Ah, the weekly flight from Austin to St. Louis. :-P Let's just say I'm not going to miss laying over in Houston Hobby for an hour or two twice a week.

I did get to see the Arch for probably the last time as we flew by at a couple hundred feet, which was kind of nice. The Arch was always my "last leg" landmark, coming back from Louisville; I always knew that when I finally spotted it over a hill I was home again, and the rest was just a quick half-hour hop, skip, and jump through the city. The Arch is thus a comforting landmark to me.

I guess I haven't formally posted it, but yeah, I do have a new job, in Austin, starting next Monday. I met everyone yesterday. I'm really looking forward to starting there; it seems like the job will be extremely interesting.

I can't decide whether the record companies are hiring morons to design their protection schemes, or whether the people they are hiring are so ashamed of their employers they just can't bring themselves to do good work. Ed Felten has a post up about the latest CD "protection" scheme:

This technology is going to end up in the hall of fame beside the previous Sony technology that was famously defeated by drawing on the CD with a felt-tipped pen. This time, the technology can be defeated completely by holding down the computer's Shift key while inserting the CD.

All right, I suppose it's possible that most people will be using Windows, and that most people won't think to disable autorun (temporarily or otherwise) before putting in these CDs, but you can bet that a simple Google search will tell them how to copy those tracks once they realize something is interfering. Making the copy protection this easy to crack is ridiculous. I realize real protection is very difficult (read: impossible, at least as long as DRM isn't built into every layer of every CD-playing box on the planet), but if this is the best the record companies have, they might as well just quit trying.

Specifically, that "so you're leavin'…" song. I had a great weekend hanging out with the families, most especially with Jen. I got home 3 hours ago, and already I miss her rather crushingly. I do get to see her again next weekend, which is top-notch.

Actually, in this last weekend I feel like I can kind of see the shape of things to come. The odds that Jen and I will ever live in Louisville again are pretty slim (since Louisville is currently eviscerating its arts scene), and the odds that Conner, Lindsay, or Lauren will end up near us is similarly small (though I would be happy to be wrong about that), which means that a couple of times a year we'll all descend on the same location, have a frenetically fun weekend or week, and then scatter again, leaving everyone feeling a little tired, a little lonely, and a little sad. At least, if my own feelings are any indication. It's nice to have acquired such a great second family; it's like a double bonus on top of having met such a wonderful woman.

Now all I have to do is find a way to live in the same city as her. :-P

Also, the flight back was not so much fun, which is unusual for Southwest. It wasn't really their fault, though; the dipshit in the row in front of me spilled his Heineken all over my backpack (which is fortunately water-resistant, so while the backpack smells like Heineken at least my clothes don't). Then I arrived home to discover that my soap exploded all over all of my bathroom stuff, which was a pain in the ass to clean off. Yargh.