Photo: Fireworks with my family.
So I was in the UK speaking at LinuxWorld Expo 2006 and got to hook up with some family and friends. A leaving party took place on the weekend prior to last week and then, after a much needed day of rest Friday, I was getting ready to fly back to the States when I turned up at Heathrow to find an empty row of checkin desks. I had missed the flight due to a mixup over the timing and had to go out the next day. As it turned out, this wasn’t such a bad thing as we had time to do some family stuff on the weekend.
We had some fireworks to mark the unique British celebration of Halloween/Bonfire Night (unique in the sense that the latter gathers more attention around this time than does Halloween itself). It is traditional to mark the failed 1605 gunpowder plot to blow up parliament with fireworks to commemorate foiling this treasonous act. Personally, I do not celebrate the preservation of the British Monarchy (nor would I, since I believe it is fundamentally wrong) but I don’t believe in a violent removal either (certainly not for the pseudoreligious reasons of Fawkes himself). I just enjoy having an opportunity to purchase fireworks and enjoy them while it’s still legal to do so (without having an anal-fingerprint in a government wankerbase) 
I did eventually fly back. This was return flight number 13 to North America (26 single flights across the Atlantic and counting) and I’m not superstituous, but when you miss one flight and then the taxi runs out of fuel on the way to the second attempt to get it – well, you start to wonder. As it actually turned out, the flight got here but we had heavy turbulance and my meal request got screwed up (probably due to the change in flight). Unlike American airlines (who had no excuse for screwing up my meal requests, leading me to stop flying with them), United apologized and prepared me a first class pasta meal in place of the regular pigeon class offering that I had “missed”. That was the best airplane food ever.
Jon.