Planes, Trains, and Getting There Anyway

by

After I got the word that my brother in law had passed away, I immediately booked plane tickets. We found a flight out of Heathrow at 12:50 p.m., planned a normal morning, and headed to the airport.

It was not until we were already on the Elizabeth line, almost there, that I noticed the alert. Our flight had been delayed by seven and a half hours.

We needed to get to New Jersey that day. The funeral was the following day, and missing it was not really an option. Any flight leaving London the next day would get us there too late. So once we arrived at the airport, we went straight to the airline’s Special Help counter to see what could be done.

They were able to get us confirmed seats on the 6 p.m. flight. Technically, that was an improvement. It was about an hour and a half earlier than our newly delayed flight. But it was still very late. It would get us into New Jersey that day, but very close to midnight local time.

The only other option they offered was standby on the noon flight, which was actually earlier than our original departure. We went through the security routine, grabbed some breakfast quickly, and then went to the gate when they called it for the noon flight.

When boarding finished, there was exactly one seat available.

My wife and I talked it through quickly, and I got on the plane. She stayed behind with the kids and planned to try to fly standby on the 3 p.m. flight, and if that did not work, take the 6 p.m. flight we already had confirmed.

The idea was that I would meet my mom, get a car, and head either to my sister’s place or the hotel.

That part did not work out.

I landed without issue and got an Uber to the hotel. My mom’s flight was cancelled entirely. She was rebooked to JFK, while I had flown into Newark. From there, she took the AirTrain, the Long Island Railroad, and New Jersey Transit, and went straight to my sister’s.

My wife was not able to get on standby for the earlier flight and ended up on the 6 p.m. flight after all. She managed to rearrange the rental car and arrived at the hotel close to midnight New York time.

So in the end, we all got there. Just not together. And not in the way we expected.

To be fair to the airline, there had been a major blizzard the day before. By the time we landed, things were slowly getting back to normal. Still, the whole experience felt like planes, trains, and automobiles in real time.

Hectic, exhausting, and strangely memorable, for all the wrong reasons.

Minor note. I wasn’t sure when I was going to post this one. Since it involves travel and today the girls and I are flying home from our term break holiday I thought it was appropriate to post it. If all goes to plan we should be boarding the plane home a few hours after this posts.

Always Have a Ticket From The Airline Flying the Plane

by

There are some travel lessons you only learn the hard way, like never packing a full bottle of shampoo in your carry-on, or trusting that a “short layover in Paris” (or worse, thinking you can sprint between Terminal A and Terminal D in Atlanta) will actually go smoothly.

But the one lesson that’s stuck with me through years of work trips and personal travel is this: always have a ticket from the airline flying the plane.

If the aircraft says Virgin Atlantic on the side, buy your ticket from Virgin Atlantic, not from Delta, not from Air France, not from whoever happens to be codesharing that day.

I learned this the hard way, a few times.

Once, I booked a Virgin Atlantic ticket from London to New York. Except it was actually an Air France-operated flight. I didn’t think much of it at the time. A plane’s a plane, right? Wrong.

Everything was fine until the airline changed the flight with a new time, new number, the usual shuffle. Our assigned seats (carefully picked because, you know, kids) vanished.

I logged into Virgin Atlantic’s website to reselect our seats, only to find that Virgin politely told me to contact Air France. Air France, to their credit, were actually very helpful, they just couldn’t do what I needed. The systems didn’t talk to each other properly, and no one could fix it. Since the schedule change was on their end, I had the option to cancel, which I eventually did. I rebooked with my lesson learned and, thankfully, no price change.

Fast forward a bit and you’d think I would’ve remembered that rule. But no.

This time I had a Delta ticket for a Virgin Atlantic flight. Thanks to my American Express Platinum card, I should’ve had access to the Delta lounge. When I showed up, they told me I wasn’t eligible because the flight was operated by Virgin, not Delta. Same metal, wrong ticket. No lounge.

It’s one of those maddeningly small distinctions that make perfect sense to no one but airline lawyers.

From now on, I’m sticking to my own rule: always have a ticket from the airline flying the plane. If you don’t, be ready for drama.

I wrote this late last year. It appropriately is posting while the girls and I are on a plane off on a holiday. And yes I have learned my lesson it’s the same airline flying the plane that is on our tickets.

Two Decades and Change

by

23 years in and I’m still doing this.

I’ve taken breaks. I’ve also posted several times in a single day. It’s been wildly inconsistent at points. But here we are, two-plus decades later, and I haven’t quit.

At some point I got into a rhythm of writing a bunch of posts at once and scheduling them out. Which means I’m not burning myself out trying to come up with something every day, but the blog keeps moving. Turns out that’s a sustainable approach. Only took me about 20 years to land on it.

The thing that gets me is this: if my blog were a person, it would be old enough to drink. Here in the UK, at least. It still couldn’t get a discounted car insurance rate though. That doesn’t kick in until 25. So it’s got a couple more years before it’s truly sorted.

I’ll take it.

Photo montage of the blog theme over the years. I didn’t realise I had taken so may screen captures. The bright orange profile was very early on in 2003.

WAY BACK MACHINE SNAPSHOT
My blog theme before I changed it, again
WAY BACK MACHINE CAPTURE
My first wordpress theme.

The One Where I Was Terrible at Football

by

Both of my girls are playing football now. A started last year, and this summer, T decided to join too. I suspect the end of season party had something to do with her sudden interest. But whatever works.

One of my earliest memories is going to play football. Yes, football, not soccer. I live in England now, so we are doing this properly. My dad used to take me to these fields right off the Grand Central Parkway in Queens, near Little Neck Parkway. I can still picture them, green spaces right by the highway where you could literally see the games as you drove past.

My first team was the Blue team. I remember the jerseys, the cover photo is me standing around during a game or a practice.. Playing was my dad trying to get me into sports. Spoiler: it did not really stick.

I did play for years, probably until I was around eleven. I never had a real knack for it. My mom likes to tell people I was terrible, and she is not wrong. I daydreamed. I lost track of the ball. I think I spent half my time wondering when the snacks were coming.

At one point, my dad started helping coach my team. Then eventually, I think he was the coach. It is funny to look back now, because some of my best childhood memories connect to those seasons, even if I was daydreaming while everyone else actually played the game.

Football also shaped little corners of our family life in unexpected ways. For example, the beach club we joined later was connected to one of my coaches. A whole chapter of my childhood followed from those football years: summers, cabanas, the smell of sunscreen and chlorine.

I played both outdoor and indoor football growing up. The indoor version was wild. No outs, no throw ins, the ball just bounced off walls like some kind of playground pinball machine. Here in England, the kids play outdoors year round unless the ground freezes solid or turns into a swamp. They have trained in rain, cold, wind, everything.

I love it. Watching them do something I did as a kid but better feels oddly full circle. I never pushed them to start early, but I am glad they found a girls club where they feel at home.

My bar was pretty low, to be fair. So the good news is, they have already cleared it.

3000 Days

by

I’ve known for a while what I wanted to write about today.

When I wrote the December 29th post about our England anniversary, I did what I always do: calculated the number of days since we moved. It’s become a thing. I like the number. It feels more concrete than just saying “seven years” or whatever.

This past December the number was creeping up toward 3,000. Which made me curious. So I did the math. When exactly would we hit 3,000 days?

I cannot make this up.

Today. My birthday. March 16, 2026 is exactly 3,000 days since we landed in England back in 2017.

I find that unreasonably satisfying.

Not a ton else to report on the birthday front. But honestly, that little numerical coincidence is enough. Some years you get a big revelation. This year I got a very pleasing number, and I’ll take it.

No fancy cake for me this year, M and I are going out but the photos are a montage of my favourite cakes M has made for me to date. The best so far would not be one for me though!

The Uncle Michael Turkey

by

After my brother in law, Michael, passed away, I wrote down a few small stories about him. Not the big ones. Just the ones that made me smile when I thought about them. This is the first.

We were at my sister’s place after the funeral, when M told this story. When the kids were little, they used to do the usual school projects. One year, A made one of those classic hand turkeys. You trace your hand, turn it into a turkey, and on each finger you write something important to you.

On most of the fingers, she put exactly what you would expect from a three or four year old. Family. Home. Simple, generic things.

But on one of the fingers, she wrote “Uncle Michael.”

That was it. No other specific people. No friends. No teachers. Just Uncle Michael, singled out and given his own finger on the turkey.

Even back then, he just had that way with kids. They were drawn to him immediately. He did not try very hard. He did not need to. They just liked him.

What struck me was realizing how few people knew the story. When we mentioned it, my mom was surprised she had never heard it before. Somehow it had just stayed with us.

It feels like such a small thing. A hand turkey from a preschool classroom. But it says a lot.

Some people leave impressions without even realizing they are doing it. Michael was one of those people.

No photo of the turkey I am afraid. its in storage after thanksgiving and I am not going to hunt for it!

The Slow Goodbye to My Sony Alpha 6000

by

When A was around four or five months old back in 2014, I finally went out and bought myself a Sony Alpha 6000. I keep calling it the 8000 in my head, but I am pretty sure it was the 6000. A mirrorless camera. Lightweight compared to the big DSLRs. And honestly, I loved that thing from the moment I took it out of the box.

I had been thinking about buying a “real” camera for a long time, probably since right around when T was born. We had those little point and shoot cameras back then, the kind you take on dates, vacations, and early married life. They were fine as long as the baby was not moving very fast, which babies do not for the first while. Slow focus, mediocre quality, but acceptable.

Eventually we drifted into using our phones. M held on to her BlackBerry camera longer than I ever wanted her to, and I tried to convince her to switch to an iPhone sooner, but that is a whole separate story. Either way, point and shoots faded out, and phone cameras took over. By the time A arrived, I was completely reliant on my phone for photos.

I know this because so many of those early pictures of her are grainy. Not unusable, but definitely early smartphone camera quality. Ten years ago, that was just how phone photos looked. They were fine, but nowhere near what a proper camera could do.

And then I bought the Sony. You can basically see the day it entered our lives just by scrolling the photo library. Everything suddenly goes from grainy baby in poor lighting to “wow, that looks like an actual photograph.” It was night and day.

I did not use the Sony all the time, but when we went to the park, to a family outing, or on a holiday, it came with me. That camera could shoot thirteen frames a second, which blew my mind. Hold down the shutter and it would just fire off shot after shot until the buffer filled. If the kids were jumping off a diving board, I would get every moment of the arc from takeoff to splash. It was incredible.

And the thing is, it is still an incredible camera. It works perfectly. The only thing it really lacks is built in GPS or any sort of modern connectivity. Even back then Sony sold an add on for that, but I never bought it. Aside from that, I truly have no complaints. It is a fantastic piece of kit.

But I do not use it anymore. Hardly ever.

Even though it is mirrorless and not some heavy DSLR monster, it is still extra weight. Unless I am going to a recital or a school performance or sports day, I just do not bring it. On those special occasions it shines. I get great photos. I am always glad I brought it.

But for everything else, holidays, day trips, everyday moments, I just use my iPhone.

The newer iPhones have such good cameras now. The optical zoom is surprisingly decent, the quick capture is good enough, and while it will never match a thirteen frames per second burst, it gets the job done. And more importantly, the phone is always with me. It used to be that the phone camera was “fine.” Now it is genuinely impressive for pretty much all normal everyday photos.

So the Sony sits around. I take it out a few times a year, but that is about it.

Part of me would love to upgrade it someday, mostly for the built in GPS so I could easily geotag everything. I still tag my photos manually because I like knowing where pictures were taken, but upgrading to a whole new camera just to avoid that step does not make sense.

And as much as it pains me to say it, I do not think I will ever buy another dedicated camera. Not because they are not wonderful, but because I do not want to carry one. Convenience wins. Even over something as genuinely enjoyable and high quality as that Sony Alpha.

It is a little sad, but it is also just reality. The best camera is the one you are willing to carry, and these days, that is my phone.

The Not Quite Two Day Work Week

by

When I was growing up, basically from first or second grade through high school, my dad worked in an emergency room. He worked there before and after that too, but that stretch of time is the one I remember most clearly. And at some point during those years he got promoted and became the group leader for the physician assistants. Which meant he controlled the schedule.

That schedule was, looking back, kind of wild.

He technically worked only two days a week. Tuesdays and Thursdays. But those two days were monsters. He would get up around six thirty in the morning, head out. I rarely saw him in the mornings. He wouldn’t get home until eleven or eleven thirty at night. Eighteen hour days. He would get home long after everyone else was asleep, put on the TV for a bit to unwind, and eventually go to bed. The only reason I know this was because my bedroom was near the living room, so I would hear him come in sometimes.

Those two huge days added up to about thirty six hours a week, and then he had administrative office hours scattered elsewhere. That part was whenever he wanted, so the rest of his week was essentially free time. He used to tell me he loved those early morning drives. He would throw on scrubs, be out the door in minutes, and the roads were empty. We lived in Queens near the Throgs Neck Bridge and he worked in the Bronx, so it was a quick trip. From the way he described it, he was not overly committed to speed limits, and because of his job, I do not think any police officer ever gave him trouble. Then coming home late at night was the same thing. Empty roads, easy ride. He really liked that routine.

Later on, when my sister went to college, he picked up a side job on Wednesdays to help cover tuition. That was at Rikers Island. His hospital had the medical contract there, so once a week he did a four to twelve shift at the prison clinic. He hated that job. They would literally lock him into the clinic area for his own protection and he would sit there with a tiny portable television, because this was the late eighties and entertainment options were pretty much nonexistent. If something happened, they would either bring an inmate to him or escort him out to whoever needed care. He did it strictly for the money, and he knew the exact week he was planning to quit because that was the moment he would no longer need the extra income our college tuition’s.

When I got older and went off to college, he still had the same overall routine. I would call my parents on Sundays for the usual check in, but if I wanted to talk specifically to my dad, I would call him on Wednesday mornings before he left for Rikers. He told me once that I was one of the only people who ever called him on Wednesdays. Everyone else avoided him because he was grumpy about going to that job and made sure the whole house knew it. But I always knew he would be home on those mornings, and for whatever reason, I never minded calling then.

Eventually he moved out of the emergency room entirely and into a more administrative role. More of a normal nine to five thing. That was sometime toward the end of my college years, and there is another whole story about how he got that job, but that is for another day.

Downsizing the Pi Network

by

I keep a blog idea board in my Trello app so I can track all the things I want to write about, because I’ll come up with an idea for a post and then promptly forget it. Of course, sometimes I also add it to the board and still forget about it for years. By the time I rediscover it, the topic isn’t relevant anymore, or I’ve already written something similar. But I digress.

One of those old notes was about the state of my Pi network. I wrote it down a year ago, maybe updated it earlier this year, and now I’ve finally made enough changes that it’s worth revisiting.

I’ve owned pretty much every generation of Raspberry Pi. Actually, I think I’ve owned all the main variants from each generation, not the tiny ones or the 400/500 models that are built into keyboards, but all the standard boards. I bought the original Raspberry Pi 1, set it up, played with it, and then never really deployed it for anything meaningful. By the time I wanted to, the Pi 2 had already come out, so I bought one of those. At some point I got rid of the Pi 1, maybe gave it away, but I’ve kept just about every other one since.

The backbone of my original home network was built on Raspberry Pi 2s. I had five of them running my early private cloud backup network. Over time, I upgraded them with new cases, official Wi-Fi adapters, and less reliance on Ethernet. Then the Pi 3s came out, and I added a few of those for compute jobs. Then came the Pi 4s, and I gradually shifted everything over again.

Eventually, I stopped using the 2s and most of the 3s, and my little network of Pis became mostly 4s. I think I had around four or five of them running various workloads. When the Pi 5s came out, I didn’t jump immediately, but I have about four of them now.

Funny thing is, I’m using less compute now than ever. The main purpose of the Pi cluster used to be my Docker setup, which ran parts of my media center, a Minecraft server, and Homebridge for connecting Ring cameras to Apple HomeKit. Most of that has since moved or shut down.

I replaced the Ring cameras, so no need for Homebridge. Plex moved to my Synology DiskStation because the transcoding works better there. The Docker stack was easy enough to migrate, so that freed up another Pi.

These days, I’m really only using:

One Resilio Sync node for backups One BorgBackup setup for immutable backups One Pi as a Tailscale exit node And a Raspberry Pi 4 running Pi-hole for DHCP and DNS in the house

Everything else runs on Pi 5s, though even that’s more power than I need. When I built out the 5s earlier this year, I decided to stop using SD cards and external drives. I got cases with SSD add-ons, most with 256 GB drives, and one with a 2 TB SSD for backups. It’s a neat all-in-one box setup.

The Pi 4, especially the 8 GB version, is still a perfectly good piece of kit, but I just don’t have enough for it to do. So I’ve started selling them off on eBay. I’ve already sold a couple of the 4s and gotten a surprisingly good return for hardware that’s several years old. I’ve sold all of my 3s and am now selling the 2s. Apparently, people still buy them for nostalgia or small projects.

A few of my old ones are in official cases, and two are even in LEGO cases with camera kits. They look great, but I’m trying to pare everything down so I’m left with only the Pi 5s, and maybe I’ll move the Pi-hole over to a 5 while I’m at it.

Maintaining the hardware takes a decent amount of time and effort, and with what I’m doing now, renting a virtual private server is just simpler. My web hosting, where this blog lives, runs on a VPS with 2.5 GB of RAM, a single virtual core, and about 40 GB of storage, all for around $23 a year. It’s based in Dublin and does the job beautifully.

Building a Pi 5 setup can easily cost around four times that, even if it gives me more power than I’ll ever use. I’m not planning to get rid of the 5s I already have since they’re great machines, but I’ve reduced what I actually run on them. Justifying keeping all the older models sitting around isn’t really there anymore. For most of what I run these days, a VPS or my upgraded DiskStation handles it fine.

So yes, I’m officially downgrading, selling off hardware, consolidating services, and simplifying. I still love tinkering, but the Pi 5s are plenty. The rest? Off to eBay.

My Imaginary Friends (A 15-Year Tradition I Didn’t Mean to Start)

by

When M and I were just dating, we ended up one night at Rudy’s, that dive bar on 10th Avenue in Manhattan, somewhere in the 30s or 40s, where you get a free hot dog with every drink. I still have no idea why that’s their thing, but it’s a thing.

Anyway, we were walking in, and right by the door there’s this big pig statue. Like, a life-size pig, standing upright, greeting everyone as they stumble inside. I don’t remember if I was the one who wanted to take a picture with it or if M said, “Hey, you should totally take a picture with that weird pig,” but either way, I did.

Side note: while we were trying to get this very important photo, some very drunk woman tried to insert herself into the moment. She might have been hitting on me, which was equal parts awkward and hilarious, because M and I both just stood there like, “Ma’am, no.” We brushed her off, got the photo, went inside, had a drink (and a hot dog, probably), and that was that. A fun night, a random photo, end of story. Or so I thought.

Fast forward less than a year later, we’re in Amsterdam. I take another photo, this time with a giant anthropomorphic French fry container. (If you’ve been there, you know exactly what I’m talking about.) And somehow, without meaning to, it became a thing.

Over the years, it’s turned into this quiet little tradition: whenever I come across an inanimate character, statue, mascot, random object with a face. I have to take a picture with it. Doesn’t matter where I am. A cruise ship, a street corner, a theme park, an airport gift shop. If it’s there, I’m probably posing with it.

I’ve got photos with everything from a teddy bear sitting on a bench in New Mexico to Winston Churchill and Sherlock Holmes statues in London. There’s one with a giant Hello Kitty in Bangkok. The list goes on. At this point, I probably have a hundred or more of these photos—enough to make a coffee table book no one asked for.

I’ve started calling them my imaginary friends. I know, they’re not actually imaginary (or alive), but “inanimate friends” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

Now that the kids are older, they sometimes join in, or they play photographer while I strike my now-traditional pose. Sometimes I’ll get a picture with them, then immediately request a solo shot because, well, tradition.

I didn’t plan this. I didn’t set out to start a collection. But here we are, fifteen years later, and it’s one of those odd little through-lines in my life that I can’t help but keep going.

I might even try to count how many I’ve got, challenge accepted.

So yes, this is a thing. A ridiculous, wonderful, slightly embarrassing thing that makes me smile every time. And now, you know about it too.