travel on Oxymoronical

British Airways ruined my Christmas

Thu, 23 Dec 2010 00:29:39 +0000

To be clear I don’t blame BA for having to cancel flights into Heathrow when the airport cannot run at full capacity. That is certainly not their fault, you can’t change the weather (though you could buy more snowploughs!). What annoys me is their incompetent response to the situation and then their attempts at being nice with fakey emails from the CEO.

I wanted to go and see my family for Christmas this year. We were booked on a direct flight from San Francisco to Heathrow that was due to leave about 4 hours from now but due to the snowstorms in the UK it has been cancelled. The first we heard about it was an email from my dad at 9:30am yesterday morning, he had been keeping track of the flight status better than us. I don’t understand this. They have my contact details so why wasn’t I the first to hear about the cancellation the moment it went up onto the website. In fact I finally got an email from BA about it at 3pm, at least five and a half hours after it went onto the website. The email contained this boldfaced lie:

Brussels bound

Wed, 04 Feb 2009 11:12:57 +0000

This weekend is FOSDEM 2009 and I’m actually managing to attend this year. It’s kind of weird, I keep doing all this travelling to the states yet I end up having to miss all the awesome stuff that goes on in Europe for various reasons (often because I am all travelled out from the states). But I’m going to be at FOSDEM even if it kills me, which considering the snow on the roads and serious travelling I have over the next few months is a possibility. Thankfully the jetlag from Europe is a lot easier to recover from.

Travel stats

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 10:20:43 +0000

I thought it would be amusing to look at some of the numbers associated with my travel home from San Francisco. This is taking into account the time between leaving the place I was staying in America to getting back to my house:

63 hours total travel time
29 hours in hotel rooms
16 hours sleeping
15 hours in the air
4 plane flights (on 3 different planes)
8 hours sat in planes that weren’t flying
3 hours in a car

Happy to be home?

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 15:33:12 +0000

I’m normally pretty happy to be getting home after a trip to the States. Not because I don’t enjoy being out there of course, but you know home is where you’re most comfortable and living out of a bag in a hotel gets tiring after a time. Today is the first time that that has really changed.

I really didn’t spend as much time in San Francisco as I would have liked. A mere 4 days meant I totally failed to hang out with some of the friends I wanted to and didn’t have enough time with even those that I did get to see. I’m really grateful to those that put me up and took special efforts to catch up with me.

Back home

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 11:15:48 +0000

Finally back home after my two weeks in North America. Both Toronto and Mountain View included fun and disappointment. Traveling to these places is generally awesome but somehow I always manage to generate some form of drama for myself, and really living out of hotels and restaurants gets old pretty fast. I’m not much of a cook but I am looking forward to sitting down with a homemade meal this evening, well maybe tomorrow with the jetlag.

Ruminations on a fortnight

Sat, 27 Sep 2008 09:28:32 +0000

It’s been a hectic couple of weeks for me and I wanted to touch on a few of the highs and lows before I forget them all.

It started with flights to get me to Toronto (for those of you that don’t know I live and work out of the UK). I was speaking at the Toronto Developer Day as well as attending a Firefox team work week (two things that conflicted more than I would have liked unfortunately). I normally manage to find direct flights but this time I had to connect through Amsterdam which wasn’t too bad, even if they seem even more mad for security than Heathrow. Incidentally terminal 4 at Heathrow is miles nicer than 3 where I normally come from, even if the 6 police officers armed with automatic weapons was a little disconcerting.

Thanks Canada (no, really)

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 06:02:47 +0000

It’s 6:30am Sunday UK time (though in my weird method of getting over the jet lag that works out as just after lunchtime) and I’ve just got home to Swansea. As many others are I’ve been thinking back over the great times I’ve had over the past two weeks. Needless to say I got out alive, as I believe everyone did (though apparently some are still stranded in Vancouver), despite Canada’s attempts to break us.