The Honolulu-to-Tokyo flight was hell, but we landed on time. Now I’m about to board a six-hour flight to Hanoi leaving in 35 minutes. (I wrote earlier that it was a four-hour flight.) This is brutal. It’s now 1:30 am LA time and 11:30 pm Honolulu time. I can at least report first-hand that the Tokyo Narita wifi is excellent — significantly faster than any airport wifi I’ve ever sampled. I’d read that wifi was faster here but wow. Few things in life turn me on as much as top-tier wifi.
The Honolulu-to-Tokyo flight leaves at 1 pm local time (or 3 pm LA time). Eight friggin’ hours in seat #18D, and then a one-hour layover (4 pm to 5 pm Tokyo time, and not on Tuesday but Wednesday) at Narita airport and then right off to Hanoi — a four-hour flight leaving at…now I’m confused but I know I arrive at 10:25 pm Hanoi time on Wednesday night or 5:25 am Honolulu time or 7:25 am LA time. (I think.). And no wifi the entire time.
LA is either 15 hours behind Hanoi time or nine hours in front of Hanoi but a day earlier.
$51 bills for the charger (which had to be bought as explained earlier) plus a $15 cab ride — done. The nearly-three-mile walk along Nimitz Highway was grotesque. New Jersey’s Route 22 or the Long Island Expressway as it gets into Queens have nothing on the Nimitz. Honolulu used to be a nice town, I’m sure. But we’re greedy for stuff and we need big fat stores to supply us with that stuff and big trucks and big thruways…the US of A is not what God envisioned way back when. Or maybe he did.
Jessica Chastain‘s Zero Dark Thirty character is based on “Jen”, a CIA analyst whose five years of intel assessment and laser focus led SEAL team Six to Osama bin Laden‘s compound in Abbottabad. This is according to ex-SEAL and “No Easy Day” author Mark Owen (a nom de plume) in a 60 Minutes interview piece.
“I can’t give her enough credit,” Owen says. “She…in my opinion, she kind of teed up this whole thing…we’d always talk back and forth, you know, what do you think the odds of this are? What do you think? And she was always like, ‘100 percent, he’s there.’ SEAL Team Six just took care of the last 40 minutes.” (Hat tip to Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet.)
Here’s a report by CNN’s Fred Pleitgen about an iPhone app called Color Red that gives Israelis a few extra seconds to take cover before an impending Hamas rocket strike. The designer of this app is a 13 year-old kid named Liron Bar. The app “has been downloaded more than 130,000 times since the conflict began,” Pleitgen says. Hugely impressive. It’s during moments like these when weight issues just evaporate…gone!
I always leave something important behind when I go on a trip. Yesterday I forgot to pack the battery charger for my Canon Powershot Elph 110S. We all know that iPhone 5 cameras deliver better-than-decent photos, but they don’t have a wide-angle lens. I feel I can’t do Vietnam without the Elph, so I’ve decided to walk three miles (for the exercise and scenery) down the Nimitz highway to the nearest Best Buy and see about a battery charger.
I’ll cab back and be off to the airport by 11 am. Tokyo flight leaves at 1 pm. Many, many hours of fuselage hell await.
