If I was Jack Bauer, this would be the stupidest 24 hours of my life.

My plane ticket home has been confirmed.

I'll leave Seoul on August 15, and stay in Beijing until September 1.

However, the trip from Beijing to Vancouver will be a long one, since it's not a direct flight. I will have a layover in San Francisco for over 7 hours. Jack Bauer could save the world in the same amount of time it'll take for me to reach home. (Damn it, Chloe, give me a better flight!)

Gotta love map inaccuracies

Sometimes it's fine to be a little off with maps. It's inevitable -- most public-use maps out there are approximations. For example, just because a street map shows that a street is a straight line doesn't mean that it really is. (Richmond's No. 3 Road is a great example -- the maps show it as a straight road but the satellite photos show that it's actually quite a crooked line.)

But sometimes the inaccuracies are just so bad that they're laughable. The airline that I'm taking en route to Seoul has one of the worst airline route maps I've seen in recent memory.

Among the errors:

• Beijing is in the middle of Mongolia
• Seoul is in the northern part of North Korea (or even in Russia)
• Frankfurt is just around the corner from Paris
• Hong Kong is next to Vietnam
• Seattle is in the Pacific Ocean

Oh boy. Hopefully their planes' navigational equipment is more accurate.