November 2005

Digit magazine has posted a comparison of the two most talked about non-pc methods for watching digital video in their article PSP versus iPod: What’s better for video? Here are some general conclusions:

PSP Advantages:
* Much larger screen with a cinematic aspect ratio
* More pixels at 480-x-272 pixels compared to 320-x-240 for the iPod
* Can buy Universal Media Discs that have movies on them and play on the PSP
* Lots of third party programs that help convert computer videos to the PSP
* Better battery life

IPod Advantages:
* Very bright, clear display
* More portable
* Has a hard drive, stores much more than the PSP Memory Stick
* Can play iTunes movies
* Can recharge using USB, PSP requires a wall outlet
* Can hook up to a TV and watch on the big screen

Just a short while ago I opened an e-mail from DL Byron that promptly had me (and my entire office) in stitches. The attachment was a PDF of a handwritten letter from a very upset Continental Airlines customer, written from seat 29E on Continental Flight 888 from San Diego to Houston on December 21, 2004.

The complaint in a nutshell is that seat 29E is situated directly across from the airplane’s bathroom, “so close that I can reach out my left arm and touch the door.” So pungent is the smell, so disgusting and distracting are the bathroom noises, and so invasive are fellow passenger’s hindquarters as they walk to and from the bathroom that the passenger has actually had to set up a “stink shield” comprised of a blanket hanging from the overhead bin.

In the most amusing section of the letter, the disgruntled passenger writes:

I am picturing a board room full of executives giving props to a young, promising engineer that figured out how to squeeze an additional row of seats onto this plane by putting them next to the LAV.

I would like to flush his head in the toilet that I am close enough to touch and taste from my seat.

The letter is stamped “Received, Apr 13 2005 CUSTOMER CARE” - so we know that Continental got it.
I am in the process of investigating just how this highly amusing thing appeared on the Internet. But in the meantime - perhaps we ought to create a “stink index” to compliment our “sardine index.”

I’m flying to Chicago for [an independent film release party](http://texturadesign.com/2005/11/chitown_chitown.htm) and will blog the whole trip. I haven’t been to Chi-town before and expect to have a great time.

The World Travel Awards was conceived in 1993 to acknowledge and celebrate excellence in the world’s travel and tourism industry. This division of the World Travel Group surveys thousands of travel professionals for their rating of industry providers and has announced the winners for 2005.

Connexion was the recipient of the World Travel Award for World’s Leading High-Speed In-flight Internet Services for the third year running.

Cathay Pacific won again, and in the past was selected for innovations such as their notifly service which uses SMS messaging technology to provide passengers real-time updates about their travel itinerary.

My dad likes to say that unexpected travel plans are dancing lessons from God. On this trip to visit my fiancé and celebrate his twenty-third birthday in Florida, I learned that the same statement extends to Internet access when working from the road. From spotty hotel Ethernet connections to the absence of any reliable WiFi in the greater Palm Beach area - technology can sometimes fail you.

I got into Melbourne, Florida after a very long night. The new sleeping pill my mother gave me for the flight didn’t do a thing. I didn’t crash and burn until just before landing in Atlanta. I had to be awakened by the flight attendant after all the other passengers had deplaned. I was so jet lagged and disoriented by the time my connection to Melbourne landed that I didn’t have the strength to plug in my laptop.

After saying hello to my fiancé and sleeping through most of the afternoon - I woke up refreshed and ready to blog about the uselessness of sleeping pills for red eye flights. But I couldn’t get Andy’s Internet connection to work on my computer. He insisted that Comcast doesn’t work with Macs, which I found patently ridiculous.

I found myself more apt to agree with him after struggling with Comcast’s installation CD for a very frustrating half-hour. Comcast works fine at my parents’ house in Seattle, where everyone is a Mac addict. But I reasoned that maybe Comcast in Florida is different from Comcast in Seattle. Not really true - but I was out of ideas.

We went in search of a coffee house with a WiFi connection. I really needed to post and check my work e-mail. We found the one place within driving distance of Vero Beach that had WiFi only to discover that it was incomprehensibly incompatible with some facet of my company’s e-mail setup. Not only was I unable to check my e-mail, but I couldn’t log into Movable Type. The woman at the coffee house apologized profusely but said that their tech guy was out sick and she was stumped. We left with free chai, but without an Internet connection.

Eventually, I managed to get Andy’s Airport Express base station up and running off his Comcast modem - something that he, a computer science teacher, had previously been unable to do. He claimed that he’d just been too lazy to figure it out, but I was very proud of myself and became insufferably smug. It’s OK, because he thinks I’m cute when I’m smug - but that’s another story.

I spent a lovely, relaxing few days with Andy - catching up and playing on the beach. This was interspersed with e-mail checking and some blogging. Then it was time to say goodbye. I packed my bags and he took me to Melbourne. I flew to Atlanta, which is - as it turns out - the single busiest airport in the United States. Flights out of Atlanta are constantly full if not overbooked - which was the case with my return flight to Seattle.

Booted from my flight - I went through the endless process of changing my ticket, getting my hotel and meal vouchers, and negotiating a free domestic flight with the friendly folks at Delta. The woman at the next counter had also been booted from our flight, but she decided to pitch a fit. I doubt if she was treated as nicely as I.

I was planning to blog about how being nice to gate agents tends to get you a better compensation package when unexpected travel plans strike. But when I got to my Delta-subsidized hotel I found that I had no WiFi and an Ethernet connection that sputtered out every 10 seconds. I resigned myself to another night without the Internet and went to bed.

As I write this - the flight attendant informs me that our Boeing 767 is somewhere over Eastern Montana. No, I’m not actually blogging from the plane. Connexion isn’t domestic yet, though I wish it were. I’m writing what I will blog when my precious laptop is once again connected. It’s almost like the Internet - but not quite. Ooh, I can’t wait until Connexion goes domestic!

While traveling, you sometimes have to jump through way more hoops than you expected. Whether it’s to get yourself a decent Internet connection or a flight home. Keeping your wits and your sense of adventure about you are always the keys to survival. Yes, air travel is uncomfortable and exhausting - but you only need to look at the innovations of the past century to realize just how good we have it. People used to have to cross the country in covered wagons. We do it in Boeing 767’s.

Now if only we could get an Internet connection.

In his column this week, Imagine It: The Sun, Some Ancient Ruins, You With No Laptop (subscription required) Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal writes of his vacation trip sans PC. Bottom line is that thanks to his Blackberry and iPod he “didn’t miss” his laptop and claims the experience convinced him that “even some short, light-duty business trips could be conducted without a laptop.”

Mossberg used the enhanced BlackBerry 8700c phone which will soon be sold in the U.S. by Cingular, and found that it served well as a Web browsing device, but Cingular’s BlackBerry Internet Service mail storage at a paltry 25 megabytes was far too limited.

The $30 iPod Camera Connector allows you to download your pictures onto the iPods hard disk and is a workable backup and viewing solution.

Since both items are more convenient to use on a plane compared to a laptop (and much lighter to carry) I’m eager to see if this combination of tools will catch on with travelers.

Here I am at beautiful Sea-Tac International Airport getting ready to board a red eye Delta flight to Atlanta. Since Connexion isn’t yet on domestic flights, I will have to do without the Web for five whole hours.

“Lucky it’s a red eye,” I begin to tell myself. “I can sleep the whole way. I probably won’t even notice the lack of access. I can quit any time I want.”

That’s the denial talking. It’s one of the first signs you’re an addict. And these days, it’s harder than ever to be addicted to the Web.

Until Connexion came along and showed me that Internet access on an airplane is possible, I believed that the Web was one of those things you had to do without when traveling. Yes, it was a hardship. Yes, I felt myself beginning to get jittery after my iPod and laptop batteries died. Yes, I started my search for the nearest Ethernet port the second the plane’s wheels hit tarmac. But I somehow I managed to cope with my temporary loss of connection.

Now it’s a whole other story. And as I prepare to take my first flight since I became aware of the wonders of midair WiFi, I’m not sure how I’ll deal.

At the risk of pegging myself as a huge Trekkie to the entire blogosphere, I can say that this whole experience has given me deeper insight into the plight of Seven of Nine - the buxom Borg from Star Trek: Voyager.

For the sake of you non-Trekkies out there, I’ll explain briefly. The Borg are a collective consciousness of humanoid cyborgs. They travel the galaxy assimilating new alien races in a never-ending search for perfection. And after being separated from the Borg collective consciousness, Seven experienced feelings of anxiety, pain, loneliness, rage and a general sense of foreboding. It’s a common symptom that all Borg experience when severed from the hive mind.

Maybe, like Seven, I’ve been assimilated into the great collective consciousness that we call the Web. After all, I’m here uploading the contents of my brain for the entire blogosphere to see. You can read my mind, archive my thoughts, download my memories. Long after I am gone, it is likely that my postings will linger on somewhere in the electronic universe.

Of course the Web is made by an ever-growing group of individual humans - most of whom have good intentions. The Borg, on the other hand, are evil. They destroy and assimilate everything in their path. I’m not really a drone. But I do have one very important thing in common with them. Like any good Borg, I’m very happy to be in the collective.

It used to be that you’d just have to suffer through Web withdrawals if you were out of WiFi range.

Enter Skweezer - which takes any web page and “skweezes” it down to a format that’s more suitable for your ultra-slick mobile phone or PDA. It’s US$14.99 per year for a service that doesn’t include ads.

It ain’t perfect though. Calcanis, and a bunch of other bloggers got rightfully hacked off at Skweezer for snagging RSS feeds, ripping out ads, and adding their own - essentially hijacking content to “skweeze” out profits.

Said Darren Rowe of ProBlogger:

Basically they are repackaging content of sites/blogs for viewing on PDAs and Phones. Not a bad idea in many respects - however they are taking complete posts and giving no real link backs. They are also stripping the advertisements from the sites also.

About the only thing that I can see on their version of my site that is linked directly back to and hosted on my site is the images. So not only are they using my content without giving me a way to benefit from what they are doing - but I’m also hosting their images.

This does not seem a fair deal to me.

The other thing that concerns me about this approach is that now there are two pages with almost identical content for each page on my site - there is duplicate content. Google does not look favorably upon duplicate content - it downgrades the ranking of sites that use it and I suspect that this practice will (and already has) downgraded the ranking of blogs that are duplicated in this way.

On the other side of the argument, Techdirt argues:

They’re not profiting off the content of others (if they’re profiting at all). They’re profiting off of the ability to provide a useful service that makes your content more valuable to the end users. Why aren’t these same people freaking out that Google indexes their site, makes it findable and (gasp! oh no!) puts text ads along the results page? If you hadn’t figured it out by now, the name of the game is providing what your customers or readers want or they’ll just go elsewhere. If a site won’t let me view the content in the best way for me, then why should I bother visiting it at all?

This all goes back to what I like to call the “who moved my cheese?” effect - which is when people are resistant to change for entirely legitimate reasons. Change is scary for companies just like it is for individuals. And the neverending pace of technology - from WiFi at 30,000 feet to the whole Web 2.0 thing - is one constant change. Industries from public relations to entertainment are feeling the “squeeze.” And their reaction - while understandable - does nothing to solve the problem.

For example: I tend to get irritated with the entertainment industry when they say that I’m “stealing” .mp3s or television shows off the Internet when they make no effort to make those shows and songs readily available for legal download. If I can’t find music on the iTunes store, I feel entirely justified in LimeWiring it. But the minute that ABC started putting Desperate Housewives up there, I stopped grabbing it off Bittorrent. I’d really rather pay - honestly.

Yes, it takes time to catch up with the pace of change. But given the “who moved my cheese?” effect, nobody would ever catch up at all if it weren’t for the folks out there “stealing.” And just when they finally catch up, something else will happen to ruffle their feathers. It’s that neverending give and take that moves us forward, and separates those that think ahead from those that get left behind.

Boingo is offering free in-flight Internet access aboard any Connexion by Boeing flights for the Month of November — from T1Rex

New Scientist reports on a flight where Connexion by Boeing demonstrated new technologies, including live TV and cellphones — from Brent VanFossen, Engineer with a View

And, as a bonus, a purported, and incredibly difficult to read, interview with a 787 Engineer.

Before you book that flight, head to Flightstats.com and see how often that specific flight has been delayed or cancelled in the past month. To specifically check a flights rating go here.

Already booked a flight? Get an email 4 hours before takeoff with the latest information on any delays that particular aircraft is experiencing. Flightstats says they’ll send confirmation 4 hours before departure, confirmation of arrival, and notice of cancellation or diversion for each segment of your requested flight number.

In the market for one of those portable voice recorders? Look no further—just use your iPod to do the job. I’ve been using my 4th Generation iPod it to keep a convenient record of some recent meetings. Then after doing a sync, I can archive the memo’s to my computer and email them to fellow employee’s if necessary. The iPod saves your audio recordings as .wav files (the necessary software–the Voice Memo Utility–has been included with all iPod’s since October, 2003–except for the Nano, Mini and Shuffle models).

Otherwise, its strictly plug and play. In regards to microphone choice’s, I prefer the iTalk by Griffin Technologies. It has an Automatic Gain Control to help set the signal level for recording, a built-in speaker for playback (I’ve used this feature in my car to listen to an Audiobook), and a pass-through mini jack so you can listen using external headphones without removing iTalk.

This article in PCWorld describes how its not uncommon to take up to 4 months when transferring cell or landline phone numbers to a VoIP account. Apparently the issue lies in whether your current phone company has an agreement with Vonage (for example). Read more here.

‘Reminds me of my safari in Africa. Somebody forgot the corkscrew and for several days we had to live on nothing but food and water.’–W.C. Fields

Need a place for a business lunch? …….try the airport—no corkscrew necessary. The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) recently compiled a thorough list of its top places to eat at over 15 domestic airports.

From [Gridskipper](http://www.gridskipper.com/), an American Airlines [a 25,000-Mile Prize](http://www.aa.com/content/urls/10year.jhtml) contest and from [Gadling](http://www.gadling.com/), a [visualization of flight pattern data](http://www.aaronkoblin.com/work/faa/index.html).

Phil makes the case for how LCD goggles might make a much better viewing experience in the air and shows how he hacked goggles to interface with the ipod for a “VR” experience. I look foward to the time when these googles replace the bulky LCD displays we use in laptops today…

Ryanair Chief Executive Michael O’Leary says revenue from inflight gaming and gambling could replace air fares as we know it. O’Leary asserts “We’ll probably announce a gambling partner (company) in the next 2-3 months.”

More info is available from the USA Today article Ryanair says all may fly free if gambling pays off.

Boarding from the rear is an idea whose time has passed. In the Wall Street Journal article Plane Geometry: Scientists Help Speed Boarding of Aircraft (subscription required) reporter Nicholas Zamiska describes how America West uses science to save money and help flyers save time.

Forget the now-discredited “board the rear seats first” scenario. On America West, window coach seats in the middle and rear of the plane are loaded first. Then they gradually fill out the plane, giving priority to those with window or rear seats, then those seated along aisles in the front are finally allowed to board. This all comes from the mind of Menkes van den Briel, an industrial engineer at Arizona State University who says this issue posed a “nonlinear assignment problem with quadratic and cubic terms in the objective function.”

Part of the slow load may be cultural. According to the article, Willy-Pierre Dupont, an Airbus cabin engineer, once “watched over 500 passengers on a Japan Airlines domestic flight in Japan disembark in six minutes flat. A new group of travelers was completely boarded and seated within an additional 25 minutes. The same turnaround in the U.S. or Europe could take as long as an hour and a half, Mr. Dupont says.”

Maybe those in Japan make a point of efficiency, and so they hustle to get their bags stowed and get seated asap. My experience is that most domestic U.S. flights are filled with people that seem totally confused by the intricacies of overhead bin technology and also feel they need to maximize valuable “aisle time” as they get aboard.

“Mr Type A” here has an idea. They ought to test letting each able-bodied passenger board one at a time and timing how long it takes them individually to get stowed and seated. The winner gets some free miles, and the loser is let off the plane last…

Webflyer.com has a nifty free utility to assist business travelers in transferring points from one program to another. It shows the arcane and sometimes circuitous paths that link virtually any two travel-loyalty programs. Users select a program they would like to transfer miles from, enter the number of miles they want to transfer, and select the destination program. It doesn’t actually perform the transfer, it just shows the many paths available and the optimal choice to maintain the most value.

After playing with it a bit I discovered that having a Diners Club Club Rewards card is integral to transferring United Mileage Plus points. The only bad news is that in all transfers I surveyed, there was at least a 50% reduction in value.