This may seem a little petty, but I have to say it. It bugs me. It wears on me little by little. 0.75 fluid ounces at a time.

Look at the toothpaste aisle. You have 800 choices of toothpastes. They generally range from 6oz to 8oz tubes. That’s a great amount to keep at home, but what about when you travel? The TSA says any fluid or gel larger than 3.4oz is probably a bomb, so that rules out the general population of toothpastes. Note: The TSA will also usually freak out about an 8oz toothpaste tube containing less than 20% of its original quantity.

For this, luckily there are travel toothpaste containers. They generally range from 0.75oz to 0.8oz. They seem great and convenient at first, but they go empty in a flash!

Why do we have to choose between a family-size 8oz and a fairy-size 0.75oz? Why can’t we have 3-3.4oz containers of toothpaste? THAT is travel size! Sheesh!

UPDATE: While wandering around LAX (long story.. let’s just say stand-by + layovers don’t mix), I decided to refill my toothpaste supply. Surprise: my 0.75oz toothpaste tube ran out during my trip! I figured I’d pick up one or two new ones at one of the airport shops.

Lo and behold: They carried 3.0oz toothpaste! Hurrah!! It cost more than 8oz toothpaste in a department store, but oh well..

Dopplr.com is a cool travel social network (a lot like TripIt) that helps you find out if your trips are going to coincide with your friends.

Anyone who knows me even a little bit knows I don’t plan ahead very much. So this “travel coincidence” functionality is less useful for me, considering I book many of my trips 12-24 hours before departing. I usually don’t get around to posting my itineraries until after my trips.

What’s great about Dopplr is that they also export past trips with a pretty cool annual report (I don’t have it yet, I’ll get it in January). Check out my public Dopplr profile here. Highlight: “6.02 km/h is Brian’s Personal Velocity. Which is about the same as a duck.”

They don’t have this as an actual feature, but by exporting my itineraries as a JSON object, I was able to display my travel in an interesting format: Days spent (and percent of the year spent) in various cities.

In 2009:
Phoenix: 188 days (51.5%)
San Francisco: 98 days (26.8%)
New York: 28 days (7.6%)
Los Angeles: 14 days (3.8%)
Boulder: 10 days (2.7%)
Austin: 8 days (2.1%)
Las Vegas: 7 days (1.9%)
Chicago: 5 days (1.3%)
Springfield: 4 days (1%)
Philadelphia: 3 days (0.8%)

I’m visiting NYC again for the holidays! I’m not taking any days off from work, other than company observed holidays. Due to availability of reward travel dates (I booked this trip using my miles), I had to fly out in between work days. Red-eye FTW!

The thought of a long red-eye flight doesn’t really bother me. One of the best skills a traveler can have is to be able to pass out on an airplane and wake up just in time for landing.

I woke up the the sound of the pilot on the intercom. Fortunately, my headphones were at a moderate volume and I could hear his voice over my music. From what I caught from his announcement, a monitoring or alerting system had malfunctioned. He emphasized that this was not a safety risk, and that the only change was that they had to keep an eye on certain things more carefully than normal.

Then he said we were being turned around and going back to Phoenix, and it would take at least an hour to get there. What was odd was that we were not being sent to one of US Airways’ east coast hubs, Philadelphia or Charlotte. It seemed extremely inconvenient, making the red-eye even redder.

Fast-forwarding ahead, I landed almost 4 hours late in NYC, missing my Bolt bus reservation from NYC to Philadelphia (I was planning on co-working at IndyHall through Christmas). The back-up plan was to take a NJ Transit train to Trenton, NJ and transfer to a train to Philadelphia.

I arrived at Penn Station and immediately bought a ticket. After a few minutes of trying to find out where the schedules were posted, I discovered no trains had come in or gone out of Penn Station in over an hour. An Amtrak power failure had suspended all Amtrak and commuter rail traffic in and out of Penn Station.

At this point, I could have walked to a PATH station several blocks away to get to a NJ Transit station in New Jersey, but considering how much I was already striking out, transportation-wise, I finally gave up and decided to work in NYC for the day.

I ended up tracking down John Murch who was working from home and offered up his couch. I’ll finally get to add a post here on SJ for him soon!

Mike and I met in SF through mutual friends, and we subsequently continued bumping into each other in the small world that is the tech community. This includes the picture above, standing in line to get into a bar in Austin, TX. In the rain. It turns out I was wearing my Pownce track jacket that night. This was post-acquisition, and Pownce was offline. The jacket is a conversation-starter with the SXSW crowd, who all knew about Pownce and the acquisition. This is especially true if you bump into Mike, who was part of the Pownce team!

Mike is a Python & Django developer, and he builds applications that scale. He also speaks at conferences on the subject.

He recently left Six Apart (who acquired Pownce), where he worked on the TypePad platform. He is now joining a Boulder-based start-up, called SimpleGeo, to help advance and scale their location-based services.

Follow Mike (@mjmalone) on Twitter!

Mascha and I connected via Twitter & Facebook — she promised to stalk me when she found out I liked to go snowboarding. Unfortunately, she soon discovered that I was merely a casual snowboarder, going once or twice a season, if that. As part of Secret Sauce Labs, Mascha helped build a social network for snowboarders, called Shred Union. See? She takes this snowboarding stuff seriously!

Lately, she has also been getting involved with Tube2Tone, turning online videos into mobile phone ring tones.

Follow Mascha (@xadness) on Twitter!