite of Solutions". I'm not sure what my schedule is for the rest of the week, I may be sticking around for the rest of the forum but I'm hoping to meet some people in Phoenix.

Sardinia

After a childhood spent wondering if Sardinia is where Sardines come from, I am finally here.

It is sunny but not too hot. The Island, what I have seen of it so far, and the city of Olbia are both beautiful. I hope to take lots of pictures.

I'm here for 3 nights on business, back in Ireland on Thursday evening. Looking forward to trying the local food.

Uneventful flight here, I read "Freakanomics" by Livitt & Dubner. It was OK, funny in places, interesting in others, I had previously read some of the material covered. It was a quick read though, I thought it would be enough for the entire trip, but I finished in about 3 hours, over the course of 2 flights. I picked up "Everything is Illuminated" by Jonathan Safran Foer in Rome airport for the journey home.

P.S. The "LifeDrive" I posted about below became a "DeathDrive" after about 3 days of operation, refusing even a the last resort of hard reset + reformat, luckily Dixons honoured their returns policy. In general it worked OK, it did what it claimed it could do, but it also crashed a lot. Maybe that was just my one, it obviously had some kind of hardware flaw. Still on the lookout for a PDA + MP3 player + movie player + Web brower / Email client with 4GB or more storage. If you know of one, please let me know.