What to pack when flying

1- Lotion for your skin and your lips. Plane AC is hard on my type of skin, add to that the physical stress associated with flying. You might need to add dandruff shampoo if needed.
2- An empty bottle of water. Make sure to have it among your personal items (and that it is empty to pass TSA). Though flying food and beverages are filled with salt and caffeine, it is hard to get enough water due to the serving size in planes (also you need to keep asking for it) and all the airport fountains that hardly give you a chance to drink more than few sips.
3- Inflatable pillow. This helps if you have sleeping problems on the plain. It can also be very handy if you need to spend the night in an airport due to some emergency. 

X11 not working with UBUNTU

As it happens I ended up deleting my /tmp file. after a reboot the machine failed to get to the graphical display (x11). After some research here is what fixed it:

(move to a shell by ctr+alt+F1 or F2 or ... F6)

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

if that doesn't work you can try something a bit more drastic

sudo apt-get install -- reinstall xserver-xorg

once you get that done try starting the graphic mode:
startx


this made the cursor visible and the wallpaper. But nothing else. The solution was

sudo service gdm restart

This will get you to the password page. You might be surprised that the machine didn't recognize my passport, until you know that /tmp is the place these things are communicated to the system and it has to be writable by everyone:

chmod 777 /tmp

once that is fixed  you should try startx the previous sudo serve command it will work.