I’m not excusing what he did but I don’t think we should have unforgivable sins. If people pay their court ordered debt then we should give them a second chance. What’s the alternative? Sentence them to a life of crime or keep anyone in jail for life regardless of crime?

Just because something fits doesn’t mean you should put it there. There are small spaces and large spaces. Small things will fit in small places or large spaces. Unfortunately large things only fit in large spaces. So put the small things in small places.

If there are places for glasses put the glasses in those spaces. Don’t put them in spaces where plates will fit. In fact you’re best off placing the large things in first. Once they are in you will know what spaces you can use for smaller things. Easy yes?

You’d think so but some people use no order at all and place what ever they grab first into what ever space they find first.OK end of rant. I have to go unload the dishwasher.

The first thing we did was report in and they scanned the barcodes on our notices. Then we had a briefing about what was going on. Then we walked up to the court room. The plan was to select 32 people from which the attorneys would select 14. Sounds easy but we were first asked a bunch of questions. If we answered “yes” to any of them we were to ask to speak to the judge. The judge would then decide if people should be excused or if they were qualified to serve. AS they called the names and numbers of the 32 people (of the 55 or so who were there) people selected were asked if they needed to talk to the judge.

I would say that almost half the people wanted/needed to talk to the judge. If the judge excused someone a new number was called and that person was asked if they needed to talk to the judge. A lot of people wanted to get out of serving. Some were self employed or part of small companies. Others had people they needed to take care of – small children or elderly parents. Others had medical issues. Some people – about 20 – the judge did excuse but many of them he didn’t. In the end we had 32 people with only 2 or 3 not having been selected or excused.

We had all filled out forms back in February so the attorneys knew something about us all. Once we were a panel of 32 the attorneys started going over their notes from the talks with the judge and I assume notes they had made from the survey results. In fairly short order they agreed on 14 people to stay and the others were excused. At this point I knew I was on a jury. The judge told us the case would take about three days.

The whole process took about two and a half hours. I was expecting the attorneys to question jurors like they do on TV but that never happened. I guess it might happen in some cases but clearly it’s not all like TV.

Take for example the coliseum in Rome. Do you know why it is in ruins? over the years the coliseum fell into disuse and was no longer being maintained. So people started recycling. They took stones and bricks from there to build other things. In fact most ancient cities and buildings were built in part with materials recycled from earlier cities and buildings. The only way to avoid that was for a structure to remain in continuous use until more modern times.

And then there is the case of tapestries. Old drafty castles and what not had huge woven tapestries to help keep them warm, decorated and less drafty. Not many of these have survived into the modern era. Why? Well because over time people needed money so they burned the tapestries. This allowed them to recover the gold and silver from the treads that were woven into the material. In fact with gold it is estimated that some percentage of all gold ever mined well into the upper 90 percent is still being used. It has just been recycled time and time again.

Which brings me to a more local example. You may have seen a bowl or other piece of silver worked by Paul Revere. This is not because he was the most prolific or even the most talented colonial era silversmith. Rather it is because he was famous for his Revolutionary War exploits. Most silversmiths of the era had their work melted down and recycled over time. As people run into money shortages or perhaps got tired of a pattern or their needs changed it was quite common to have silver and pewter melted down and reworked into something else. More recycling.

So over the years we have lost many things of potentially great historic value because of recycling. Is that bad? Someone else will have to answer that question. But I think today we think carefully before we turn one things into another. Clearly aluminum cans are not worth saving in any great numbers. Buildings are a more tricky matter. But the fact remains that recycling may be a big thing today but it is by no means a new thing.

In theory that doesn’t make much difference between the time chips leave the cashier and they time they return is usually pretty short – generally hours.  But sometimes chips stay unredeemed for long periods of time. Some are lost, some are saved as collectables (I have a small collection myself) and some are held in safe deposit boxes (by patrons) for later visits to the casino. In those cases the casino still has to keep cash at the casino to cover the value of chips that are long outstanding. And no float.

What I’ve been seeing lately is casinos bringing in new chips – changing the design, logo, colors, etc – and declaring the old chips no longer valid. They do this with plenty of warning of course. But at some point the chips are no longer redeemable chips in circulation and the casino can take the money that people paid for those chips and use it themselves. This is cheap profit – well as long as the chips cost less to buy than their face value. Since most chips are well less than a dollar to buy (probably much less than a dollar if bought in the bulk that casinos buy them) and a dollar is generally the lowest value chip I think that profit might be pretty good.

I do wonder how much money is involved though. I tend to expect people to turn in chips that are worth more than $5. I’ve sure a lot of $1, $2, $2.50, $3 and $5 chips are never turned in and that they add up to a good number. But how good a number? Is it lost in the noise of total profits or is it a significant number. I figure that casinos have to report this somewhere but I haven’t yet gone looking for it.

Just one more thing that makes casinos more complicated than they appear on the surface.

(*Float being taking advantage of the time between when the customer pays for the chips and the chips are redeemed to invest or earn interest)

I am sitting at my gate and there are as far as I can tell one pair of power sockets. Someone is laying in front of them while using both of them. She’s got one of those “leave me alone” faces on too. But I have a spare battery so I’m getting some work done anyway. I do wish I was plugged in though.

Airports should have more power outlets. MHT has added some recently BTW. And people who use limited sockets should really either limit themselves to one or use a power strip. I travel with a power strip BTW. If I want to plug in more than one thing in a public place I use it. It seems like the only reasonable thing to so.

Surprisingly few people seem to travel with power strips. They are always surprised when I pull mine out or suggest it as something to do. I would have thought it was an obvious thing to do these days. No?

Both are about the same difference in time and miles from my house. Well depending on the time of day. Getting to BOS for a morning flight can take upwards of 2 hours while it never takes more than 45 minutes to get to MHT. Big win MHT.

And wi-fi access? Free at MHT but expensive at BOS. Lots of airports have free wi-fi these days and while it is a small thing I see it as a leading indicator. Airports with free wi-fi seem to generally be more passenger friendly to me. They tend to all be cleaner, newer, have better amenities but also be smaller. Although Orlando airport is huge it does have free wi-fi and lots of other things to recommend it. Yeah I’m a fan.

MHT is smaller than BOS and that cuts both ways. As a plus if means you don’t have to go running around as much. One time I flew out of BOS on Delta and back on Northwest. That meant that the parking lot that was easy when I got there was a long walk when I got back. And heaven help you if you enter the wrong terminal for a flight!

Speaking of parking. MHT is $10 a day for long term parking while BOS is $24 a day. Huge difference and that has to be factored in when you price flights to/from either airport. For a five day trip a fare from BOS must be at least $70 less than MHT if you are going to leave your car at the airport. Yes at MHT you may have to take a shuttle but the shuttles are quick, clean and convenient when compared to a long walk through BOS Central Parking.

BOS has more food choices – they’re very limited at MHT. Sometimes that is a big plus for BOS. BOS also has more airlines and more direct flights. But prices? Usually I don’t find a lot of difference. Sometimes the flights are less expensive from BOS and sometimes from BOS. This is even without figuring in the costs of parking. Since MHT is much easier – physiologically even if the traffic is not an issue – to get to I find it a lot easier to find rides to MHT than to BOS. And honestly traffic is almost always an issue.

So hands down I need a really good reason to fly out of Logan (BOS) if I can also fly out of MHT. No contest.

Note: Written from gate 3 at MHT and posted using the free wi-fi.

Even still there are a number of countries on the map that still do not register visitors. There are at least a dozen countries in Africa who have not come my way. One in central Asia and North Korea. In some ways the North Korea is a surprise because I would have thought there were a lot of people doing searches for programming and computer science related stuff. On the other hand I know they have serious Internet censorship. But I get visits from Iran all the time. In fact I have visits from all the middle eastern countries. I’m only missing one in Europe – Serbia. No one from Greenland – is there anyone in Greenland? Of course Greenland is technically part of Denmark so perhaps people from there are visiting and showing up under Denmark? Could be.

Any way you look at it I am missing visits from about 18 countries. But I think population wise I’ve hit a good part of the population. Not that it matters much in the grand scheme of things of course.

I think though that it highlights something we don’t often think about. It takes a long time to become the captain of a big airline plane. There are years of training involved and then years of working your way up from smaller to larger planes first as a first officer and then finally as captain. But that is what we want. We want the most experienced and best trained pilots in the world in the cockpit. Money is a real part of the incentive to work though that struggle. Not the only thing of course – the best pilots love to fly. But money helps keep them from flying only as a hobby.

We want these people in the cockpit not so much for the ordinary flights. We want them there when things go wrong. It’s like insurance in a way. The experience and the training make it possible for a pilot to stay calm when the sky is falling – or the plane is falling from the sky. It is experience that lets the pilot know that he (or she) can do what no one else can do at a time when most people would panic.

I get on planes all the time and you know I always feel better when the pilot has some gray hair. That way I figure I have someone who has seen a lot, done a lot, trained a lot, and will be the right person there when things go wrong. I don’t want a young hotshot – I want an experienced mature person who will go past the red line when it matters but not when it is a way to show off “courage” or “skills.” I hope the airlines are always willing to pay extra for that.

It started out well enough as my sister-in-law drove me to the airport – DFW. Things continued to look good when the airline upgraded me to first class for the first leg of the trip. And it took off on time.

Now in Minneapolis-St Paul I had a 3 hour layover which I didn’t mind a bit. I took a longish and fairly good lunch in a sit down restaurant.  They loaded the plane on time. And then Murphy hit. There were traffic delays coming into Logan so we sat on the runway for an hour before take off. I called home and found out that the roads were very icy in New Hampshire. Between the late hour of my arrival (well after when my wife usually goes to bed so she can be awake at school the next day) I offered to stay in Boston for the night. A friend/co-worker offered to pick me up and let me crash at his apartment in down-down Boston. Which I did. So far so good.

The next day he dropped me off at the office in Cambridge and I got some work done. I also booked a seat on a bus to Exeter where my wife could easily pick me up. Two subway trains later I had missed the bus. It seems the MBTA estimate of how long the trip was off by a matter of 3 times the actual length. So I had my ticket changed to a later train. I figured I wanted to see what the train was like anyway.

Well the good news is that Amtrak Downeaster has both power and wi-fi. Well the power plugs in my seat were not working but I had plenty of battery so I got some work done. Good thing I had a backup battery though because the train was delayed in route for about an hour. Finally I got there and my wife was waiting for me.

With a break for supper at my son’s place (he cooked and it was great) we finally drove home. So I got home 36 hours after leaving Texas. And I rode in three cars, three trains, and two planes to get home. But you know, a 100 years ago this trip would have taken a whole lot longer so I guess I should be glad I was able to make it at all.