I knew when I planned a Memorial Day weekend trip to New Orleans for a small business information technology conference that I would still be recovering from my knee surgery earlier in the month. So I splurged and cashed in a boatload of frequent flier miles to get an aisle seat in first class on each of the four flight segments (Boston - Philadelphia - New Orleans, New Orleans - Charlotte - Boston). This was only the third or fourth time I’ve flown first class, and I was expecting a real treat.

My primary mission was accomplished. I did in fact have plenty of leg room, even without sticking my right leg into the aisle. I did get special treatment from the flight attendants, who helped me store my crutch and carry-on bags. I was able to board and depart the aircrafts first, which minimized the amount of time I had to spend standing in line. Other than that … feh.

My memories of first class included cloth napkins, real china and glassware, food worth eating, and whatever luxury items the plane could physically accommodate. What I got on each of the + / - 2 hour flights was:

• a free drink in a plastic cup on a paper napkin
• as much food as I wanted, as long as I all I wanted was potato chips, pretzels, granola bars, cashews and sesame sticks, or biscuits (two of the flights coincided with regular meal times; on the flight from Philadelphia to New Orleans, at least the bums in coach had the opportunity to buy some fruit, cheese, and crackers)
• a blanket and pillow
• access to the first class bathroom

No hot food, no free headset, no special magazines, no deck of cards, no visit to the cockpit (OK, I wasn’t really expecting that). I’m just happy I didn’t pay cash for these seats. If I had, a copy of this would have gone directly to the CEO of US Airways. Flyer beware.

If you were unable to attend the Dragonfly or Boston Theater Marathon festivals and want to read what you missed, you just have to be my friend. My Facebook friend, that is. I’ve posted a copy of Not On My Watch on my profile there, as well as a copy of Life Savings, my first ten-minute play. If you have a particularly strong aversion to Facebook but you really want to see the scripts, shoot me an e-mail and I’ll send you back the PDFs.

It’s far too easy to spend way too much time editing your own Facebook profile and looking at what your friends are up to. Now there are third-party applications available on the site, promising to suck up even more time. See this blog entry from ZDNet for more info.

So far I’ve added file sharing and a “political compass” application to my own profile. There are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of others available.

In case you were wondering what they’ve got me doing to rehab my knee, this will give you a rough idea. I’m not perfectly in line with the protocol. I’m not doing any pool work, for example, and I was already on the exercise bike one week post-op instead of waiting until week four.

I feel like I’m ready to move to Phase II already, but I suppose if I rush things I risk reinjury, and we wouldn’t want that. I’ll have to be patient, I guess. (No pun intended.)

Kudos to Dr. Gomoll for what seems to have been an extremely successful procedure.

Just about any piece of home theater equipment you buy these days comes with what the manufacturer says is a “universal remote.” What that really means is that you can take what they give you, spend an hour trying to figure out how to program it to control other devices, and then realize that the most you can hope for is a “universal on/off switch.”

The Logitech remotes are different. Instead of punching in arcane codes, you program them through a USB cable attached to your computer. You tell your computer what equipment you own, and it configures the remote control for you. Because it’s designed as a universal remote from the ground up, it has ALL the buttons that ALL of your devices have, and what buttons it’s missing appear on its LCD screen. (For example, it has no specific hardware button to list the contents of my DirecTV DVR, but it knows that I need one.)

What I like best is the back-lighting, which makes it easy to find buttons in the dark. And I love that it’s somehow motion-sensitive. The lights come on automatically when I pick it up.

Yes, it’s a bit crazy to spend more on a remote control than we used to spend on a television, but it sure is fun.

For more details, see the Logitech web site. The best price we found was at Amazon.

My brother got me an iPod nano for my birthday. (I think it’s the first Apple-manufactured device I’ve owned in 10 years.) Now I have to decide what to put on it besides music.

So far I’ve subscribed to four NPR podcasts:

1. Car Talk
2. Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me
3. Fresh Air
4. Krulwich on Science

I need to broaden my horizons. I’m looking for podcasts that are educational but not soporific, humorous but not banal, meaningful but not pedantic, intelligent but not impenetrable. Any suggestions? Please comment and include URL if possible. Thanks.

Yeah, my wife and I are Survivor fans. And we were both aghast when Dreamz broke his promise to Yau-Man. I would really like to know what it is like inside Dreamz’s head. He’s got some serious cognitive dissonance processing skills. I think he is actually able to convince himself that he had certain motives and used certain logic before acting, when in fact he makes up those motives and rationales afterwards.

“Hmm, I just walked in dogshit. A smart person like me wouldn’t walk in dogshit by accident. I must have had a good reason. What could it be? Now here I am, sitting on a bench scraping off the bottom of my shoe. Hmm, there’s a pretty woman sitting next to me. Well, guess what? I’ve been watching this pretty woman sitting on this bench for the last 15 minutes, and I couldn’t think of anyway to introduce myself without seeming to come on too strong, so I stepped in dogshit first. That was my plan all along!”

I think I’ll have to base a character on Dreamz in a play someday. But maybe no one would find him believable.

I turn 40 tomorrow. Others in my situation have celebrated by obtaining a new set of golf clubs, a sports car, or a mistress. I got myself a new blog and a facebook page. (I started with a MySpace page, but I was quickly informed by my sister Sarah that MySpace is for “pedophiles, stalkers, and twelve-year-old prostitutes.” So I went to facebook.com instead.)

I already have one blog, so why another? I’ve decided to focus my other one (The Schlog) on technology and other business issues related to my company, SCHRAG Inc. My reasoning is that most people who want to hear what I have to say about technology have no interest whatsoever in anything else that’s on my mind. I call this one The Schrug because, you know, whatever.

May has been and continues to be an eventful month here.

May 1: My aformentioned sister turned 18. (She’s off to Oberlin in the fall.)

May 4: I underwent surgery at the Faulkner Hospital to reconstruct my anterior cruciate ligament. I injured the ACL playing basketball four years ago, but it wasn’t until this past winter that I decided it was worth operating on. The surgery was performed by Dr. Andreas Gomoll, and as far as I can tell he did a great job. I’m already able to walk without crutches (albeit in a calf-to-thigh brace) and there has been very little pain.

May 5: My mother’s birthday. The first one without her. Emily Fenichel would have been 65. My stepfather maintains an on-line memorial.

May 11: My brother Zachary and his wife Rebecca celebrated the birth of my niece, Nora Emily Schrag. (I can only pray that Nora’s older brother Leonard will be nicer to her than I was to my younger brother Zach.)

May 13: Not only is it my birthday, but it is Mother’s Day as well. This was never a particularly noted event in the Schrag household when I was young, but this year it has additional poignancy. Additionally, my cousin Ariel Schrag’s book gets reviewed in the New York Times.

May 16: My maternal grandmother’s birthday. The first one without her as well. Sophie Davidson would have been 97. She died in her sleep last December.

May 17: My 10-minute play, Not On My Watch, premieres at the Devanaughn Theatre’s Dragonfly Festival in Boston. (For more details, see the announcement in The Schlog.)

May 20: Not On My Watch is featured at the Boston Theater Marathon. (For a description of both festivals, see this write-up in the Boston Globe.)

May 25: I travel to New Orleans for a conference on disaster preparedness for small businesses.

I’ll do my best to keep this space interesting going forward. Let me know if you have any special requests.