So, I’m back from a one week vacation in Virginia. We stayed in a castle on a mountaintop in the Appalachians, near the Blue Ridge Parkway. It was a pretty amazing experience. The place was like an English stately home–except that instead of being roped off and littered with “DO NOT SIT ON CHAIR” signs, we actually got to live there for a week.

It was the most relaxed vacation I’ve had in years. Lots of reading, gazing at the scenery, chatting with friends, and some hiking up mountain trails to break up the lazing around. People took it in turns to cook for the group, and we ate well.

While we were away, the budgerigars were looked after by friends. The birds apparently had a good time, as they didn’t seem to want to come home. The journey by car was quite hard for Chester; he’s a nervous bird, and took out his fear on Lola by pecking at her. Meanwhile, she was more interested in watching the outside world go past. They were both quite flighty when we got home, but the next day they were back to their usual selves–in fact, they were both very affectionate. It’s good to have them back, I missed them a lot.

The mountain weather was misty at first, and even when the sun came out the temperature didn’t go much above 20°C. Austin, on the other hand, hit 39.4°C in the shade this afternoon, and it’s humid too. Nice and warm, in other words.

IBM server hardware seems to have a vacation detector circuit, but people were kind enough to keep a few disasters for me to return to.

I just learned that IBM has renamed OS/400 again. It was called i5/OS last year, but this year they renamed it…

i

Yes, the letter ‘i’ in lower-case. IBM i.

Fabulous! That’s going to be really great for searching for information, isn’t it? Hardly any web pages contain the letter ‘i’ on its own, or sentence bridges like "…I downloaded the patch from IBM. I then…"

It’ll work especially well in IBM Lotus Notes, where searches are case-insensitive and punctuation-insensitive unless you reindex the entire database with non-default settings.

I also look forward to the support calls. "There seems to be some corruption in the database, the OS field says ‘i’." "Yes, the machine is running ‘i’." "A running eye?" "It’s running IBM i." "The letter ‘i’?" "Yes, the OS has a 1-letter name which is a lower case ‘i’."

Somehow I get the feeling this is going to be the best renaming since that UK railway company called itself ‘one’.

Ah well, I’m sure they’ll change it again next year.

[Opinions mine, not IBM's.]

When I moved to the USA, one of the first things I did was get a cell phone. I was going to be living in a big city, rothko was working in a different part of town, we needed to coordinate things–it seemed to make sense. We went to Omnipoint, got a couple of phones, everything was good.

A few years later, Omnipoint were purchased by Voicestream. We got a phone upgrade. Still no trouble. Later still, Voicestream were purchased by T-Mobile. Another phone upgrade came and went.

Finally, we moved to Austin. I started looking for new phones, as ours were a couple of years old. The requirements were simple enough–quad band, Bluetooth for the car and for sync with the Mac, iSync support.

T-Mobile had zero quad band Bluetooth phones. None at all. On the other hand, IBM had a discount deal with Cingular, who offered some good phones. So, we were seduced to switch providers after 7 years with T-Mobile and its ancestors. This time a contract was involved. And before long, Cingular was purchased by AT&T.

Our contract finally expired last week, and we decided that on balance, we preferred T-Mobile. For starters, AT&T’s bills are utterly incomprehensible. You’ve probably read stories about iPhone users getting 200 page bills. Well, ours aren’t quite that long, but they’re just as impossible to decipher.

Then there’s the pricing. With discount, AT&T isn’t ludicrously expensive; but they really, really overcharge for SMS, web and e-mail. Plus, rothko has perpetual problems with dropped calls.

I saw a good deal at Amazon.com on the BlackBerry Curve. It meant a 2 year contract with T-Mobile, but I was willing to take that risk to get a good deal. I ordered two phones, 2 years of family plan service, 2 years of unlimited e-mail and web. I wasn’t expecting any problems.

A while later, I got an e-mail from Amazon saying that I needed to call T-Mobile to confirm my information. I did so, and was told that I needed to fax them a copy of my Social Security card, driver’s license, and a recent utility bill.

Fax? In 2007? Apparently, yes, a company that sells e-mail and Internet access doesn’t actually have e-mail itself. I scanned the requested documents, found an online fax service, and sent everything off.

A few hours later, I got another call. The woman on the other end of the line explained that I had been misinformed. What I actually needed to do was travel to the nearest T-Mobile store and have them fax in the information.

Annoying, but no big deal. I figured they were just being extra careful. So that evening, I drove to the nearest store and had them fax everything in. I took the transmission receipt home with me. The next day, I called back to check the status of my order. After a few minutes on hold, I was told that I had been misinformed yet again. A fax wasn’t enough; I actually had to go to the store and have them confirm the information in person.

By now, I was starting to get annoyed, but I decided to humor them. I drove to the store again, and explained the situation. The store called T-Mobile, who told them to fax the information. So they faxed it again, and confirmed that the fax had been sent.

An hour later I called to check on my order. After a few minutes on hold, I was told no. They were refusing my order. If I wanted service with T-Mobile I would have to pay full retail price up front for the phones, and then pre-pay for service.

So basically, all that jumping through hoops had been a total waste of my time, as they had never been going to give me contract service in the first place.

I explained that I had been a T-Mobile customer for 7 years, and could prove it. (I still have copies of old paid bills, because I’m that kind of person.)  No dice.

So, I’m still with AT&T, and I’m wondering what to do next. Part of me still wants to switch, but part of me wonders if I should, given the amount of dicking around I’ve received trying to become a T-Mobile customer again.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a third option. Thanks to industry consolidation, the US only has two GSM providers. So I can’t say “Screw you, I’ll go with the good guys”, as there aren’t any good guys.

I wrote a letter to T-Mobile customer service, but I haven’t sent it yet. I don’t honestly know if I want a 2 year contract at this point. Maybe the best thing to do is to buy a couple of unlocked phones from somewhere else entirely, then go to T-Mobile and just get a couple of SIMs and sign up for service with no contract.

Getting a Second Life

Imagine a world where you could create literally anything you could imagine, and explore it in 3D. What would you make?

If your answer was “strip malls and casinos”, I know a place you’ll love.

◊ ◊ ◊

A while back I had the unusual experience of having my employer suggest that I spend some time trying out Second Life. IBM is quite interested in the commercial possibilities of 3D shared environments, and has even set up some experimental conference spaces.

I managed to get into Second Life via the experimental Linux client build. It was slow, but did the job. It was also very good at making ATI’s buggy video drivers crash. But between crashes and bouts of net lag, I managed to explore a little.

What I found was mostly depressing.

When Linden Labs set up Second Life, they had a vision of a William Gibson style cyberspace, with people flying around in 3D conducting business. So they set up their digital world as a free market, with its own currency, exchangeable for real money. Unlike the real world, however, land in Second Life isn’t purchasable; instead, you have to rent it.

This has had an unfortunate effect on the virtual world. If you want to build any kind of building, you need land. If you want land, you need to pay for it with Linden dollars. So you need an ongoing source of Linden dollars, or you need to spend real money. Hence, about half the buildings in Second Life seem to be either strip malls or casinos.

The strip malls mostly sell clothing and other accoutrements for your virtual body. If you buy a building you need land to put it on, and most people don’t have land, so there’s not much point selling buildings.

The space not taken up by casinos and strip malls is taken up by nightclubs. My guess is that they’re mostly owned by the same people who own the adjacent strip malls, and are used as a tool to stimulate the sale of fashionable clothing.

◊ ◊ ◊

I don’t want to give you the impression that it’s all commercial trash, though. There are some great places in Second Life. My favorite is the International Spaceflight Museum, which has scale models of an enormous selection of real life spacecraft. There are some nice Zen Gardens in Achemon. Braunworth has a reimplementation of the town of the first Silent Hill video game which I quite like wandering around.

Sadly, the quality of 3D objects is additionally limited by the fact that everything has to be built inside the game; there are no proper 3D tools, and you can’t (say) construct something with Google’s SketchUp and import it into Second Life.

So, if 95% of the population can’t afford land, can’t work out how to make things, and eventually get bored with watching pixels dance in a nightclub, what does everyone do? Well, mostly Second Life is a giant chat system. It’s IRC with 3D graphics. There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but it seems such a waste of a 3D rendering engine. And in practice, the 3D doesn’t really add much to the IRC experience.

There are also technical issues. Each patch of land has a limit on how many people can be in it, and the limit gets hit fairly regularly. IBM has resorted to buying a square of 4 patches of land, and building the conference hall where the corners meet. The client is also slow and chews CPU. Even on my brand new MacBook Pro, the frame rate drops rapidly as soon as ten people turn up in the same place.

So, is Second Life the future of the Internet? I’m going to say no, not without some pretty radical improvements. It’s an amusing place to spend a few minutes every now and again, but so far, that’s about all.

Friday was definitely the worst Friday ever.

I wandered in to the office with my coffee, and discovered that my main work laptop—an IBM ThinkPad, obviously—had mysteriously powered itself off overnight, instead of merely going to sleep. I booted it, only to get the dreaded Fan error message.

(If you’re falling asleep already, skip down to the moral of the story.)

A fan error is pretty much the kiss of death for a recent laptop. The quest for ever faster and slimmer portable computers means that today’s portables are designed with fans that suck cooling air through their innards. No fan means the machine overheats as soon as you do anything that strains it a bit; and that could be something as trivial as leaving a web browser running on a Flash-heavy web site, especially if you have Eclipse running in the background.

Still, I have a backup laptop, for exactly this eventuality. I keep it mostly synched up with the main one. I started transferring my recent data across. Before long I was logged in to work via the VPN.

I’d just gotten my first batch of e-mail when I discovered that a clever user had found a way to bypass ACL security and replicate an old, shut down database with a new, in production database. This had wiped a chunk of important configuration data.

I found the backup I could get at most quickly, and did a temporary restore. Then I asked a colleague to pull a more recent backup onto a spare partition of the System i server (aka AS/400), which I then used to do a proper restoration.

I had just about finished documenting what had happened and putting new precautions in place to stop it happening again, when my laptop locked up solid. I suspected the ATI video drivers, so I switched back to the open source ones (which are less buggy) and continued.

Overnight, it locked up again. This was very suspicious. To have Linux lock up once, well, that’s not unheard of when proprietary drivers are involved. But to have it lock up twice, the second time with no closed source software running in the kernel—that smelled fishy.

I ran a Memtest86 diagnostic, and sure enough: bad RAM in my backup laptop. Oh joy. I flipped the machine over and swapped the RAM with the DIMM from the machine with a dead fan. The errors continued. So, it looked like an error in the internal RAM. I took the DIMM out of the RAM slot and ran Memtest86 again. Hypothesis confirmed.

I consulted the handy Hardware Maintenance Manual. It turns out the internal RAM can be replaced too, but you have to remove the keyboard to do it. So, I did that and swapped the internal DIMM. This time Memtest86 still looked good after a couple of minutes, so I powered off, put the second stick of RAM back in, screwed everything back together, and now I have it running an exhaustive test.

Monday, I’ll get the dead laptop and bad RAM shipped to the service department.

The moral of the story: Always buy the extended warranty on a laptop. Even the best ones are significantly less reliable than desktop systems; they are more prone to overheating, and their tiny fans tend to get clogged easily or simply burn out. When something does go wrong, laptop parts are significantly more expensive than desktop parts. Repairs frequently involve motherboard or display module replacement, and can easily cost as much as the machine is worth.

As you have probably noticed, I’ve just gone through a major software migration for my web site.

I was using typo. It was OK, but had a few problems. While its web site describes it as “lean”, that isn’t really the reality. It also relied on a combination of Apache, LigHTTPd and FastCGI that tended to break down without explanation.

The biggest reason for change, though, was that typo’s authors’ idea of what was important functionality was diverging from mine. The wakeup call was when someone spent a bunch of time replacing the regular page templates with templates written in HAML.

For those lucky enough not to know, HAML is a stupid and inexplicably trendy idea in the Rails community, comparable to LiveJournal’s S2 style system. Basically, instead of creating your page templates in HTML and CSS, which everyone can understand and for which there are a zillion useful tools, you instead write program code in a whole new language which has minimal documentation. The program then generates the HTML and CSS.

Of course, this destroys the entire point of template systems, which is to separate code from presentation and make the presentation layer editable by non-programmers using common tools.

I wouldn’t have minded the HAML idiocy so much if it wasn’t for the fact that typo still lacked support for things as basic as user authentication for commenting. So I looked at other web content management software… and looked… and looked.

I tried Blojsom. Supposedly it’s what Apple uses. If so, I hope they’ve done a lot of work on their version, as it’s a major PITA to set up, and very complicated even when you get it working.

In the end, though, I knew the main feature I wanted: OpenID support. Hence, I found myself reluctantly herded towards WordPress, which has a working OpenID plugin. (Or at least, it works for my OpenID account when I test it. I don’t think it has XRI support, though.)

I did entertain the idea of writing my own CMS. I even sketched out some design notes. But it really is a solved problem, I just didn’t like the technologies used to solve it.

Let’s be blunt about this: I hate PHP, and I hate MySQL. PHP is the Visual BASIC of web programming languages, a mess which grew with no planning out of a quick hack, a kitchen sink language known for its amenability to security holes. MySQL is a toy database, popular because it’s fast, fast because by default it doesn’t actually provide the basic ACID functions a database is supposed to provide. (Sure, you can turn those on, but once you do, today’s PostgreSQL is faster under non-trivial load.)

But I don’t believe in religion, especially not when it comes to software. I’m a strict pragmatist–whatever it takes to get the job done, even if it may offend a few aesthetic sensibilities and fall far short of perfection.

I spend most of my time at work developing using IBM Lotus Notes and Domino. Every time Notes is mentioned on Slashdot, a bunch of people will rant about how bad its UI is. They miss the point utterly. Believe me, the poor UI of Notes is only the most glaringly obvious defect it has; there are far worse problems underneath that the average end user is blissfully unaware of. But you know what? It works. It is sufficient. It lets you build groupware applications and dynamic web sites with fine-grained security in days, not weeks. That is why people use it. The only other tool I’ve found which comes close is Ruby on Rails, and that’s still too immature for me to want to use it on production systems. (That, and it’s surrounded by a community of people who think things like HAML are a good idea.)

So, here we are. I’m editing this in a nice AJAX WYSIWYG editor with spelling checker (an idea shot down by the typo developers), and you should be able to log in with OpenID to comment (an idea the typo developers seem utterly uninterested in).

It took most of Saturday hacking with Ruby, PostgreSQL and MySQL, but I believe I’ve managed to transfer not just all my data, but all your comments too. I think I’ve even managed to keep all the permalinks the same, and preserve all the timestamps. I’ve temporarily lost the tags functionality, but should be able to get it back with another plugin. Hopefully WordPress will prove more reliable than Typo, and hopefully the OpenID stuff will interoperate correctly with LiveJournal. If not, pray that I inexplicably become independently wealthy and have the time to write something that does the job properly.

At the weekend I decided to give in and get a USB keyboard. I went to Fry’s, hoping to find something suitable, but fearing that all they’d have would be Microsoft keyboards.

I know Microsoft’s hardware quality is better than their software quality, and their keyboards are definitely much better than the trash you typically get with a new PC. They are also to be commended for providing a reasonable ergonomic layout at an affordable price. However, I just don’t like the key mechanism; there’s too much resistance, and it feels cheap.

The keyboard isle at Fry’s had a pretty good selection, including exotic gaming keyboards, glowing l337 h4x0r keyboards, and the extremely overpriced Logitech diNovo Edge.

After some hands-on testing, I settled on a Kensington SlimType keyboard. It’s basically the same mechanism as an IBM ThinkPad laptop, but as an external keyboard. It also manages to provide a full keyboard, with number pad, in a lot less space than my IBM Model M. I was frankly gobstruck to note that it was only $30. I may end up getting the Mac version for the other half of my desk.

My Linux keyboard problems went away immediately with the new device. No more unexpected screenshots or X locking up. I even managed to get all the fancy extra keys working; I can type Euro characters with the Windows key, and accented letters with the menu key, thanks to KDE. Getting the multimedia keys working was a bit harder, and required a ~/.Xmodmap file:

These keycodes seem to be fairly standard for multimedia keyboards (they match what someone reports for a Dell keyboard), so they may be useful to other people. I made the moon key (161/F13) turn the laptop display on and off. The rightmost multimedia key is presumably supposed to be for firing up your MP3 player, as the icon looks like something rectangular with buttons. I decided to make it fire up Nonpareil, an HP calculator emulator, in HP-16C mode.

So far the new keyboard is working out well, apart from my hands having to get used to a new layout. So if you need a compact keyboard, the Kensington is recommended.

The excitement started a week or two ago when I discovered that my ThinkPad laptop’s internal cooling fan had stopped working. As soon as I did something graphically intense for more than a minute or two, the system would overheat and perform an emergency shutdown.

Fortunately, I have a backup laptop.

Unfortunately, the backup ThinkPad laptop had also developed a fault. The fluorescent backlight for the display was failing. The screen was a curious reddish-purple color, and very dim—unless I turned the brightness up, in which case the backlight stopped working entirely, and everything went black. It also tended to crap out when the machine got warm.

So, I called the IBM hardware support line. The next day, the DHL truck showed up and I was handed a shipping box. I followed the instructions and shipped the dying-LCD laptop, which I figured was the less usable of the two. I enclosed the appropriate paperwork and a short description of the problem. Then, I went back to writing Java.

One day later, the DHL truck turned up again. It was my laptop, repaired. New LCD, and they also upgraded the BIOS while they were working on it.

Next, I installed Kubuntu on the repaired machine. I switched to Ubuntu back in June 2006, and had gotten used to GNOME. Unfortunately, the GNOME developers had subsequently decided it was a good idea to include the Mono runtime as a required part of gnome-desktop, and Ubuntu had made it a required part of ubuntu-desktop.

For those who don’t know, Mono is controversial. It’s a Novell project, and Novell just signed a deal with Microsoft to get permission to use patented Microsoft technology in Novell’s Linux distribution (SuSE). Mono is a reimplementation of Microsoft’s .NET, and it’s widely believed that Microsoft hold many patents that cover .NET.

One theory is that Microsoft is encouraging people to become dependent on Mono now so that they can suddenly threaten patent infringement suits and cripple desktop Linux later on. That might sound a little paranoid, but remember that Microsoft already funded SCO during their lawsuit alleging intellectual property infringement in Linux, so plenty of people are suspicious.

Anyway, I want no part of anything to do with .NET, so I had been planning to switch back to KDE and use Kubuntu once the next major release came along. But, with a newly repaired machine and the prospect of upheaval anyway, I decided I might as well make the switch now.

The next piece of excitement was when I discovered that Kubuntu doesn’t support ReiserFS. Regardless of whether Hans Reiser turns out to be guilty of murdering his wife, ReiserFS is on the way out, as Reiser’s team had stopped improving it in favor of Reiser4; and unfortunately, Reiser4 hasn’t made it into the Linux kernel.

So, I had to reformat the entire drive. After some research I decided to go with JFS. (Hey, it’s IBM dog food.) I soon had Kubuntu up and running.

Next I had to move my data over. I tried the direct approach, connecting the two laptops via ethernet and transferring my files over that. After a few minutes the first laptop overheated and shut down. Uh-oh.

I had a fairly recent full backup, so I restored that on the Kubuntu system. I then left rsync running overnight, at nice 19, with a bandwidth limit imposed. This got everything up to date slowly enough to avoid overheating.

Installing Java, Eclipse, VMware and IBM’s VPN software was next. Unpleasant, but it was done soon enough. I logged in and swapped the laptops, putting the newly repaired one on the desk and plugging in the external keyboard and trackball via USB.

Which is when things got really ugly.

The symptoms were unsubtle: the arrow keys, Insert, Delete, Home, End, Page Up and Page Down would all open Ksnapshot every time I pushed one of them. Investigating further with xev revealed that those keys were generating a spurious “release key with keycode 111″ event after each pair of correct events. No “push key with keycode 111″ event was being generated, but that didn’t seem to matter.

I investigated various possible fixes involving xmodmap. I tried unloading the USB HID kernel modules and seeing if X could handle the USB keyboard as an explicit second keyboard. Nothing worked.

Then, as I was staring at the output of lsmod, I had a vague recollection about UHCI and OHCI and EHCI and USB devices and incompatibilities… On a whim, I tried unplugging the keyboard from the USB hub, and plugging it directly into the laptop. Suddenly everything worked.

So it seems there’s some lingering bug in Linux’s USB keyboard support, which is triggered by USB keyboard converters. My guess is that when the keyboard is plugged into the hub, the incoming USB signals are converted to USB 2.0 by the hub, whereas when the keyboard is plugged directly into the laptop everything is done using USB 1.x. Perhaps the buggy module is only used for USB 2.0.

Actually, there’s one last lingering problem… if I type Shift-Insert the system goes insane, launching dozens of Ksnapshot windows. So I think I need to get a genuine USB keyboard. In the mean time, I’m making a mental note not to type shift-insert, which I don’t usually do anyway as most programs recognize the more usual Ctrl-P for paste.

Apparently Sunday was a bit of a slow news day for the Dallas/Fort Worth Star-Telegram. I have to wonder how their graphic artist reacted when asked to draw the all-important inset map.

Monday was somewhat more exciting, for me at least. I went to put on the usual “I’m a responsible adult with a job” clothes, and discovered that the pair of khakis I had grabbed and stuffed into my case were too small. I don’t know when I bought them, but they were not only too tight around the waist, they were also a bit too short. While I could just about squeeze into them, the result looked uncomfortably close to comical, and didn’t really allow for breakfast. I had a long day ahead. This would not do.

I had the car direct me to the nearest strip mall, where I found a Kohl’s store. By a stroke of luck, they were having a massive sale on khakis. I soon found the perfect pair, at 30% off. (Cotton, pleated, easy fit, 34/34, permanent crease, anti-wrinkle, in case you care.)

Returning to the car, I ripped the tags off my new clothes and considered what to do next. I thought about the possible headlines: Pantsless IBM employee arrested in car, Early morning shopper shocked by hairy legs. No, not worth the risk. So I went to IHOP, ordered breakfast, snuck into the gents’ lavatory, and changed there. After breakfast I spent a little quality time at Fry’s Electronics before the first session at the IBM event. (Still haven’t managed to find a Wii.)

The rest of the day was pretty dull, as was Tuesday. The drive back was largely uneventful. There were the usual SUVs driving at 15-20 mph over the speed limit and weaving across lanes without signaling, but that’s just Texas. I stopped at a Starbucks in Waco, and eventually got home safe but tired.

Today I mostly caught up on e-mail, then for spouse night we went to Taste of Austin. My back is still sore from spending too much time sitting in bad hotel chairs, but I’m hoping it will be back to normal after another night in bed.

Food turned out to be less of a problem than in Berlin, oddly enough. There seemed to be lots of vegetarian restaurants, and we found a vegetarische imbiss at Schantzenstrasse and Susannenstrasse.

I also got the impression that people were more friendly than in Berlin. Then again, perhaps it was my imagination, a side effect of my becoming more used to Germany.

Josef had an original LP from the first release of Autobahn. The band look like big geeks in the photo, and the sleeve credits Conny Plank. (His name was removed from later editions.)

CD shopping was made more annoying by the fact that nowhere seems to take credit cards, not even big stores. If you don’t have an EC card with a PIN, forget it.

Stereotypes sometimes have an element of truth to them. While we were in Hamburg, Josef and Ute helped rothko to polish the text of her German scrapbooking site. The original text talks about the enthusiasm of TLC scrapbookers for the business. For our hosts, this proved to be the most difficult piece to translate, and it took a long time for them to come up with an acceptable German phrase for “enthusiastic”. Apparently the literal translation of the word would be viewed with great suspicion in a business context, particularly when said by an American.

This reminded me of my two favorite jokes about Germans:

We got to the airport for our return at around 06:30. The queue was very, very long. The airline official checked my passport and visa (permanent resident card). Then he asked for my driver’s license. After that, he wanted proof of employment. Fortunately my medical insurance card has IBM’s logo on it.

This is all the result of the US government decreeing that airlines should pay the cost of deporting people. Ironically, if you don’t have a visa at all then you’re OK as far as the airlines are concerned, because it means they’re not on the hook; it’s if you do have a visa that they have to triple-check everything, just in case the visa is fraudulent or you can’t continue to meet the terms of your residence.

Next, we had to queue for the metal detector. My passport was checked again. Then we walked through to the hallway beyond, and walked to the departure gate…where there was another security checkpoint, with another queue. My passport was checked a third time, and everything went through another round of metal detection, this time using a wand.

Just when I thought things couldn’t get more ridiculous, I realized that they were hand-searching the carry-on luggage of every single passenger. I cooperated with removing every single item from my bag, so they could be checked one by one.

The guard noticed the TRIO DVD and grinned. “Trashy,” he commented. It turned out that he had been a fan back in their early days, before they became famous, when they were playing obscure Hamburg clubs. Somehow this puts a more human feeling to the proceedings, and makes it all seem better.

When we got to Newark, we had to collect our luggage. We re-checked it, and it was scanned again. Then, we had to go through security, for what was my third round of metal detection and fourth round of passport checking.

At immigration, I was handed back my documents with a smile and “Welcome home”. Maybe I was fragile from the 8 hours on the plane and the repeated security screenings, but I felt genuinely touched. And not in a full-body-cavity-search kind of way.