Living on an island in Canada I've taken these small commuter flights a number of times. Being able to hop on near the actual flight time is fantastic. Few points about these smaller flights:
- Typically they still want you there 30 mins early to check-in and load the baggage.
- The pilot to passenger ratio makes them very expensive. A 20 minute flight for me is costlier than a 5 hour one to a major hub. I rarely pay for these out of my own pocket.
- Being a smaller operation your pilot can be very young and inexperienced.
- These planes are very small and at times get uncomfortably hot in the summer.
- The majority of crashes around here are from similarly sized aircraft. Always an uncomfortable reminder of what can go wrong.
- Flying in any kind of adverse weather can honestly be pretty terrifying in a smaller plane. If your lucky they'll delay or cancel it altogether.
- Sometimes your pilot will leave the window open and a wasp will fly in prior to take off. Sitting in the co-pilot seat in a cramped plane, it may be up to you to kill it :)
Overall I prefer the smaller flights in the summer, but I'll take the slow security for the safety of the bigger plane in winter.
Having recently fired it up again the xbox experience (outside of xbla) remains decidedly old school:
- You still need the correct dvd inserted to play.
- You can't turn the xbox off and expect it to save your progress.
- Some games are tightly integrated with xbox live, good luck not paying for it.
- It takes forever between the xbox boot time, initial game load time, copyright notices, in game menus, and save game load time to actually start enjoying a game.
- Installing games to the hard drive for a slight load time bump is very, very slow.
Since picking one up I've been really spoiled by the ipad mini. Just pick it up and play, don't sweat the details.
Sometimes I think about how lucky most of us white collar workers really are. I grew up with a Dad that worked rotating day/evening/graveyard shifts and I know how much it would have meant to me if he could have spent more time with us.
My neighbour, who used to work in construction, gave me some advice after the birth of my son: "Make sure to spend time with your kids, especially when they're young. One of my biggest regrets was working too much and not being around to watch them grow up." Now they live in Australia.
Puppet also supports a 'dry run' mode to give you an idea of what changes would have been applied during a run - something Chef is lacking and definitely makes installing Chef on an already functioning machine a very scary proposition.
The built in reporting in Chef isn't very useful and the web ui is pretty light, but there's at least hooks and examples on how to extend it to meet your requirements.
Most of the Chef development so far appears to have been focused on core features and most recently a simplified installer - hopefully reporting will become a focus as the product matures.
Puppet is definitely easier to start with but any ruby you pickup in learning Chef is useful in more general sense, while time spent on the puppet dsl is only good for using puppet.