Airports, part 1

I am sitting at the airport, waiting to fly out to Tampa for training.  It’s been a few years since I’ve flown.  I think the last time was… 2007?  The process has definitely been streamlined.  I showed up a good two hours early just in case and spent less than half an hour getting boarding passes and making it through security.   What’s a guy to do on a Sunday morning in an airport?   And if you suggest beer, this is Texas and they don’t serve alcohol till noon on Sunday.  Why not write updates for a blog I haven’t had time to mess with in a couple of weeks?  Sounds like a plan to me.   Maybe by the time I check in to my hotel tonight I’ll have a good couple of posts written so it will look like I update this thing every once in a while.

Side note…  I was going to write “actually” there a few lines ago, and came to a dead stop.  I work with someone that uses “well, actually” as the beginning of most sentences.  So the word “actually” now  grates on my nerves.  I hate to hear the word uttered.  

My wife watches “How I Met Your Mother” on Netflix quite often.  There’s an episode where they expose unknown habits.  Lilly eats loud.  Ted corrects everyone.  Barney bursts into falsetto every once in a while.  I don’t remember what Marshal did.  But Ted’s girlfriend in that episode never shut up.  She talked constantly.  But Ted never noticed.  It took someone else pointing out her action for Ted to realize.   I know others at my job haven’t noticed the “well, actually”.  I asked one or two of them about it.  But I noticed it and it drives me up the wall.

The other thing that annoys me at the moment is my laptop touch pad.  I replaced the HP Elitebook with an HP Probook 6570b.  The primary reason for choosing this laptop was the inclusion of a built in serial port.  USB to serial converters and PCMCIA cards just don’t work the way they are supposed to.  Something is lost in translation.  Speed.  Speed is lost in the translation.  What takes me 28 minutes to do on this laptop used to take an hour or longer on the old laptop.  That part is great.   Processor, RAM, and hard disk space are also great.  What isn’t great is the touch pad.

The touchpad itself works fine.  It’s a touch pad, and by that title they suck.  I’ve tried the “magic” Apple touchpads and they suck just as bad.  Touch pads are serviceable.  What annoys me about this one is a small orange light.  Now, the functionality built into the touch pad gives you the ability to double tap  the touch pad on and off.  Which would work great if my hands stayed put while typing, but they don’t always do that.  So my hand lifts and raises, and slides around, and the touch pad turns on and off in the midst of everything else I’m doing.   If I move my hands, the thing turns on and off.

It’s worse when playing games, because I use my left hand on the number keys and my right hand for the mouse.  If there was an external keyboard, I’d say it would be the perfect laptop.  But that touch pad just drives me up the wall.  Even worse, when the transition occurs, the processor usage spikes like crazy and the whole system drags to a halt.  If they could fix that issue, I would love this laptop.  As it is, I have my misgivings.