Sometime very recently, the Albuquerque airport installed public wireless throughout the terminal. I only discovered this about 2 minutes before I boarded, but it was nice for those two minutes. Now I'm in Phoenix with a 3-hour layover, and I discover that they have free wireless as well. This is good. Phoenix is doing something weird to my SSH packets that is making mouser.org refuse my SSH login requests; worked fine in ABQ. But I'll settle for web access.

Anyway, the Hawaiian Airlines check-in booth (of which there was exactly one) was staffed by no less than 8 people, all wearing loud Hawaiian shirts and firing off Alohas at speeds exceeding R26. In addition, there were two older folks playing ukeleles and a greeter woman in what i must assume is a "traditional" hawaiian outfit sort of like a kimono, only louder. Hawaiian Airlines: friendliest check-in ever.

2.5 hours to go...

You may notice that this long layover is incongruous with my itinerary description in the previous post. This is largely due to the fact that I didn't pay much attention to my actual itinerary. The short connection is on the way back, where it will matter even less if my bag arrives a day late. So that's good news. Also, my bag was the first one off the plane today... and I guess that's a good sign too. The travel gods are with me. As are a phalanx of loudly-shirted aloha-weilding smiley people.

Update:
I arrived here so early that they hadn't yet done seat assignments so I was told to go to the gate and just wait around for a bit and they would call us up when seat assignments were ready to be given. This just happened, and being the first person here for this flight, I got my pick of the available seats. Window seat, exit row (== leg room)—its even a rear exit row (seats in front of an exit row don't recline, so only the rear row of a set of exit rows is desireable). Sweet.

And I have secured an electrical outlit for myself. Life is good, here in the Phoenix airport.

Speaking of power, only yesterday while packing did I discover that the second battery that came with my mini travel laptop was larger capacity than the one I had been using. With the power settings I have configurede right now, I can get a wopping 6.5 hours of runtime out of this thing on the larger battery. And an additional 4 hours on the backup battery. I wonder if they make a taser option for the accessory bay, because I've got Joules, baby.

One other comment, as long as I'm sitting here people-watching... A flight to Honolulu in December is definitely the first time I've seen so many people who seem really excited about traveling. Pretty much everyone in this little estuary of the terminal looks really stoked. It more or less eliminates the depressing feeling that most airports carry.

Time remaining: 2 hours.

..and in other news... the Phoenix airport has cops on mountain bikes that ride through the concourses. I think they should be outfitted with those irritating beepers that the little golfcart-bus things have, or at least old-school Model T horns. aah-WOOO-gah!

Update 2:
With just under 2 hours to go until the flight, the ukelele players and greeter woman arrived at the gate and started doing songs for everyone. Then, without being prompted, native Hawaiians from the passenger crowd came forward and asked if they could perform dances or songs. So for two hours I was entertained by random Hawaiians; it was awesome. I made some audio recordings with my iRiver and I tried to get some pictures, but I don't think they came out. I may post one later.