Every once in a while I deliberately give myself a long layover at an airport so that I can check out a city I've never seen before. This time: Atlanta. I just took the MARTA train into Atlanta with the intention of checking out the Georgia Aquarium which has just opened with great fanfare. Anyway, the aquarium is "sold out", meaning you can only get in if you buy tix online some time in advance. So I was turned away tragically and have been aimlessly wandering the streets for the last few hours.

Atlanta seems like a pretty nice place, but as far as street life goes it seems like a ghost town. I walked all the way from five points to uptown and encountered about 8 human beings and the only thing open is the Starbucks I've now sequesterd myself at. Far from the teeming metropolis of the south i'd been led to belive. Then again, it is xmas break so there aren't any students around. But still, it all seems a little bit sterile on first impression. Time to go find something to eat, then back to the airport, and onward to Mexico...

I can't understand why anyone would get up at 5am ever, much less the day after christmas, to stand in lines at some horrid shopping mall to buy... stuff.... unneeded junk (mostly). All to save a buck. Bizarre.

I'm really close to throwing my laptop out the window. I mostly blame SBCYahoo for this, but I cannot tell if they are entirely to blame. Here's the problem - I hate web based email... it's slow, hard to navigate, and dosn't work unless I'm connected to the internet, which I'm frequently not (like when I'm on a plane). Problem is, at home SBCYahoo forces me to use "smtp.sbcglobal.net" as my outgoing mail server, even though my actual email is from other domains. That's fine as long as I'm at home.

Problem is, whenever I leave the house, I have to change my SMTP server to something else... typically it takes a mission to figure out what works depending on where I'm sitting. Right now, I've wasted 30 minutes just trying to send a *%&$* email. One email. Why is this so difficult? Why is there no "universal" smtp thing that just works?

I have a bit of a layover in Las Vegas today and was happy to find that the entire airport has free WiFi. That's really cool. Considering what a small investment it is, I'm surprised more hub airports don't just give it away for free. I wonder what the infrastructure for setting up and running (or letting someone else run) a pay-per-use wifi network really costs vs. the benefits of making customers happy by just giving it away...

This is amazing - it's an alarm clock which launches an annoyingly loud helicopter that flies around the room until you get out of bed and catch it - thus forcing you to get up as well as expend energy that wakes you up.

[link here]