January 17, 2010

There were 2 posts published on January 17, 2010 (this is page 1 of 1).

Avoiding airport security gridlock

So it seems that today another person in a major airport went someplace he wasn’t allowed and shut down the whole terminal for hours. Jules Paul Bouloute, who just returned from Haiti, walked through an alarmed security door and paralyzed JFK airport. This comes less than two weeks after Chinese student Haisong Jiang walked the wrong way through security and caused the evacuation of the Newark airport.

To me, it doesn’t matter whether these individuals have bad intent, whether they’re incompetent, or whether they just made a dumb mistake. The fact that someone can in five seconds cause six hours of misery and chaos to a terminal full of passengers shows how broken our air travel system truly is.
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Going under again

Last weekend the kids went to a pool party for a friend at Gypsy Divers. The scuba diving school rents out time in a room and its heated pool for birthday parties and the like. I hadn’t planned to get into the pool at first but on a whim I dug up my ancient dive certification card from the training I got back in 1989.

As the kids got ready for the pool, I chatted with staff and asked if it was possible to get some gear on and try diving again. After squinting hard at the hair-covered picture on my dive card, the staff issued me a BC, regulator, and tank, and sent me into the storage room to hunt down flippers, booties (which Kelly found so attractive), and a mask. After a quick, two-minute refresher lesson on all the controls around me and a suggestion to stay near the shallow end at first, I straddled the poolside and slipped into the twelve-foot end.
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