Ignite Philly

Last night I went to IgnitePhilly 2 last night at Johnny Brenda's, a bar and venue in Fishtown.

"If you had five minutes on stage what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds?"

That is what Ignite Philly is. A group that I am a part of, the Drexel Smart House, presented at the event. A number of other interesting groups presented and the event was introduced by the founder of Half.com and venture capitalist Josh Kopelman

Before I left West Philadelphia for Fishtown, I changed the inter tube of my rear wheel. I apparently didn't tighten both wheel nuts tight enough, because after about a mile my wheel came out of alignment and started rubbing against the frame. I went to a service station to ask to borrow a wrench but the man who worked said the garage was closed and all the tools were away. There was a many inflating his bike tires at the air pump, I asked him if he had a wrench. He told me no and looked at my problem. He then proceeded to kick my wheel into alignment. I thanked him and that solved the problem for about a minute. After two blocks I asked a young guy getting out of his car if he had an adjustable wrench. He said he "just might" and instead found a pair of pliars with teeth for using it on nuts and bolts.

A local 8-bit music group played Gameboys for intermission.

The flying

...after moving out of my apartment of two-and-a-half years and living on my friend's futon for a week, I stood waiting out on the sidewalk on a cold December morning in Philadelphia. I waited for the airport shuttle I had called an hour earlier. The van, run by Lady Liberty Shuttle (their web site oddly circulates between a picture of Chicago and Cleavland), was running a little late. I was growingly concerned but didn't fret it, at $10 it was much cheaper than a taxi cab and a better option than waking my friend and coercing him to drive or walking a mile and a half to the train station to take something only marginally cheaper than the door-to-terminal service Lady Liberty offers.

Arriving at PHL I managed my 4 large and overstuffed bags sans Sky-Cap. I had so many because, as I mentioned, I moved out of my apartment—an apartment which was super-saturated with stuff. A family member had booked this flight for me and they had booked me with pennypinching zero-frills carrier, Southwest. While I don't really appreciate the complete lack of services offered, I do appreciate their baggage policy of allowing three checked items of up to 50lbs without an additional charge. My backpacking/trekking backpack, in which I intend to take most of my things to Europe, is the 6,000 cu.in. EMS Summit 6000. It had two large blankets strapped to it (one of which I had to move) along with a full-sized crook-handled umbrella and barely passed the 50-lbs weight limit.

PHL is undergoing some terminal expansion. The E-terminal ID-checkers from the TSA were a lively pair, the burly bald man with a handlebar moustache was very excited to find that someone in the line was from Dayton, Ohio, which he claims is a rarity. He stated listing Dayton suburbs that everyone always seems to come from. Then several other people in line claimed they were from Dayton—it was very surreal.

At the gate I learned three things, Southwest seriously overbooks their flights, you have to go to the gate counter to get an actual boarding pass, and that my flight from Philadelphia to Austin is really a flight to Orlando that continues on to Austin and then to San Diego and Oakland (I pity the fool who booked a flight to Oakland from Philadelphia only to find this their route).


I board the plane, a single class 737, and sleep for most of the flight in a window seat. On the flight from Orlando to Austin, I wake up to have some coffee in a Styrofoam cup and some Wheat Thins, Southwest's idea of "lunch" I suppose.