I suspect maybe that travel just hates me.
I woke up at 6:30am on Saturday so that I could be ready and awake enough to be at the airport by 8 to make my 9:30 flight. The plan was to go from Austin to Chicago, then from there to Minneapolis. Finally, I was going to catch a commuter flight to St Cloud. Easy, right?
Well, my flight out of Austin was delayed for two reasons: Dallas was entirely shut down for the day due to wind storms, and mechanical problems. About two hours later than expected, I'm in the air, heading to Chicago. I get there only to find out that Minnesota is getting an ass-load of snow (imagine that), and flights are being delayed and cancelled. So instead of making a 2pm connection into MSP, I end up being the last flight allowed into MSP, which arrives at 9pm.
Needless to say, the connection to St Cloud was cancelled. I was damned lucky I made it into Minneapolis.
I have an awesome family, and my uncle came and got me from the airport and let me crash at his house in Lakeville. I got up on Sunday and he drove me up to St Cloud. Yay! Finally home!
You'd think I'd be happy. Instead, I'm sick. I caught a nasty something on the way DOWN to Austin, and it's turned into a full-fledged nasty something awful now that I'm back. My brain hurts. So I took today off and have been spending it sleeping.
So now that you've all heard my sob story and feel bad for me, I'm going to try to milk things for all that I can. Does anyone here know about radio telemetry? I'm talking about radio collars and such. If you know about them or have worked with them, I'm interested in talking to you. Please drop me an email (the usual place) or a comment.
Radio telemetry??? Interesting timing...next week I'm joining a new startup in San Francisco that does Wireless Sensor Networks. A mesh of little low power wireless nodes that sense their environment and can store, process and relay info across the mesh to IP based gateways.
What did you have in mind for your radio telemetry?
Neato! I've always wanted to learn more about it, how it works, etc. So I devised a reasonable project for myself: I want to radio collar my cat so I can track where she is in the house (elevation as well as area). But I need a good starting point since I know nothing about telemetry.
Is Pixel running away again, or something? :P
How much is an assload? Is that in the metric or English measurement system?
Sorry to hear about your flight. It seems that more and more flights now are turning into flights from Hell. I've had 12-hour or more delays recently, including a flight where they took somebody instead of me for the stand-by seat (the airline told my wife that I didn't show up for the flight even though I'd checked in and was standing right in front of the counter the whole time). I even had a 10-hour delay right before a job interview, where I didn't make it to my hotel until 3 AM and had to be up at 6 AM for my interview!
Hope you get better!
@jdiwnab -- nope, she's just being her usual cute self. :-)
@Dr Scott -- I was referring to the metric version of ass load. ;-) And I'm sorry to hear I'm not alone in my bad plane karma. Maybe I'll see you on the train to REAL World 2007!
I've worked with Easy Radio and Zigbee. Drop me an email and I'll help if I can.
Two birds with 1 stone from left field...
Leafing through the Make: Magazine I noticed they're holding an AUSTIN Maker Faire this year! October 20-21.
Plan your travel around it, have FUN, and share/learn your telemetry projects with fellow hackers!
(RS should also consider an RB booth which would expense the whole thing!)