Birthday zeppelin!
It's now my birthday. Yay!
And a consortium of friends has put together an amazing present: they got me a zeppelin ride.
I'm still not entirely clear on who contributed to this--I gather that some kind of informational note or card is en route to me, but it hasn't arrived yet. So, in the meantime, to anyone who was involved: thank you!
There was a flurry of email and phone calls about this today, made more confusing by my not checking my personal email all day and by my voicemail deciding not to tell me that I had voicemail until eight hours later. (I was wondering why people kept calling me and not leaving messages.) (Unrelatedly, it was also the kind of day where I couldn't log into an important financial website, and when I called their customer-service number it had been disconnected. And so on.)
But I eventually talked with the Airship Ventures people by phone, and they told me that because it's my birthday, they're upgrading me from a one-hour flight to a two-hour flight! (And changing the time, but that turned out to be fine.) I'm afraid I wasn't properly appreciative on the phone with them, because I was confused and didn't have enough information, but now that I understand what happened, I'm even more pleased by this present than I already was.
I will, of course, be taking photos. Huh--maybe I should've borrowed Kam's camera with a telephoto lens. Though I'm not sure I know how to use a telephoto lens.
Anyway. I'm looking forward to it. And if you see a zeppelin in the sky, in the Bay Area, on Saturday in the early afternoon, then wave at me!
After the ride, I think Kam and I will be stopping by the Computer History Museum for a bit--they're very close to where I live and work, but I've never been there, and I've been meaning to go for ages. And they've currently got a Babbage Engine on exhibit, and a Cray, and I think an Enigma machine. So if all goes well, it'll be an old-fashioned technology day all around.
Then dinner and hot-tubbing. Should be a good day.
Thanks again to all who helped make it happen!
