It has been a day of circular progress.

I tried to clean out my Traeger grill – 90 minutes later, I had a non-functioning igniter, but in the process I discovered the fire pot was nearly worn through (it’s five years old and sees rough service, so I’m not disappointed), and it’s easier to replace both of them at the same time than to do it separately.

Then I found out that I could have gotten a lower fare on our trip to Africa if I’d scheduled us to leave a day earlier – but the savings would mostly vanish if I tried to change the ticket now (allowing for the extra day of travel and the cancellation charge on our not-quite-fully-refundable tickets). I’m going to call BA tomorrow and see if they can help, but I’m not optimistic.

Finally, I tried booking our flights from Porto to Madrid; the price of the flight I wanted went up $15 when I backtracked to check an alternative time, and the seats I chose are blocked. I think I’ll wait until tomorrow.

I feel like Billy in the Family Circus!

I use Tripit to keep track of our trips – that means I have only one place to go if I want information about upcoming (or past) travels. But it’s nice to have some of the information on our calendars, too – not every little gory detail, but the big things, like start/end dates of a trip and flight info. So I wrote a program to extract selected info from Tripit and put it on the calendar.

And then I rewrote it in September to use a MySQL database to keep track of changes so that I could tell what was happening, especially when the airlines make changes to flights. All was well.

Until October 27, when the program stopped working – Tripit rejected my requests with a “403 – Not Authorized” HTTP error. I hadn’t made any changes to the program for weeks, so I filed a bug report and went on about my life. I wasn’t traveling (much) so not having the calendar get updated wasn’t a big deal.

But now that we’re starting to book travel again, I was getting seriously annoyed. So I spent some time tonight figuring out what was going on, and I eventually figured it out – there was an incompatibility between the Tripit server and the Python code they’d supplied to access it. In particular, the server was rejecting requests which included the default User-Agent set by the Python library. I modified Tripit’s code to explicitly set the User-Agent to match a typical browser, and everything worked again.

What a pain!

We were supposed to have gone to Africa in 2020; the trip got postponed to 2021, and then again to this year. We’re hoping that it’ll actually happen this time – so we’ll need flights.

I wanted to book the flights through the cruise line (AmaWaterways), but their best offer required flying through Qatar with very long layovers and flights at inconvenient hours, so I decided to do my own research.

Google Flights had some very attractive Business Class fares, but they were through consolidators with dicey reputations, which did not appeal. I kept playing with the site, and got it to offer flights on KLM – the interesting thing was that it quoted two prices: $16k for the two of us if we booked round-trip tickets, or $13k for exactly the same flights if we booked outbound with KLM and the return with Delta.

That inspired me to look further, and I eventually found an even better choice – outbound on BA through Heathrow (with an 8-hour layover, which should be long enough to make the connection) and returning on KLM (booked on Delta) through Amsterdam. Total price: $11k for refundable tickets.

The flights will still be long, but my wallet will hurt less, and we’re protected if we can’t make the trip. And if prices go down, we can cancel and rebook.

I was Toastmaster of the Day at the Cats this morning; I chose “Wrong!” as the theme of the meeting because it was on this day in 1920 that The New York Times editorialized that Robert Goddard was wasting his time working on rockets because a rocket in space wouldn’t have anything to push against. They eventually published a correction – on July 17, 1969, a day after Apollo 11 lifted off for the first human Moon landing.

People seemed to enjoy the theme, and the Table Topics Master picked questions to probe people about being wrong, so I think it was a good choice.

I’m not immune to being wrong, of course. Last night, I mentioned that I’d started a new Time Machine backup on my Mac mini. It started very very slowly – it took more than an hour to copy 1% of the disk, which would mean the first backup would take several days, and I wrote about that yesterday.

I was wrong – the backup finished just after midnight. I’d forgotten that I’d also started copying some media files to another partition on the disk as soon as I plugged it in, and the two processes were competing for the disk (and probably forcing the arm to seek a lot). Once the system had finished copying the media files, it could devote the full resources of the disk to Time Machine and the process sped up considerably.

People can’t multitask, even though we try – and sometimes, neither can computers.

We have an Alaska cruise and tour planned for this summer (moved, of course, from last summer). It felt like the right time to look at air arrangements, so I checked the flights available through the cruise line (Celebrity). Their price was more than $200/person cheaper than buying the same flights directly from the airline, and buying through Celebrity makes the tickets refundable – I’m hoping not to need to exercise that option again this year.

The replacement for my failed WD Time Machine drive arrived today (by UPS, not FedEx); I plugged it in and started the backup process. At the rate it’s going, it should complete the first backup in a week or two. Good thing I’m not in a hurry.