I took a side trip to Hungary this past weekend and inadvertently lost my passport.

So now what?

This all happened on a Friday night. Thank God for a smart phone. And data roaming be damned. I quickly googled for the embassy in Budapest and called the emergency after hours number. After declaring myself an American citizen, my call was escalated to the oncall duty manager.

Here’s where definitions of emergency differ. I has a flight out of Budapest Sunday morning. This was a “blocker” for me. The US Embassy in Budapest is closed over the weekends (even for emergencies). Not an emergency to them.

The best the duty officer could offer me was to arrive Monday morning, identify myself as an American and I’d be escorted in to get a temporary passport.

I tweet’d looking for help. I crowd sourced getting help. You have no idea how helpful that alone was. (thanks everyone!) I had people sending me DMs and text messages and replies to my tweet. It felt good to know I had this network of people willing to help me.

Saturday I retraced my steps (no luck) and moved my return flight to the last possible one on Monday. It was mentally really hard to have any fun the rest of Saturday.

Sunday. Budapest is hot, hot like Yucatán hot. Budapest is also a very walkable city. However, because of the heat I spent most of of my time going from one free wifi coffee shop to another. I also scouted out my embassy.

Monday morning. Embassy opens at 9am. I’m up at 7a, dressed and fed and out by 7:45a. Way ahead of schedule. I got to the embassy at around 8:15a and told the guard I had lost my passport and showed him my California drivers license. He disappeared for a bit and then opened the gate for me. He told me to leave my bag with him, it’ll be easier to get in (made sense to me – I wanted as little drama as possible).

Currently, my most valuable possession.

I had to empty my pockets and literally turn off my phone before going through the metal detector. The guard there put all my belongings except for my ID and money into a box.

I grabbed a ticket and waited a few minutes until hey called my number. I had to fill out a passport application & lost passport form, get passport photos ($5.41), pay $135 for a new passport and wait 20 minutes for them to print out my passport.

At least I had alternate ID. The gentleman behind me had nothing but a copy of his passport which didn’t seem to be of any use. I talked to him a bit. Same thing, lost his passport and everything else he had in his “pouch”. At least my stuff is all separate.

Total time in embassy, 1:19. Didn’t have the patience for the metro and took a taxi to the airport.

So basically a huge inconvenience. Meant having to change a number of flights around (not free). Meant staying longer than I had packed for or planned to in Budapest.

Also, screwed my work schedule. Also, expensive mistake.

Souvenier from Budapest.

If you’ll indulge me,

Single points of failure suck. I can’t help thinking that this whole passport concept is a single point of failure. I lost it and was screwed. Never mind that I had a couple credit cards and a California drivers license with me -and- a color copy of my passport.

I also have a this biometric data that’s physically attached to my body and REALLY hard to lose. I felt like I had all these tools to conclusively prove who I am and some computer could verify I was okay to fly.

Back in Paris

I learned long ago that home is wherever my stuff is. My stuff – laptop, luggage – was in Paris. I’m back in Paris, still far from my home but I can’t tell you how much this feels like home!

1. Why mrz?
   It’s not short for Mr. Z.

   Shortly after moving out to Mountain View in 1996, I worked at 3Com. I worked in the engineering division that, during the two years I worked there, went by names such as NSD and ESD. This was the division that made “brouters” and if memory serves, largely came from Bridge Communications. I started there as a Solaris syadmin and left as a network engineer (and didn’t really look back).

   Anyways, username convention was your first, middle and last initial. mrz stuck. Also, it’s half as long as my first initial and last name.

   (Bonus points if anyone knows my middle name without using Google.)

2. Matt or matthew?
   In high school I worked at Dairy Queen. One of the highlights, of course, was taking home soft serve ice cream (“mistakes”). But that’s not what this is about.

   When I started, my name tag read:

   Welcome Matt

   It was at this point I decided I would only go by matthew – I am neither a doormat nor a welcome mat.

   Nowadays, I answer to both, but often correct to the preferred. Which you use tends to indicate how well you know me.

3. But why matthew and not with a capital M?
   You’ll very rarely see me write my name, first or last, with any capitalization. This an artifact of my first email address (matthew@interaccess.com), which was in all lower case.

   That stuck. So did the fixed-width font. It’s weird, I know.

4. One more thing…
   Since I already have you at 3 bullet points, here’s one extra bit of trivia.

   My first name comes from my great grandfather’s middle name and this first century Galilean. My middle name comes from my grandfather’s first.

He knows that if he wants to get online he has to double-click on the Firefox icon and then on the Kidzui icon:

He asked me if I could come to his school and show people how I “fix computers”.

I started off by asking if anyone recognized the logo on the back of my shirt.  Even to a room full of 5 year olds, the Firefox logo was instantly recognizable – there wasn’t anyone who didn’t know what it was.  I talked briefly about what Mozilla did (“we make a web browser”) and that I help fix computers when they break.  

I thought about showing them Mitchell’s Mozilla Tree but probably couldn’t have done as well as Mitchell could have! 

Then I pulled out my laptop and showed them Firefox (Minefield really).  I was in the middle of showing them Firefox and how what my son does when he wants to get on the Internet… and Minefield crashed.  Which was a great segue into “lets go look at these computers I brought and how I fix them!”

I brought three old Celeron “servers” (you can hardly call a Celeron a server) with lids off and we spent the next 20 minutes taking apart the machines.  We took out the computer’s brain and the fan to keep it cool (they didn’t believe me that you could cook food on the CPU when the computer was “thinking hard”).  We took out the two memory sticks and the hard drive and the IDE cable.  

These are things most parents in their right mind wouldn’t do with their home computer and these kids really enjoyed physically touching these parts and asking questions.

Mary Colvig helped me gather up a bunch of Firefox bags and my two kids and I had stuffed stickers into each one. Kids went crazy over the Foxkeh stickers and there was a collective “awwww!” when I showed them the “don’t hurt the web” stickers!

Anyways, good times. I enjoyed talking about Mozilla in a very different setting than I’m used to.

I’m going to go work on my new role in community outreach now…

1. If I had to do it all over again, I’d do something around sociology.  I’m often fascinated by human interactions and behavior.  I remember taking the bus in college and wearing earphones but having my Walkman (link for those too young to follow) off to watch & listen to others on the bus.
2. History.  Hated this in high school, didn’t bother with it in college.  Now I’m fascinated with history, mostly Spanish California, early American history and some pre-history (like “Guns, Germs & Steel“). I tend to lose interest right around WWII.
3. Both my kids, but my son in particular, love watching anything to do with science on TV with me.  This includes anything from Discovery Channel, Animal Planet or even History Channel.  And those are always good times.
4. I did my first double century (200 mile bike ride) two years ago and haven’t done much riding since.  I have a goal of doing the Furnace Creek 508 before I’m 40 so I better get training.
5. I was born in Denver and moved to Orange, CA until third grade when we moved to Hoffman Estates, IL (Chicagoland).  I moved out on my own and back to California (Bay Area) in January of 2006.  I’ve lived in Mountain View, Morgan Hill and Dublin, CA.  I relocated for work to Southern California in 1999 (also in January) and lived in Costa Mesa, Dana Point, Laguna Niguel and Aliso Viejo before moving back to the Bay Area in 2006 (this time not in January).  Southern California is definitely the best.
6. Moving out of the house and 2200 miles away was one of the hardest thing I’ve done in my life.  It was weird to know that no matter what, things would never be the same.  My youngest brother was only five and I don’t know him nearly as much as I wish I did.
7. My fondest memory of SoCal while growing up was the Angles Stadium.  It wasn’t that far from where we lived and I could always see the big A on the other side of the freeway.
8. Met my wife in Irvine.  We worked at the same ISP – she was in sales and I was a Solaris admin learning to be a network engineer.  As hard as moving away from Illinois was, this alone made it worth it.
9. I’m part Persian (by marriage).  This of course means I’m no stranger to large family gatherings or being the only one in the room who hasn’t a clue what the conversation is about (I don’t grok Persian).  Means I’ve also learned the proper way to make hot tea (and have modified that to make my own iced tea).
10. Speaking of Persian, my two favorite dishes I don’t get often enough are Shirin Polo and Gheimeh.  But please keep anything with rose water away from me.

I bought a new cooktop and oven.  The gas cooktop has a pressure regulator that sticks out just enough that I can’t slide the oven in under it.  I’m not sure if it’s possible/safe to get a 90 degree elbow joint, run that from the cooktop to a 48″ flexible gas pipe and plug the regulator into that followed by another 48″ flexible pipe to the house gas line.  Or alternatively, screw the regulator directly onto the gas line.

So,

Stove - 90 degree - 48" - regulator - 48" - gas main

or,

Stove - 90 degree - 48" - regulator - gas main

Not sure about this and since Natural Gas isn’t something I want to just play with I’m hoping to find the right way to do this.

Help.

You could argue I could have waited a couple more days but shaving at this scale is best done at home and not in a hotel!  Too bad too because it was just starting to get comfortable.

Here’s to next year!

Flash forward 30 some years and I find I’m doing the same with my two children and weirdly enough on Apple computers (first computer I owned was  Commdore 64 followed by an Amiga and then some Gateway running Windows in 1995 – only recently went back to Apple).  My son spends his time in KidZui (which to him is the same as pbskids.org) and my daugther does drawing with Tux Paint (on an 8 year-old Powerbook, but she doesn’t seem to notice or care).

My son recently asked me if he could have my black MacBook when he is older.  I laughed, sure, but I haven’t any idea what computers will look like 30 years from now!