Friday afternoon I was having lunch with a friend when I remembered I needed to go to the AT&T store and move my iPad from a standalone plan to my family plan. Oh the dread.

Fortified with a meatball sub I made the short drive. On the way I thought “going to the cellular store is about as much fun as going to the dentist.” But then in the next minute how unfair that comparison was. My dentist is nice and my visits to her office are often reasonably enjoyable. So no this was nothing like going to the dentist.

It doesn’t matter where you go cellular stores for the carriers like AT&T and Verizon are much the same. You go in and talk to the “greeter” who is more of the list-maker. Adding you to the seemingly endless list of people waiting to be seen.

After a few dozen circuits of the store playing with the phones that are out and reading every scrap of information you find some uncomfortable corner of the floor to crowd into and hope that you have enough battery to keep yourself entertained while you wait. And wait. And wait.

For years now I've had Google Apps for one reason or another. What started out as a employer's choice in one spot and merged into being easier than managing my own servers lead me down that path. There are plenty of reasons that I'll be migrating away from this solution soon but for now it's the devil I know and have time to feed. I'll save the rant as to how many different ways gmail is really broken for another time.

Until the release of OS X Mavericks there was an uneasy truce between Mail.app and Gmail. You simply did a few things, well a bunch of few things, but one time setup and it was done. Then along came Mavericks and there was pain. A few changes and things were ok again, assuming you had the time and bandwidth to let your massive collection of email download. The truce was uneasy but it continued to work. Then last week Apple released a fix to help Mail.app work better with gmail. And that's when things stopped working. At least for me and a collection of others who could no longer get mail in the Inbox.

It could have been worse

All things considered I'm a pretty good traveler. I've racked up more than a handful of frequent flyer miles criss-crossing the globe to help deliver Open Source software to places far and wide.

Given the number of days I've spent in airports and on their companion tubes hurdling through the air a few tricks to make things easier have been picked up along the way. In addition there is plenty to know about scheduling and when to do certain things. This all brought me to the airport early Friday morning for a short flight from Boise to San Francisco for work. Arriving at the airport and flitting through security, my laptop was coming to life as soon as it touched the desk in the business center.