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Viva La France, Viva La QWERTY

So here I am, stuck in Paris Charles De Gaulle airport for a 2 hour layover on my way from Luxembourg to JFK. The Air France lounge has some computers with internet access so I figure I'll go online check email and such. Then I noticed the keyboard. Apparently they don't use the QWERTY keyboard in France; instead they use something called the AZERTY keyboard (see if you can figure out the first 6 letters in the top left) Now once you've learned to type on a QWERTY keyboard and hqve done it for 15 years or so, you develop some muscle memory as to where the keys should be. But alas they are not there. On the plus side, they do have some symbols we dont have in the US like € and £, qnd qlso é, è, ç, ù and à. Bottom line though I'm back to the two finger method of typing. On the plus side they were trusting enough to not have any internet security programs installed so I could download AIM and talk to people while I wait for my plane. Anyway, this keyboard is really getting annoying so I'm gonna go now.

What country am I in?

Well it's certainly been a while since I last posted, mostly because I've been travelling a lot lately. I have one more trip next week then will be home until Thanksgiving. In the past month or so, I've been to Toronto, Mexico City and London, and now am heading off to Luxembourg next week. I had the weirdest thing happen to me though. When I was in Toronto, I totally blacked out on what country I was in. I was in a restaurant having dinner with the group I was meeting with, and as I was walking to the men's room, for some reason I had no idea what country I was in. It was the strangest feeling but I actually had to stop and think about where I was. Took me a few moments before I remembered I was in Canada. On the plus side, I've spent enough hours on a plane to become a movie critic in my spare time. So here's my thoughts on current movie offerings on airlines:

Continental Airlines:
Mission Impossible 3: (B+) A pretty fun mindless action movie, that gets better by the 4th time you've seen it (thank you Continental for the lack of variety). Philip Seymour Hoffman makes an excellent villian, but the movie loses points because Tom Cruise is bat-shit crazy and it distracts you from the plot.
X-Men 3: (A-) Good all around sequel (or whatever the correct term for the third movie should be), continuing the X-Men franchise. Nice to see the ever expanding cast of mutants. Plus Halle Berry is in it, so that's good for some extra credit.

British Airways:
Click: (B-) Decent, but a little confused. Starts out as a comedy and ends a drama. Plus, the story of "career man is shown a future where he is wildly successful at work but loses his family and then is given a second chance and realises how family is more important than work" isn't exactly original thought. Nice to see David Hasselhoff again, and not in a bathing suit.
Poseidon: (D) Boring. Very boring. Emmy Rossum is nice to look at, but not for 90 minutes.
The Break-Up: (B) Better than I expected. Vince Vaughn is funny, but I'm starting to think he went to the Richard Gere School of Acting, since he plays the same character in every movie he's in. Jennifer Aniston looks good.
The Devil Wears Prada: (C) Pretty boring, though not as bad as Poseidon. Anne Hathaway is pretty hot, but again that's not enough to keep me interested for 2 hours. Only reason I chose this movie was I had worked my way through the library and had to choose between this and Garfield 2.
The DaVinci Code: (A) It's as good as the book. The plot moves quickly and keeps you interested. Even after reading the book, it was an enjoyable movie. Plus Audrey Tautou is nice to look at.

I think that's enough for now. I'll be back next weekend with a report on Air France (which by the way has some of the best flight attendants in the business).

Time for some routine maintenance

It has been about 10 years now since I last went to the doctor for a physical. I had been thinking of going for a while, but to be honest just never had the motivation to find a doctor (my last doctor of record was a pediatrician, which doesn't work now that I'm 26) and make an appointment. In fairness, I did call a doctor a year or so ago to make an appointment for a physical, but the computer at the doctor's office was down and they couldn't make appointments, and I never called back. My company changed health plans as of this past July (we're on a July 1 - June 30 fiscal year) and the new plans include a routine physical that's 100% covered by the plan every 3 years if you're under 30 and annually after 30 with a company called Executive Health Exams. I'm not sure why I decided to make an appointment now (maybe it was the easy web-based appointment process), but I'm scheduled for 11am today. According to my friends who have done the physical with this group already, I'm in for 2-3 hours of poking, prodding and testing. Here's the list of what they're going to do to me today:

• Complete review of medical history and physical exam (the poking and prodding bit).
• Blood tests: cholesterol screening, complete blood count, metabolic profile, iron saturation and blood chemistry.
• Urinalysis (note to self, drink lots of water before the appointment)
• Audiometric evaluation
• Vision assessment
• Tonometry (glaucoma) test
• Spirometry test (lung function)
• Resting EKG
• Chest X-ray (if deemed medically necessary)

Now I am grateful that my company is picking up such an extensive physical exam program, even though I know they're doing it to try and reduce healthcare costs by detecting problems early. I'm interested to see what the doctors find, and hope it's more than just the typical: "try to lose weight, exercise more and reduce stress." What was stupid of me was scheduling the appointment for late in the morning, since I can't have anything to eat after dinner the night before (stupid blood tests). So basically here's the situation: I haven't had anything to eat since 7:30 last night, and won't have anything to eat until about 2pm this afternoon. Add to that the poking and prodding, and this is not going to be a happy day.

This is the world we live in

This past Thursday I was scheduled to go to Washington DC for a meeting. I was planning to take the Delta Shuttle since it's the fastest way to get down there. On Wednesday afternoon I decided to check the weather report, and saw they were predicting storms for Thursday afternoon. Since both LaGuardia and Reagan National have a tendency to delay flights even at the mere mention of bad weather, I thought I'd play it safe and switch my travel plans to take the Acela instead of the shuttle. When I woke up Thursday morning and turned on the news, I was very glad I made that decision. Is it just me or is the world becoming more crazy on a day to day basis. It seems like over the past five years things have been spiraling out of control, from 9/11 to Madrid, Bali and London. Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, North Korea and now Israel-Lebanon. Kind of makes me long for the good old days of the Cold War. Now I wasn't alive during the 60s at the height of the fears of nuclear war, but by the 80s, things had pretty much settled down into a pretty stable pattern. Now I don't know, but it seems like everything's going to hell. On a personal note, I fly pretty often for work, so I definitely took notice of this latest threat. What's strange is I'm less concerned about the possibility of being on a plane that's attacked (although that's definitely in the back of my mind), but more about the increased hassle of flying. In response to the threat, they've prohibited liquids on planes and have instituted secondary security checks at the departure gate. There have been bombs in suitcases, bombs in shoes, and now liquid bombs. Where does it end?

Time to buy a new car - UPDATE

Well, I did it this weekend. And actually the car salesman wasn't too bad. Other than some expected and typical sales lines ("What's it gonna take for me to get you into a new car today?", "Well, I'll tell you...[looks around the showroom]...I just want to make sure my manager doesn't hear me tell you this, but..."), the guy was ok. He did get a little ahead of himself and started to work up numbers before I had even test drove the car, but overall a pretty pleasant experience. They even called a few different finance companies to see which would offer the best deal on the car (which the Acura dealer I got my last car from didn't do). At the end of the day, I'll still owe the finance company a few grand in mileage penalties on the last lease, but managed to get the new one at invoice price. Actually it didn't take much arm twisting to convince me to get the new car after driving it. I've also driven the BMW 3-series and Audi A4, but like the Acura better. The 3-series is a little smaller and feels cramped, and I've heard horror stories about the reliability of Audi's (not to mention they're also a little small on the inside). Overall I'm very happy with the new car, and now just need to pick a name for her. All suggestions are welcome.

What do you mean we're lost? UPDATE

The charge for this car trip just showed up on my AMEX: $200. Normally a car from JFK to my apartment is like $115. I am really not happy. My assistant has called the car service to complain, but so far no call back. I've told her if they don't reduce the fare to a reasonable level, to tell them I will never use them again. Since I spend close to $1,000 a month on car services, this is not an empty threat. More to come...

People make me angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry.

FinanceBoy angry. FinanceBoy SMASH. Let me clarify, not all people make me angry. It's really just a few...and they've usually done something to deserve it. Yesterday I encountered two people that made me angry. First was the jackass on the plane (soon to be the sequel to Snakes on a Plane) that was sitting in front of me and decided to use his PSP at full volume. Without headphones. Now thankfully my Bose noise-cancelling headphones drowned this out for most of the flight, so I didn't say anything to this guy. Also, he was a large and grumpy townie-looking fellow, and I really didn't feel like starting a ruckus in-flight. Speaking of the flight, that leads to the second person that made me angry yesterday, but first some back story.

I had a meeting in Chicago yesterday, so I was flying out and back in the same day. Needless to say it would be a long day since I had a 6:30am flight, and was booked on the 7:30pm return (which would get me into Newark at 10:30pm). So when my meeting ended a little early, I asked my assistant to see if she could get me on an earlier flight home. She is a godsend and got me on the 6:05pm flight home. I sit in Chicago Friday-evening traffic (which is bad) and get to the airport at about 5:15. When I check in, I am told that my flight has been delayed an hour. I get to the security checkpoint and there is a long line. For once the planets are aligned and I was randomly selected for the secondary security screening. Normally this would not be good, but it means that I get to skip the long line and end up getting through security quicker. We board and push back at 7:05. As we are taxiing to the runway, we pull off to the side and I hear the engines power down. This is never a good sign. A second later the pilot gets on the intercom and announces that we're being held for another 30 minutes. He explains that there were storms that moved through Newark earlier that afternoon and it's caused all sorts of air traffic delays. I'm not happy, but understand that the Newark-New York airspace is some of the most crowded in the world, so a storm can really mess things up for several hours after the storms have passed. I continue reading my book and we take off as promised at 7:45. When I get to Newark, my driver is waiting (NB: same car service as the Lost story, but this guy knew how to get to Bridgewater) and as we walk to the car I ask about the storms, since it seems just as hot as before I left. Driver's response: "We didn't get any storms here." THE PILOT LIED TO US! The weather was clear in Chicago, clear in New York, yet he blamed the 90 minutes of delays on weather!

Maybe I'm just getting old and cranky.