Back from Seattle, so I've unlocked all the posts made while I was there (no sense advertising to all that I'm not at home, you know?) and I may have a few more comments to add later.

Oh, and apologies to those I didn't manage to meet up with. Every time I had a spare moment, someone dragged me off to a bar, which played hell with my planning skills. In fact, even the people I did meet up with I met in a bar.

My bag turned up this morning. If I'm reading the site correctly, it actually turned up last night, and they handed it off to a next-day-delivery courier. One of the things in the bag was my office phone, which when powered on, received a text message saying,

"Welcome from O2. You are now roaming on the %%Network%% network. [-]"

For good measure, they send me the same message an hour or so later, complete with the same "%%Network%%" bit in it. CODING FAIL.

The luggage status now appears to be "it will arrive 24 hours after you", which means I have until about 10pm this evening to wear yesterday's clothes. Or I can do a bit of shopping, I guess. What I don't quite understand about this is that my original flight was on with BA, arriving in at about 4pm; I'd have expected them to sling the bags on the same LHR/SEA BA flight today rather than the same flight plus 24 hours as I wound up on, i.e. Northwest Airlines. Still, if the bag gets here, that's cool.

incoming waider alert: August 31st - September 13th. YHBW.

- laptop decided it didn't like the local power source (or something) and refused to either power up on mains or recharge itself. It's fine now, although I suspect the battery may be roached.
- phone and digicam ran out of power, the latter at an inopportune moment leaving me to take a bunch of photos on the former. The former only ran out of power when one of my travelling companions borrowed my "Irish plug to freakish foreign power socket" adapter overnight on the one night when I actually needed a recharge; fortunately, the phone spent an hour and a half beeping plaintively in lieu of actually shutting down and ran out of power right as I was boarding the flight home.
- Vodafone's picture album service appears to be broken again, meaning my cheapskate Flickr gateway isn't working right now.
- the phone's email client choked on one particular message, by which I mean the entire phone OS appeared to reboot. This was repeatable, too. I can't see anything wrong with the message now that I can look at it in a real client, so I can only assume shoddy coding in the client itself.

Despite the best efforts of BA I've made it back to Chez Waider. From Iceland, for those of you not able to read my locked posts or not following my mutterings. I think now I am going to have a shower as soon as the immersion heater heats up some, and then hit the local pub. Where I will be faintly disappointed to have to pay with cash.

but I'm waiting on an email and itchy to write stuff. Credit card use here is astonishing, and may in fact account for the priciness of things (if you have to factor in a transaction cost on everything you sell, it's going to add a few points). It is not uncommon for someone to buy a hot dog (approx $3.50) using their credit card. I've gotten into the swing of it myself, buying a beer ($8, more expensive than when I got here due to a shift in currency rates) on plastic because frankly I couldn't be bothered playing with the coins and notes. I'm sure my signature gets progressively more interesting as the night goes on. Speaking of, I've not quite figured out the circumstances under which a signature is required. I've bought $20 meals with no signature, yet every single beer has required my scrawl on the line. I used know something about this, since I spent a year working in the credit card industry, but I can't really make sense of it - it doesn't seem to be split by merchant (which was my expectation) nor by product nor by amount, although ultimately that last is what usually triggers the more serious credit checks (signature, ID, etc.) I'll just shrug and keep signing.

and I already 0wn3d one of the Irish bars. Go me.

(note that I usually avoid Irish bars like the plague they are, with very few exceptions, but I was stumped for somewhere I actually wanted to spend time drinking)

My trip to Seattle in 6,500 words and 30 photos.