You have to love business class.  A bloody mary, three glasses of wine, and watching Land of the Lost while eating my three-course dinner, and I find myself inspired to pull out the laptop and work.  Or at least blog for a minute.  I’ll try to remember to publish this during my stopover in Narita.  If not, then I’ll publish once I am online in Singapore.

This might actually be pretty short lived.  It looks like the outlet at my seat might be a little funky.  I only had a few minutes of power, and then the outlet stopped working.  I jiggled the plug a bit and it seems to be working again, but I don’t know if it will last.  I don’t have my extended battery with me (didn’t come in before I left) and I burned through most of my power at the airport waiting for my flight.

For those of you who might not be my facebook friend, I am using my new work laptop during this trip, a ThinkPad X301.  I got it just a couple days ago, and I am really happy with it so far.  Of course, I’ve done little else with it besides install Windows 7 and a bunch of apps, but I really like the keyboard.  It isn’t as compact as the VAIO I had before, but the keyboard is vastly superior.  I can actually type fairly accurately on this one.  On the VAIO, I was constantly hitting the touchpad and inadvertently repositioning the cursor or selecting text and overwriting.  This is much better.

While I was typing that last paragraph, the power stopped and restarted.  So I guess we’ll see how it works for the duration of the flight.  I’m charging again, and I have at least an hour of battery life if it dies altogether.  I’m hoping it doesn’t; I want to finish this up and get a little work done.

I didn’t have time to get to everything I wanted to write about during my last post.  Firstly, I want to thank everyone that helped me celebrate my birthday one month ago today.  We all had a blast at Purple Cafe in Kirkland.  Thanks for all the kind gifts and sharing the evening with me.  It definitely helped ease the pain of being a year older.  Seriously, I had a great 37 and I have a good feeling about this year.  I am choosing to treat this as a pre-new years opportunity for some resolutions.  For example, I’ve not been very good about exercising and eating a more reasonable and healthy diet, so I’m resolving to improve that.  Amber, although she may not think so, has been a good influence in this regard.  For example, she has been doing this birthday health challenge for a couple of years running: run the number of miles that are equivalent to the singles digit of your age, swim 1000 yards multiplied by the tens digit of your age, and bike your age in miles.  I’m going to try to do this for my next birthday, so I will have to run 9 miles, swim 3000 yards, and bike 39 miles.  Depending on how long you take you qualify for a gold, silver, or bronze.  If you do it all on your birthday, you get the gold.  I’m hoping for a bronze – do it within a week of your birthday.  I think the most challenging thing will be the swim, since I’m not a very strong swimmer.  Actually, I don’t swim at all really.  So I have 11 months to learn.  Look for more details on a training plan and updates on how it proceeds.  Of course, I’ll have to wait on swimming and biking (except for the exercise bike) until my arm is back at 100%.

As I mentioned above, the other thing I’ve let slide this year is the diet.  So I’m re-resolving to make progress toward my goals in that arena.  I’m not going to be too draconian in my approach, but I am going to try to reduce the number of restaurant trips and keep track of what I’m eating so I stay within a more reasonable diet.  I make pretty good progress when I do this, so I’m going to try to be more dedicated to the idea.  Of course, the three-course dinner I wrote above above might not be a great start…