Airports

Arrived home last night around 23:00 quite knackered. This morning I took some time to clean up all the previous posts with some html formatting. A little nit-picky I suppose, but I think it looks better.

Being at home my net connection is better than most places on the road even though they all advertise "high-speed internet". It's all basically DSL as far as I can tell and most connections are highly asynchronous in that downloads are fast but uploads are limited. Optimized for web browsing of course but not very good for uploading voluminous data like pics or movies.

So it's from home that I had to goof around with a movie I made of two airports: Zurich and DTW. The movie's kinda crappy as I haven't yet figured out what are the best settings so I'm just using the default at present (mp4 compressed down for web streaming; this means that iMovie chops it pretty harshly down to something like 15 fps, I might change this later). The first part at Zurich isn't all that interesting actually. It was just a test of 360 panning just before I went through passport control. Passport control was fairly painless; they mainly looked at the passport and boarding pass. Within the secure area I managed to get my Swiss taxes refunded. That was a bit of a hassle; I guess they want you to run around a bit. I had to get a stamp at customs then take that to the tax refund place. You can only do this beyond passport control since they want to make sure that you're actually going to leave the country. All that legwork for about 10 Euros. Still, that'll buy a coffee or two.

The second segment is from that colorful tunnel at DTW, which I suppose is fitting to include since that's more or less how I started the blog or at least this particular Zurich-Tuebingen trip segment.

Next, it's SIGGRAPH in San Diego, coming up in less than a week. Just enough time to do laundry and then repack.