Sooo tired

Haven't really slept much in the last five days or so - between flying to Oakland, the soon-to-be-legendary trip to Reno, Cora screaming through the night, and the redeye back to NYC, I'm working on an average of 4 hours or so per night. This is one of the things that makes me wonder if I'm cut out to be a parent - I can barely take care of myself with this little sleep, how could I possible take care of someone else?
For me, when I'm working on serious sleep deprivation it's very similar to being sick - my throat hurts, I feel crappy, and my head feels like it's full of syrup. Hopefully I'm just really tired, because I really don't have time to be sick.
To AA's credit, the flight from SFO to JFK was 100% sold out (oversold, in fact), so there was no way a pleb like me was getting an upgrade. All things considered, though, it wasn't that bad; we left on time, arrived on time, and I was so tired that I slept for almost 3 hours of the 5 1/2-hour flight, so to me it felt like a pretty short one. Combined with my PSP and Musicophilia, it was actually relatively painless. Getting through today, on the other hand, is another thing entirely...

Rockbox

So, I recently bought a new Sansa mp3 player - they're all over woot all the time. Overall not a very good portable - for example, I accidentally crushed my last one after sitting on it - but after seeing that the new version of Rockbox had come out, I just had to get a replacement - so, $40 on buy.com, a small amount of elbow grease, and now I have a cheapo 6GB media player that supports just about every media format I use (and that's good, because I have lots of AAC, OGG, WMA, and FLAC lying around). Seriously sweet.

My new other hero

Bruce Schneier will of course always have a special place in my geeky heart, but I think I've found another guy to worship: Brock (last name unknown).
Some of the stuff is relatively simple, but a lot of it is very, very elegant. I've already learned a couple of things just perusing this blog, and I know a LOT about bash.
For instance, I'm now terribly ashamed of my previous post about awk and sed, if for no other reason than it shows I was unaware of a lot of these methods.
Of course, in my defense, I've been doing shell scripting for a very long time and I tend not to use a lot of bash-specific features, just because I cut my teeth having to write portable (i.e. bash and ksh) scripts. Really, though, that's not a valid excuse anymore - you'd be hard-pressed to find a Unix distro from the last 3-4 years that doesn't include bash out of the box.
I am totally gonna study this guy's blog......

Frequent flier upgrade

So, I want to visit my family, I've still got a voucher from Virgin America for a flight we never took, along with a boatload of AA miles. So, I figure I'll use the voucher to get to SFO, then see if I can get a cheapo one-way red-eye on American back to NYC and upgrade it to business. I make the reservation on AA.com and call about an upgrade. Apparently there are no upgrades available until mid-November (when I'll be in Germany) because they are all taken. Just out of curiosity I look at the seating chart for the flight in question, and here's what it looks like:

Are miles even worth anything anymore?