cww.blog!

Well, it's been quite some time since I posted anything here... so long, in fact, that up until this entry gets posted, the front page will have been empty for a couple days. Weird.

It's my birthday today (or, rather, it was my birthday yesterday), and I had about 10 text messages and 28 emails when I woke up, most of which had something to do with that particular fact. I spent the day like any other day, with the exception of opening five packages of completely unexpected presents sent from far and wide. Thanks, everybody! I also tried to get my friend Steve to go have Japanese food with me this evening, but it turns out he's at a conference in San Francisco. Alas, we'll perhaps celebrate my birthday this weekend, instead.

In other news, I've stopped hanging onto boarding passes and started collecting data on my travels in a database. Maybe I'll use it to create cool graphs or something in the future, but right now, it's just getting started. The travel databaseI've been able to insert 34 flights into it so far, most of which are from 2006.

I think this database will be interesting to view in the future, when I feel like looking back on a trip to Buenos Aires or that time I smelled cinnamon and cloves in Harvard Yard. Technical graphs of flight frequencies and interfaces to airlines' web sites would be pretty cool to include eventually, too.

I would like to appeal to those of you with whom I've flown in the past: if you have old boarding passes, emails, journal entries, bills of lading, deportation notices, or any other such items that might give me a clue about flights I've taken, I'd love to have that information. For example, I don't have any information on the flights I took back and forth between Texas and Oregon in 2002 and 2003 (hi, Kari!). Nor do I have any data for when I met Tamara in Seattle in July, 2004, or when Katy and I spent Christmas in New England and Texas in 2005. I'm also missing flight numbers for the week I spent in London in 2004 (hi, Uncle John!). Oh, and how about the Thanksgiving trip to New York City, also in 2004? And the various trips to Pittsburgh before I started graduate school in 2005?

All those flights aside, the gold mine, of course, would be to find old information for the flights I took around the world when I was much younger (hey, Mom?). It would be really neat to know which KLM, Pan Am, and Eastern Airlines flights I took when I was a jet set two-year-old. I have my old passports around here somewhere, but those are only going to help so much.