June 2006

For those of you who travel internationally a fair amount, there’s nothing like a good language barrier to make things even more challenging. That’s why I really like Gadling’s intermittent series of posts entitled “Words for the Travel Wise”. It’s a good jumping off point for picking up words in new languages, and you’ll never know when they’ll come in handy.

Today’s word is khintrem, which means please in Armenian.

Gizmodo is running a contest that promises to be a lot of fun. Just take a 1 minute video of yourself singing a song, upload it to YouTube and tag it “Gizmodo Idol.”

You could win three pairs of really really expensive nice earphones for your iPod.

PS: If you want to check out the competition here’s my entry.

When Pam Mandel of Seattle, WA bought a round trip ticket to Salzburg, Austria she needed a flexible ticket due to the terms of her two-month work contract. She thought she had purchased just such a ticket on British Airways via Expedia, but it turned out that the ticket was restricted in ways that Expedia never told her about. Once she had used the outbound leg of her trip she couldn’t change the date of her return, which was a major problem.

Mandel contacted Chris Elliott, a The New York Times business travel columnist. Elliott told her that both Expedia and British Airways were in the wrong. After he contacted Expedia, the travel agency helped Mandel rebook her ticket at no additional charge.

Unfortunately, most business travelers won’t have Chris Elliott to ride to the rescue. In the event that you purchase a flexible ticket, you should make sure to converse with your travel agency before you leave for your trip. Make sure that the ticket works the way you think it works, and save yourself the hassle.

The ezVision Video iWear headset will make you look just like the laser-spouting X-Man Cyclops, while you view videos from your iPod. The company says “Its like watching your iPod Video on a 50 inch Screen.” Hook your iPod up to the mutant-inspired headset and view your content in privacy. It can also be used for gaming with your XBox, Playstation, or Gamecube.

The Ultra Mobile PC (a.k.a. Origami) has been getting a lot of flak lately from many corners. JK on the Run who - true to his name - is constantly on the go now gives us an impassioned defense of the embattled little device.

I’m curious to hear from our readers. Do you use a UMPC? Do you agree with JK, or with the skeptics?

The TravelPost.com Insider has a great list of parks that have free WiFi in different US States.

Mobilemag has posted about the Glocom Neofree battery pack. Charge it up at home and then use it on the road to juice up your small portable electronic gadgets. About the size of a pack of cards, the 4400mAh of power is supposed to be able to provide about 8 hours worth of runtime for a PSP or PMP. Still trying to find a site that talks about how much it costs…

The Lobby has an interesting post on cell phone batteries, which are sort of like the Meghan L. O’Sullivan of modern technology: critically important and seldom recognized.

I, for one, am a big fan of power cycling my cell phone battery regularly, especially when it’s brand new. You’ve got to run that battery down and then charge it all the way up at least three times when it comes out of the packaging. I try to power cycle it at least once a month after that. Plugging it in to the adapter every time you come through the door will only decrease your battery life long-term.

Just discovered a promising service called Loungepass which allows you to buy one-time access to a selection of 128 airline lounges worldwide. You log in to the service, choose an airport, reserve a time and date, and throw a charge card at it. Based on my limited scan of the service, rates seem to run about $10.00 to $20.00 an hour. Passes are limited to three hours, and it seems that at this stage only Continential Presidents Club and Club America lounges (and one Club at DFW in Dallas) are available in the U.S. Looking forward to trying this when I am stuck at an airport with a delayed flight. Eager to hear experiences of others who have tried the service.

Guests at the Sheraton Chicago Hotel may as well be checking themselves into rehab, because General Manager Rick Ueno has declared his intention to help his guests kick their Blackberries the curb.

For no extra charge, Ueno will take Blackberries and other similar handheld communications devices and lock them up in his office until the user wants them back. He was inspired to do this after finding out that his life was better after he took his Blackberry out of the equation.

Now there’s a radical thought. Maybe we don’t have to be in touch 24/7….

Yeah right. Someone point me towards the nearest WiFi cafe, I need to check my RSS reader.

Via TechMeme.

At least for a few more months, the BoardFirst.com service will be providing Southwest travelers with early bird check in, allowing them to game Southwest’s first-come-first-serve system to get first dibs on a coveted bulkhead seat.

The airline is suing the BoardFirst folks, claiming that the service creates problems with its inventory. Since Southwest may be ending the boarding system anyway, the argument may be a moot point.

Kir Royale welcome cocktails? Pumpkin gnocci? Sounds like Eos Airlines, where the service is better, the food is gourmet and the legroom is optimal.

The National Geographic Travel Insider reviewed the service this week, and he does have one excellent point. The $2,950 one-way fare sure beats the $13,000 you’d pay on the less luxurious British Airways.

Via Gridskipper.

A few days ago, Jetblue’s in flight entertainment subsidiary, LiveTV picked up the rights to provide domestic in flight Internet access. The terms of the sale prevent the service from going into effect before 2010.

Jeff Pulver has speculated that perhaps JetBlue and Connexion (which sponsors this blog) might join forces to provide the service to users before the end of the decade.

“As a rule we don’t comment on rumors or speculation, so I couldn’t do it if I wanted to,” said Terrance Scott of Connexion yesterday. “The auction winners are both prohibited from saying anything about the auction process during the ongoing quiet period, so armchair speculation is rampant.”

He also pointed out that Jetblue, which operates an all Airbus fleet, has never done anything with Boeing.

But does Connexion have any plans to get into the domestic market in the near future?

“We made a conscious decision not to participate in the spectrum auction, opting instead to focus on maximizing the current global network we operate. However, we have and will continue to monitor the evolution of the ATG technology to see how it matures,” said Scott.

Overall, he concluded, these developments are good for in flight connectivity in general, and that’s good for both Connexion and the traveling public. Besides, he pointed out, “the technology is also only applicable over terrestrial land mass, so it doesn’t/won’t provide US carriers with a solution for their international flights. That’s where we come in.”

“We basically view the air to ground capability as being complimentary to the Connexion by Boeing service.”

If you’re an average Joe who thinks that the seat pitch on most airlines is a major pain for you, try being Bill Walton. According to an article by Chris Elliott this week, the 6′11″ former NBA star has an excruciatingly hard time when traveling.

The man can’t stand up straight in an MD-80. It’s a good thing he’s not claustrophobic.

But for you similarly tall travelers, Walton has a few excellent tips about airlines and aircraft that work for him.

When a real live snake almost took over an actual plane, it looks like Samuel L. was nowhere in sight. What a shame.

What I really want to know is how the bleep did a four-foot mothableepin’ snake wind up on some random airplane?

Via TailRank.

Rafe Needleman over at CNet News has an update for us on the WiFi-enabled music player that will allow users to snag any preselected album off of various online stores whenever they come in range of a WiFi connection.

Let’s say you just downloaded Not Ready to Make Nice (iTunes) by the Dixie Chicks but decide long after you’ve left your computer that you love it so much you want the whole darn record. With an iPod, that wouldn’t happen until you could get back to a computer with an Internet connection, but if you were using a WiFi-enabled player, you would just flag the album for later purchase. Then at any old time, you could step into a WiFi-enabled coffee shop, buy a latté and have the whole album downloaded by the time you step outside.

Update. Via TechMeme.

We’re thrilled to report that we got some links and love from Philip over at Starwood Hotels’ blog The Lobby today. We at The Blog Business Summit were very happy to see Starwood getting into the blogging game from the beginning, and have noted their steady improvement as bloggers.

In summation, we would like to say thanks for the lovin’ and the linkin’. You guys rule!

The New York Times had a very interesting article this morning about a phenomenon called traveling while Muslim. It comes as no huge surprise to me that many Muslim folks, American and otherwise, are being faced with considerable obstacles to traveling.

And getting picked on by the TSA is only one part of the problem:

Azhar Usman, a burly American-born Muslim with a heavy black beard, says he elicits an almost universal reaction when he boards an airplane at any United States airport: conversations stop in midsentence and the look in the eyes of his fellow passengers says, “We’re all going to die!”

There’s got to be a better solution, one that benefits all of us. Perhaps instead of creating lists of “safe” people and racially profiling those whose overall look matches with the stereotype of a terrorist, we should just subject everyone to the same random screening process. Every so often, the computer identifies you for additional screening and you’re searched more thoroughly.

It’s impossible to get rid of this issue completely. Human beings are flawed, and we do make assumptions based on past information about what a terrorist might look or talk like. But from what I read in the Times, it seems like we ought to be able to do a whole lot better than this.

The Voice over IP program Skype will now come standard on the new Dell XPS M1210 and M2010 laptops, which is exciting news that will widen its availability immensely.

Using Skype on an airplane may be a lot less annoying than using a cell phone, simply because the call quality is generally so much better than your average cell connection. People won’t feel quite as compelled to shout. And if something is truly private, that portion of the message can be conveyed via instant messaging instead of blurting it out for the whole plane to hear.

I have a feeling that it will also cut down on the kinds of calls that users make. Sure you might quickly ping your coworker to check on the status of a project, but are you really going to use it to try to talk to a client? It’s not that Skype is unreliable, but people are still relatively unfamiliar with it. Eventually, that unfamiliarity will not be a problem - but for the meantime, I see it as a much better method of communication than bringing out the cell phones on a plane.

Via TechMeme.