Southwest Airlines just saved me $8.00 this trip. The inflight wireless internet system was out of commission for the flight. That piece of news garnered some groans when the captain announced it. I’m going to watch This Week in Computer Hardware (TWICH) during the flight, but I would have preferred to work online. Each week I’m going to have to download a bunch of Leo Laporte’s TWIT TV content before my flight. Right now I’m listening to music, but time seems to go by quicker when I’m actively writing and listening to programming. The flight from Pittsburg to Denver is going to take about three hours. My flight out of Pittsburg was delayed by about 45 minutes. Apparently, the airplane had been delayed in Chicago. That pushed the flight right into lunchtime. For the most part, I avoid eating right before a flight. For those of you who know me very well, you know that I keep a pretty rigid meal schedule.
People do some interesting things on flights. Today for example the passenger sitting next to me spent most of the flight looking at college football gambling lines for some type of complex parley bet. The math was pretty basic, but the research looked interesting. The passenger had a raggedy red backpack that produced a treasure trove of interesting things. A few newspapers appeared and received a careful reading. Some type of magazine showed up with gambling information for about 30 minutes. An iPad with a broken screen emerged and seemed to contain tons of information. Decisions seem to be made based on some type of matrix based mathematics. It looked like about 9 items were being combined to form some type of maximum value. The larger values seemed to get grouped into a list of some type.
Throughout the last two months of traveling, I have been on the lookout for a Microsoft Surface in the wild. I have yet to actually see somebody using one. People seem to be using iPads or a variety of Android tablets. Oddly enough I have still seen a large number of Lenovo (IBM) ThinkPad laptops. Businesses must still be assigning the extremely heavy and outdated devices to employees. Apparently, the ThinkPad was built to last.
What did I learn during my Southwest Arline flight today? I learned that I do not like Nabisco Honey Maid lil’ squares.
I wonder how many business case studies exist describing the rise and fall of Microsoft’s messenger application.
It is always interesting to walk into a situation where my reputation does not proceed me. Over the last few months I have ended up in a fair number of situations where I’m meeting people for the first time.
