Road Trip

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I am back from my most recent roadtrip. I loaded up the Tesla and started letting the hands-off Full Self Drive (FSD) supervised take me to points North. First stopping in a campground in Tennesee and up to Pittsburgh for the CIDM Convex Conference (which was the best conference in years). There was a celebration of the 20 years of DITA XML. I was an earlier adopter. My presentation went well and I semi-stealth launched wisdomino. I demo'd some extra cool software we developed and will be selling in weeks to come. It's truely game changing. Of course, there will be much more than that to come. After that it was on to Franklin, PA. to meet with some colleagues in the mining division and onto the farm stopping in Olean NY for the night. I am pretty sure it was the first time I had driven across the entire Allegany National Forest. I ended up driving through the very dark forest expanse during a night time thunderstorm. Although I normally trust the Tesla FSD on the Interstat...

I haven't blogged in awhile. I guess I am still decompressing from our most excellent, but crazy vacation in SE Asia. Things really went as planned. We first started considering the trip and these counties over a year ago and bought the transpacific flights 6 months prior. We were making reservations up to the day before we left.

We had 10 flight segments in 14 days. For clarification, we made no tight connections. We did have one long connection in Seoul (12 Hours). We didn't need a hotel since we landed at 5:00 AM and left at 6:00 PM. We had breakfast/brunch in the 4-seasons hotel downtown. I used their business center for some personal business. Never stayed in the hotel. Although the Royal Brunei ticket was to/from Brunei, it was not a layover, but still a a single ticket. Also, we had no morning flights. All flights were in the evening, so we could sleep, albeit in economy. Early morning flights were invented by the devil to totally "F" you up. The money you save is easily taken from your soul.

Airlines: Delta/Korean Air, Thai-AirAsia, Laos Airlines, Vietjet, Scoot!, Royal Brunei, and Philippines Airlines.

All the airlines were great for the most part. It was my second experience with AirAsia (first time was Kuala Lumpur to Chennai India a couple years back). We aren't going to use them again. Scoot! was a better than expected experience. They are a Singaporean LLC (Low-cost Carrier). They called us "Scooties!". Funny enough, but you start to see the utopian Scootie persona and motif in Singapore in public service messaging---I am ok with a sub-utopian life.

We are planning the next trip to Egypt (transoceanic). Then Malta and the Balkans (Kosovo, Montenegro, Bosnia, etc.).

A pic we got after we got back from Singapore. Gotta love the "hokiness" of Singapore. Like in Korea, we did not stay in the Sands hotel. We had a great/better hotel a short walk away, actually with nice view of the Sands.




And for something totally different: (The Good Bad and Ugly Danish National Symphony) Ennio Morricone





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