I made it safely to Tampa after a great flight. I was seated next to a gentleman, Ron, who is a retired cybersecurity expert that spends his time traveling the word. We ended up talking the entire flight about everything from the best places to travel that are cheap but amazing. We spent quite a bit of time discussing the challenges that are going to be faced with further development of quantum computing and the perfection of the Qubit. This is the first flight in my recent memory where I didn't wear my headphones or fiddle with my phone.
Upon arrival, my cousin Nick and his wife, Shannon, picked me up from the airport and we headed out for dinner. I was great to get to spend some time with them outside of Pathfinder where it can be hard to hold a conversation with the same person for more than five minutes—we were actually able to catch up on life events.
This is where my day took an abrupt turn towards the worse. When I went to check in at the hotel I was told that due to how my room was reserved that they weren't going to honor the \$64 price that I was expecting. The desk agent informed me that the current price of the room was nearly \$400 for the night! Then she tried to make it seem like in light of the circumstances—them arbitrarily deciding not to honor the set price—that offering me the room at about \$300 was doing me a huge solid.
Even with the hotel BS, it was a pretty decent travel day.
Now I am sitting in my overpriced hotel room biding my time until my check-in time to board the ship. Coming off of a long day to try to adjust to a daylight schedule means that I was awake at 5:27 AM ET and could not for the life of me fall back asleep. I decided to start my day with a light body weight workout in my room since I didn't feel like unpacking my gym clothes and then dealing with them for the rest of the day. If felt good to get my body moving since I had to skip my workout yesterday :grimacing:. Speaking of working out, I have been trying to strategize how I am going to maintain the progress that I have made towards self improvement. I think the easy one on the ship will be continued focus on my fitness (Maybe I'll post in the future about my sudden focus on fitness) as once I get back into the routine of working out, I realized how much I miss it. The harder aspect will be my self organization; I have gotten into the habit of starting my day by compiling a list using the Eisenhower Matrix so I have a clear plan of what I need to accomplish. This has been especially helpful has I have to divide my attention between a few calendars and balance work and personal tasks. Now that I have no real commitments to worry about that I have to remember to keep up this habit. Well, no better time than the present to work on this:
Back in 2009, I purchased a MacBook Pro to see what all the hype was about. What I learned was that even with lower specs than my Windows laptop, it was much snappier and the battery life was much better. Further, I actively used it until Apple stopped providing updates for it which made it basically useless in 2024. After 13 years of use, I was sad to see it go for sure. About the same time that I had to part with my 2009 model, I decided again to eschew my hatred for iOS that am forced to use for work and buy another MacBook. This time, I settled for a MacBook Air rather than the Pro, but I have fallen in love with it. Again, it seems much faster than my Windows machine despite having way lower specs, and the battery life is unreal. I have been using this thing a decent amount of the past few days on a single charge—I would guess that I have about six hours of use and am I am writing, I am still showing 55\% battery remaining. In comparison, when I have had to use my work laptop on battery power, I get about two hours before it NEEDS to be charged. Also, I hd forgotten how much better the multi-touch gestures on MacOS are. Anyway, rant over.