Since my newspaper was never delivered yesterday, I did spend the morning at the cafe coding up my solution to our hiring puzzle. Out of politeness to the people who I work with, I’m not going to say much about it except that it is not the obvious solution. I also found a slicker way to deal with the bitwise arithmetic than I had originally planned.

Finally got a chance to go back to the airport and take pictures of planes landing. Since I live in a place with natural disasters, there is all this talk of putting together a bag that you can grab if you need to evacuate quickly. Important papers, family photos, precious metals, jugs of water, whatever it is that people think that they should be bringing with them in an emergency. I’m sure that there are guidelines. But I think about that advice every time I go to the airport and, like yesterday, my camera runs out of batteries. I try really, really, really hard to have everything that I need in my camera bag so that I can just grab it and go. I fully intend to have spare batteries in my bag. I try really hard to keep my scanner radio and my ear protection and spare SD cards and everything else in the camera bag. But I keep falling short. So yesterday I had to turn the camera off and miss several Southwest planes (including the 500th 737 delivered) so that I could save batteries to take a picture of Mark Cuban’s plane landing.

Why did Mark Cuban’s plane come to San Diego yesterday? Did the Dallas Mavericks need to be in San Diego for some good reason? Don’t know. But I do suspect that they don’t come here often because the controller told the pilot to turn left onto taxiway B (towards the passenger terminal) when they were headed to the north ramp (taxiway C). Since I forgot to eat dinner, I was starving by the time the plane landed, so I just left the airport instead of switching my scanner over to the ground frequency to find out how the plane was going to cross back over to the north of the runway.

Those reading with feed readers can see the photo on instagram.