the calm before the storm
It's been extensive travel, travel, travel for the past several weeks - thus no blogging at all. I'm just not a road-warrior-blogger ... I keep asking myself and others how to best blog when on the road - with nothing but a BlackBerry and a normal laptop, I personally find it difficult to blog. Ah, and no, I haven't gone as far as starting to twitter from just about everywhere about "my last five minutes three times every quarter of an hour". My feeling is that Twitter asks too much of me at this moment in time, or I am just about too much of an introvert to just Twitter, blog etc. "without thinking" (feels like having to babble without thinking to me, at least - I am not trying to say others don't think before they Twitter or blog; my brain is just too oldschool ;-)).
Anyway, on one of my flights short before the European Soccer Championship I found the boarding pass (on the right) in the seat pocket in front of me - and I always thought boarding passes would have to be personal, issued to the name of a passenger ... - jfi, BayernMuenchen is the name of a German soccer club
On another flight, they had to reboot the audio/video system, and I don't know why, but my video screen showed boot progress ... it took about 15 minutes for the Windows CE based system to reboot, which reminded me of modern cellphones that often need near to a minute - if not more - to (re)boot; any modern phone is a disaster in just about any emergency situation if you need to turn it on in that very moment (not that I encountered any emergency situation whilst traveling, thank god).
Anyway, my calendar currently says I'll be in the office for the most part in the next two weeks, so that should allow for some blogging again :)
Anyway, on one of my flights short before the European Soccer Championship I found the boarding pass (on the right) in the seat pocket in front of me - and I always thought boarding passes would have to be personal, issued to the name of a passenger ... - jfi, BayernMuenchen is the name of a German soccer clubOn another flight, they had to reboot the audio/video system, and I don't know why, but my video screen showed boot progress ... it took about 15 minutes for the Windows CE based system to reboot, which reminded me of modern cellphones that often need near to a minute - if not more - to (re)boot; any modern phone is a disaster in just about any emergency situation if you need to turn it on in that very moment (not that I encountered any emergency situation whilst traveling, thank god).
Anyway, my calendar currently says I'll be in the office for the most part in the next two weeks, so that should allow for some blogging again :)
Comments
The Blackberries seem to boot pretty fast. It's just Windows machines in general that take ages to start!
Pedro Quaresma, 2008-07-18 13:17
As for the boarding pass, it was very likely a chartered machine. Keep the boarding pass - I am sure you can sell it for pretty good money on eBay.
Anonymous, 2008-07-18 13:24
Being in trouble with a phone turned off that then needs a minute or more to boot - well, I find that to be quite troublesome on top.
- a phone might even not be able to save a life due to long boot times.
(and yes, one might argue that a phone should be "always on", but it's just not the case often, let alone the problem if the phone just crashed).
@Anonymous: Hope I didn't step on your toes - I didn't mean to come across joking about or blaming Windows CE (nor the manufacturer) and totally understand that it's entirely seperated from anything vital for flying.
I found it interesting to get a view of the internals, which I believe shouldn't usually be visible.
Quite certainly there's much more to the system than just "loading an entertainment system" - I'd assume there's a many integrity checks to make it 100% tamper-proof by all means, but that's just my 2 cts without any further knowledge.
I could also imagine that a system that old was more than just state-of-the-art back then - one could therefore also see it as great work, which it has to be to survive that long.
Florian Vogler, 2008-07-18 13:55
Giuseppe Grasso, 2008-07-18 20:42