I'm back in Kyoto after several weeks visiting family in The States. The size of my waiting inbox is impressively depressing.

Though the flight back had pluses and minuses, it was much nicer than the flight the previous week. Here are some of the pluses and minuses of the day, on our Cleveland→Minneapolis→Seattle→Osaka-Kansai trip on Delta Airlines...

• Minus: Had to leave the hotel before its restaurant opened; missed free breakfast.
  Plus: Lady let us grab a couple of muffins anyway.

• Minus: 6:00am line at Cleveland airport security was unexpectedly long.
  Plus: Airport staff said neighboring security area was close and empty. It was.

• Minus: Arrival gate in Minneapolis was far from our next departure gate.
  Plus: Long peoplemovers were fun for Anthony; terminal is beautiful.

• Minus: Minneapolis departure delayed due to mechanical problems.
  Plus: Still arrived to Seattle a minute early.

• Minus: Didn't have Seattle→Osaka boarding passes; had to pick up when we got to Seattle.
  Plus: Arrival gate was directly across from where we needed to be.

• Plus: Delta's trans-pacific flight has USB charging ports at every seat.
  Minus: Discovered that they're not powerful enough to charge an iPad.
  Plus: In-seat movie selection was impressive; both Anthony and I satisfied for the entire 11-hour flight.

To top it off there were no minuses to the arrival into Osaka Kansai:

• The line at immigration consisted of just one person in front of us. Through in a jiffy.
• Our luggage was already visible on the carousel as we walked up, so it was grab-n-go.
• Zero wait at customs; through in 10 seconds.

From touchdown to meeting Fumie (and her dad, who kindly drove) was 16 minutes. Wow.

We arrived on Saturday afternoon (now it's Monday). So far I'm managing jetlag okay; I was zonked yesterday, but went to the gym to get Well and Truly tired, and slept a full six hours last night. I'll probably try to do the same again today, if for no other reason than to avoid my email queue.

After having heard of (but not paid much attention to) the game “Minecraft”, I got it for 10-year-old Anthony and me to play together, and found it to be delightful fun. The gameplay is completely unstructured (you explore, mine for resources, and build stuff), though how things work is a bit opaque at first until you figure out how to build stuff. Anthony did so quickly, so he kindly explained it to me.

However, I ran into trouble setting up the WiFi link to play together, and felt like an idiot once I realized what the problem was. I thought I'd share it here for the search engines, in case others had problems setting up multiplayer Minecraft over local WiFi.

The standard instructions are simple:

1. Ensure both devices are on the same WiFi hotspot.
2. On one device, open the world you want to play; ensure that the “local server multiplayer” option is enabled. Start playing.
3. On the other device(s), press the [PLAY] button to bring up the list of worlds.
4. See the WiFi world shared by the first device, select it, and go build things together.

For the life of me I could not get this to work... no shared world appeared in the last step... until I realized that “guest” WiFi networks (such as created by an Apple Time Capsule or Time Machine, and probably many other home WiFi routers) explicitly isolate each client from all others, so even if both devices are connected to the same hotspot, they can not talk to each other.

I'm sure it's the same for most public WiFi hotspots.

So don't use “guest” or public WiFi hotspots for local Minecraft multiplayer (or any local multiplayer game, for that matter), and you'll not waste an hour of your life pulling your hair out.

Oh, it's getting dark and I hear a zombie coming, so I gotta go...

The time we spent with family in Washington last week was filled with lots of sports, mostly baseball (both playing and watching), but Anthony's love of soccer was not overlooked. One day before the bulk of the family flew in, we visited the playground at his cousin Josh's elementary school to kick a ball around a bit...

Anthony's cousin Josh is really talented in baseball — he's seven years old, but holds his own playing against twelve-year olds — but he has little experience with soccer, so the play today was a bit lopsided.

The soccer was fun, but once my brothers came in, there was a lot of baseball (among the kids, the adults, and at the ballpark).

To be continued...

As part of my summer travels, I moved from my sister's place in Washington State to my folks' place in Ohio this week. As the last time I traveled to The States, the flight schedule involved some unpleasant experiences, but unlike last time where the memorable highlight was an anonymous hero, this time the memorable highlight is a check-in agent with a black heart.

(This is one of those “too long for anyone to read” story that I'm writing mostly for my own memory, and as a bit of a cathartic measure, because it was a quite frustrating experience, to say the least.)

The schedule was for Anthony and me to travel out of the tiny regional airport in Bellingham, Washington on a puddle-jumper to Seattle (25 minutes), then to Atlanta and finally to Akron Ohio. Door to door would be 12 hours.

The puddle-jumper out of Bellingham was scheduled for 7am, so we arrived at the airport at about 6:20 for what I expected to be a leisurely few steps to the gate (the airport has only four “gates”, doors that open up to the tarmac for the walk to the plane, each accompanied by a barrel of umbrellas for use in inclement weather).

My whole itinerary was ticketed as being on Delta Airlines, but it took a bit to figure out that this puddle-jumper flight was run by Horizon Air (which actually appears in this airport as Alaska Airlines), so it took a few minutes for me to find the correct check-in counter. When I did, I met “Tanya”.

Tanya quickly made three facts clear:

1. The official cut-off time for baggage check was 6:20 (it was now 6:25), so she didn't have to check us in if we had bags (which we did; Anthony and I each had one).

2. She could check us in if she felt like it.

3. She was not going to check us in on this flight.

It was surreal because the area was almost empty, with two TSA agents just hanging around waiting to inspect luggage before what must be the shortest conveyor-belt ride in America. Tanya didn't give any reason for her denial other than that the cut-off time allowed her to deny us. If they were short-handed in back, or if they were running late for some other unknown task, or if there was some other kind of practical reason, she never mentioned it.

Of course I apologized for not having paid attention to the Alaska-Airlines Bellingham checked-bag cut-off policy, and begged her to reconsider, since I had multiple connections to meet and a 10-year-old child in tow, but she quickly went from “let me see the bags and decide” to a “nah, not gunna do it” attitude (seemingly making the decision without regard to the bags, so I don't know why she asked to see them).

A minute or two after we arrived at Tanya's station, a mother and child also showed up and was told the same thing. The mother mentioned that they had gotten caught in an hour-long wait at the border (apparently having come from Canada), to which Tanya made an animated and incredibly smug “that's not an excuse” involving a sweeping “talk to the hand” motion with both hands.

They were trying to get to Disney World, so they presumably had other connections and hotels and such also on the line. Not only did Tanya not seem to care, she actually seemed to enjoy the situation. Maybe she enjoyed the rush of power in deciding others' fate, or maybe it was simple Shadenfreude. I suspect the former.

The father eventually joined the mother and child and learned of the situation, and made some attempts to plead, but it was clear Tanya was not in a charitable mood. To the credit of all us customers, no one but Tanya ever raised their voice or said anything in anger, despite what was clearly a highly unreasonable situation.

As Tanya made preparations to leave the check-in counter to head to the gate, the words “I'm sorry” somehow came from her mouth, but it seemed clear to me that she wasn't the least bit sorry or sympathetic so I took the opportunity to say (calmly, softly):

“It sure doesn't feel like you're sorry. In fact, you seem to be delighted to do this to us.”

That was the key word for Tanya... “delighted”.

She stormed off leaving us and the other family wondering what to do, and moments later the only other two customers in the area (talking to a different Alaska Airlines check-in agent) came over to me and said “I'm so glad you said that. We were two minutes late. I wanted to say something, but couldn't.”

They were two minutes past the allowed-to-deny-you time, and Tanya wouldn't check them in. Wow. Just wow.

Again, to everyone's credit, no one said the choice emotional words of anger toward Tanya that I'm sure we were all feeling... at this point, it was still more jaw-dropping disbelief and wonder than anger.

I felt particularly bad for the Disney World family, because they left plenty early enough that they should have had no problem — no one expects an hour delay at the Canadian border at 5am — and now they were stuck in limbo. My situation was much more my own fault, and much easier to handle at the moment since I could just call up my sister to return to pick us up. I had Anthony wait at curb for her as I tried to figure out what to do.

It was as that point that one of the TSA agents came over and said “I want to compliment you for how you handled that, keeping your cool in front of your boy”. I thanked her for her kind words, but since I certainly didn't feel cool on the inside, I didn't know that I deserved them. She said that I showed great restraint.

“Does Tanya often elicit the need to show this kind of restraint?”

“Not usually.”

The other check-in agent, Thomas, was left to handle Tanya's discards. He was soft-spoken and kind. He rebooked us on the exact same itinerary for the next day, took the $200 ticket-change fee, and said “see you tomorrow”.

What upset me the most in all this was not the fee nor the disruption in schedule, but the way that Tanya handled the situation. Even if the end result would have been exactly the same, a little bit of compassion and empathy in her words and tone would have made a world of difference, but Tanya displayed not the slightest hint of either. I'm deeply upset by what she did, yet at the same time I have pity for her and what kind of life she must have had to have brought her to this.

Anyway, on a whim, later that afternoon at my sister's house, I called Delta Airlines to confirm the schedule for the next day, only to find that they had no record of any of this; they said that the ticket hadn't been changed since May. An hour and $625 more in fees later, Anthony and I had a confirmed schedule.

Neither Delta nor I have any idea what the $200 I'd paid was for, nor what happened to the itinerary that had been created.

The TSA agent who had so kindly complimented me had suggested that you can avoid the check-in line by doing the check-in online, then bringing the printed barcode and luggage directly to a window set aside just for that, so I went to the Delta site to check in, but they handed me off to the Alaska Airlines site because the day's travel was to being with them. There I found out that I couldn't check in online because, for whatever reason, my name was marked with a special request as “deaf / hard of hearing”. This was a surprise.

There's likely a completely innocent reason for this... even perhaps my own mistake when I created the reservation... but part of me wonders whether it's Tanya's idea of a “joke”.

I called Alaska Airlines to tell them that I didn't need the special request, and to ask about the $200 and the disappearing reschedule, but the lady I talked to had no idea, and in what seems to be a recurring theme for the day, I missed their Customer Service hours by 10 minutes.

We arrived to the airport much earlier the next morning and saw that Tanya was there, so I was thrilled when lucky timing placed us in front of Thomas. We did have to hand Tanya our tickets when walking out to the plane, but I had Anthony do it so that I didn't have to even look at her. We passed with the same cheery “Have a nice day” that everyone got.

The Delta flight from Seattle to Atlanta had some stress because our short connection time in Atlanta was made shorter by the flight running increasingly late, and we were in the 2nd-to-the-last row (which meant that it would take forever to exit the plane). The flight crew was kind and sympathetic, but there was nothing they could do. At least I could use the on-board Wi-Fi (a first for me) to keep up to date with the flight status, but things didn't bode well when an hour out, our projected delay grew so big that the Delta iPhone app said that we wouldn't make our 5:15pm connection and started offering alternatives (all of which left the next morning). Yikes.

A kind lady closer to the front of the plane was traveling with daughters seated right behind us in the last row, and since they had no connection, I gently asked whether she'd swap positions with me and Anthony so we'd have a better chance to get out early. I felt horrible putting her on the spot, but she immediately said “oh, of course”, and so joined her daughters in the back of the plane. The kindness of strangers can do wonders. Thank you kind lady.

Atlanta is a big hub for Delta, so many people had connections, and most seemed tight. We were to park at gate A1, and leave from F4. They're not the two most-separated gates in the airport, but very close; to walk between them is over two kilometers(!), but there's also a train for most of it.

We landed 14 minutes late, and on the way to the gate we promptly stopped and sat on the tarmac for a while before the pilot announced that someone was in our parking spot (another Delta flight with mechanical trouble), so it would be a few minutes while they looked for a spot.

I had the tightest connection of anyone I talked to, but the family across the aisle had a 5:30 flight to Zurich (it was now 5:00) leaving from the same far-flung terminal I had to go to. I didn't think any of us would make it.

Anthony and I ran like the wind.

Finally reaching the train out of breath and covered in sweat, we waited for the train next to a pilot of some sort. I jokingly asked whether he was flying on Delta to Akron (he wasn't), but he advised me that the train was the best way to get to the gate, and wished me luck.

The train had to make six excruciatingly-slow stops before getting to Terminal F, but along the way the pilot comes up to me and, looking at his iPhone, tells me my flight is delayed to 7pm. That eased the pressure a bit, but just in case we still sprinted to the gate. We arrived almost exactly at 5:15, so if it had not been delayed, we would have missed it.

It ended up being delayed until 7:30 because the flight crew was late arriving from some other flight. It took a while before the Delta Airlines iPhone app was updated to show the delay, so I bet the pilot was running a private corporate app. He said that they don't announce a delay until they're really really really sure it's going to be delayed, because once passengers see the delay they scatter throughout the airport and can't be recalled if needed. Still, Delta knew the crew wouldn't even arrive to the airport (on a flight from Mexico) until almost 7pm, so they certainly could have let us know many hours earlier. That would have saved a lot of stress. Maybe they were holding out hope that another crew could be found. I dunno.

My folks picked us up after arriving 2½ hours late, and we finally reached home at about 10:30. Thrillingly, it was actually with our luggage (it's been long delayed on a few recent trips).

I slept well the first night, but thoughts of Tanya and her “delightful” lack of empathy kept me awake last night. I just tried to call Alaska Airlines customer service, but they're not open on the weekend, so I'll give them a try on Monday to let them know about my experience, and to figure out the deal with the $200 I paid.

I've flown at least 250,000 miles over the years (including almost a hundred transpacific round trips) and have on occasion called the airline to offer words of praise for specific employees, but this will be the first time in all these years to complain about a specific employee. It doesn't feel good.

(UPDATE: I've posed a followup comment below).

I don't know anything about wine other than “I like” and “I don't like”, and I found out today that I really like this 14 Hands Cabernet Sauvignon. My sister-in-law normally has an educated idea about what wines she buys, but today was in a rush and just grabbed this Washington State wine on display at the front of the store.

Apparently it's a fairly cheap (low price) commodity wine available all over America.

My sister-in-law thought it was just okay, but I really liked it.