December 2007 Archives

I'm currently at Heathrow airport, waiting for a delayed flight to Chicago. I'm guessing the delay is related to the massive amount of fog in London today. I don't want to pay for wifi here so I'll probably not post this for awhile. I've heard more American accents around me at this airport than I have since I was still in the US, I think. Apparently a lot of Americans go to London.

I was unexpectedly upgraded to business class! I got to go through fast track security, which meant very short lines. I'm excited. I think I will get a bed on the plane.

I have been in London only since early yesterday afternoon. I dropped off my things at Emma's house (old friend from way back when I lived on San Juan Island), then wandered around the city a little bit. I took some photos that I will upload to Flickr at some point in the near future.

Some observations about London:

When I arrived at Stansted airport I did not hear as many people speaking English as expected. Emma's neighborhood has a great many signs in Arabic or Farsi too, as well as restaurants advertising halal food. Pretty much everything is in Swedish or English in Stockholm; maybe it's different in the suburbs where I hear many more immigrants live.

Oxford Circus is utterly insane three days before Christmas. So many people shopping. I saw some cool decorations, and did some shopping myself. Didn't buy much though due to things being rather expensive here.

London is much dirtier than Stockholm. This reminded me that Stockholm is a really clean city.

Oh man, so many freaking CCTV cameras. Lots of "If you see something suspicious, tell the authorities" signs in the underground too. I also had to actually go through customs even though I came from an EU country, because Great Britian is not in the Schengen area (I think the UK and perhaps the Republic of Ireland are the only EU/EEA countries that haven't signed Schengen and do not plan to implement it). Britain sure is paranoid. Kind of like the US.

I don't remember tube carriages being so strange. They have a rad shape. Kind of low ceilings though, presumably because the old tunnels weren't made very big. I was glad I'm not tall.

So some time and a lot of miles have passed. I'm now in Chicago. My flight was very nice. Business class certainly makes an eight hour flight much nicer. I did have a bed. Wish I would have slept in it rather than watching movies and Top Gear the whole time. The flight ended up being nearly three hours late to depart, and as a result I missed my connection in Chicago. I have been at O'Hare airport now so far for over seven hours. I slept on a bench a little bit, and am now waiting to board a new flight... to St. Louis. There I transfer and finally get to Seattle some time around 11am PST.

This is the second time I've flown with a stopover in Chicago ever, and the second time I've been stuck in a Chicago airport for an ungodly number of hours due to missing said connection. I think I should take it as a sign and not book flights that stop in Chicago anymore. I am very glad my return trip from Seattle is non-stop to London. Also, my phone doesn't work at all. I suspect that it is not actually quad band, so I'm probably going to have to track down another one somewhere.

So two weeks from now I'll be in Washington state, hanging out with my family. Here is my planned itinerary for where I'll be while I'm traveling to and in the US. Dates other than when I'm flying are approximate, and dates are in local time for whatever time zone I'm in at take off/landing. Confusing.

• 22 December: Stockholm to London flight
  • 22 December - 23 December One night in London!
• 23 December: London to Seattle flight
  • 23 December - ~27th December: Hanging out with family in Buckley
  • ~27th December - ~2nd January: Seattle
  • ~2nd January - ~4th January: Portland
  • ~4th January - 6th January: Seattle
• 6 January: Seattle to SF flight
  • 6 January - 9 January: Work/hang out in San Francisco
• 9 January: SF to Seattle flight
  • 9 January - 14 January: More family/studying time in Buckley
• 14 January - 15th January: Seattle to London
  • 15 January - 16 January: One more night in London!
• 16 January: London to Stockholm

And then on the 17th of January I get to try and take a final exam. Should be exciting!

I just got an unlocked quad-band mobile phone so I can use it pretty much anywhere in the world but South Korea and Japan. I will be using my Swedish phone number while I'm in Europe, and in the US I plan to switch to an American SIM card I bought on eBay which should soon arrive in the post. If you wish to be able to call/text me while I'm in the US please let me know and I will give you my number once I have it. Or if you want my Swedish number I can give you that too.

The other day I decided to finally try and figure out why it is that Safari and other browsers do not offer to remember passwords for me on certain web sites. I regularly encounter this problem on some banking web sites, and the Yahoo login page for Flickr. Looks like the common way of keeping browsers from remembering passwords is the non-standard autocomplete HTML form attribute (assigned a value of "off"). This originally was a feature added to Microsoft Internet Explorer, but Firefox and Safari support it now, along with probably lots of other browsers.

The idea is presumably to keep users from storing passwords in an insecure manner on their computers. However, I use the built in keychain on Mac OS X, so it stores these remembered passwords in a fairly secure manner. Firefox's password manager also can encrypt stored passwords with a master passphrase if you tell it to. I don't memorize most of my passwords, so whenever I log in to a site that won't let me store a password in my keychain I have to go and decrypt a GnuPG encrypted text file I store all my passwords in. This essentially means I do the same thing as using the keychain would, but it requires doing pointless extra stupid work.

I should get to decide what my computer will do. I don't need web sites telling me how to secure things. This kind of behavior encourages users to choose crap passwords just so they can remember them, or re-use the same password for many sites/accounts. Both are, of course, bad for security.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how I can make Safari ignore the autocomplete form attribute? So far the only solutions I've seen for working around this involve patching WebCore, which seems scary and like total overkill. I don't want to use some other password manager either--I'd rather use the one built in to the OS. I tried using Privoxy with some filter rules, but gave up because it was taking too much effort and time to configure. I'm considering switching back to Firefox. I think it at has some extensions that will make it ignore this damn form attribute, or at least GreaseMonkey can do it for me. But it would be cool if I could just make Safari ignore this autocomplete attribute.