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The TSA Has Determined That My Cheese Is Not Explosive

Before leaving San Francisco for home in Cambridge, I stopped at the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero to pick up a few gifts for home. Among them was a small muffin-sized package of delicious, creamy Mount Tam cheese from Cowgirl Creamery in Point Reyes, CA, a favorite of my wife’s. I stashed it in my shoulder bag before catching the BART train to the airport.

Arriving at SFO I pleasantly breezed through the metal detector on my way to the gate and waited for my bag and laptop to come through the X-ray machine. The pleasant breezing sensation then came to an abrupt halt, as did the X-ray conveyor belt. My bag went back and forth through the machine several times.

“Can I please open your bag, sir?” a TSA contractor asked me. Her shoulder insignia read “Centurion Security Services, S.A.F.E.S.K.I.E.S.” emblazoned on a ferocious eagle-and-flag backdrop. I wondered what on earth the super-sized acronym could possibly stand for.

“No problem.” I’m not inclined to be overly protective of my bags’ privacy in these sad police-state times we live in. I assumed that the shape or size of something in my bag reminded someone of a sample X-ray they remember from the TSA X-ray Analysis training seminar. I didn’t want my behavior to remind someone of something they saw in some other TSA seminar, such as that fascinating Strip-Search Profiling Criteria class they took. I put my shoes back on and waited while, after several rummages, the cheese emerged. Much examination and discussion took place as the cheese was passed around and looked at from many angles. It received several prods and squeezes.

“We’ll run your bag through again, sir.”

[Continued…]

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Going to (and speaking at) Flex Camp Boston

Developer Brian Rinaldi is organizing a nice, cheap, fun, local event called Flex Camp Boston at Bentley College just outside of Boston. With a single track of speakers, limited enrollment, and targeting an intermediate/advanced audience, it should be a nice intimate event and a great way to exchange information with other Flex practitioners. Tim Walling and I will be speaking there about the AIR prototype of Allurent Desktop Connection that we worked on a couple of months ago. Not only am I happy to be going to a pleasingly small mini-conference, but the travel time there will be pleasingly short for me and other Bostonians. Waltham is considerably closer than Chicago, Seattle, Atlanta or Milan. Besides, it’s $10 — how can you not go? Case closed.

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