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!