In transit

Sitting at the gate in FFM, with an hour to go. There is of course no free public wifi here, but I still have the UTMS usb stick that I used to access the Internets all those months (I now have a working ADSL connection at home, btw, after two false starts when the installers screwed up). The stick works here just fine.

This will have to be a brief post as the battery is running down faster than the hour of stick-time that I bought.

Next stop Osaka and Kyoto. It's been a really hectic couple of weeks lately, getting everything shipshape for the holiday season. And it is a season: I'll be away in Japan for two weeks, then two weeks home, then off to Canada and the States for two weeks over Christmas and the New Year.

I'd been a bit apprehensive about the chance of flying on an A380, given the recent engine trouble. As it happens, this is a 340; definitely large enough. I've now seen a 380 "live," there is one across the way loading up at one of the A terminal gates. It's huge. It's REALLY huge, even bigger than I thought it was. Imagine taking two 747s, slicing the roof off of one and the belly off of the other, and glueing them together along the seam. That's a 380. It's as long as longer than a 747, but at first glance it seems short because the body is so oddly tall. I'll admit to being relieved that I'm not flying on one, but I am also vaguely disappointed.

So, to Kyoto. I'm invited by friends from SL to talk to them for a week about the societality (nice word) of Second Life; specifically two topics: identity and character, and how these are developed; and the development of ethics and community values in a virtual world where neither of these needed to develop (consider the level of vitriol and abuse in the typical chatroom for an example of VWs where they did not develop). After that, I've got a guide book and a handy-dandy-phrasebook and a JapanRail pass that takes me almost anywhere on almost any train, and I'll let the Moment move me. I'll keep you posted, here or on Twitter or even on the dreaded FB.

Next post, gods and terrorists willing, will be from Kyoto.