Air France // inflight entertainment

daily life marketing

Flew with Air France from Boston to Paris. I wasn’t a fan before, but this time the food was actually allright. Maybe 30 Atlantic crossings with KLM created a “oh – please – no – nothing – thanks” reflex whenever somebody asks me “chicken or pasta”.

The A340 had an ok inflight entertainment with a medium choice. My current ranking of inflight entertainment options:

1. Lufhansa LAX / MUC A340
Wifi / Internet with the Boeing Connexion system
It does cost 20US$ but it is worth it. Internet on the plane, nothing can beat that.

2. KLM AMS / NY Boeing 777
Inseat Video with on demand library. Decent Selection of movies. Unfortunately
not letterboxed.

3. Airfrance BOS / CDG A340
Inseat Video. 8 movies Loop. Similar systems I saw in the mid ninetees in business class. Back then the movies were hi8 based.

4. JetBlue (only by heresay)
Cable TV including premium channels. It’s TV, but at least there is HBO from wha t I have heard. Inseat.

5. Song
Cable TV without premium channels. Inseat.

6. Inflight TV on monitors
Most have it. Usually worth avoiding.

7. Inflight domestic
Projection screen, colors and contrast are all over the map. United wanted some money
for headphones. The “Feature presentation” was a very mediocre US family movie.
The worst of the worse.

lego global differences

marketing politics

Whenever I return to Germany my kids get some gifts. My son wanted a Lego Dino Hummer, I picked one up in LA. Interesting that the US Version is featuring a shooting device where the german one has a cage. Kill or capture. That’s the Euro / US choice.

Narrenfreiheit

communication

link

I think “Narrenfreiheit” is one of my most favorite german words.

gmail mind read

google history internet

gmail starts to put custom feed items on top of my email box.
Nice and not nice. The 5 different ones that I saw fly by
were tailored pretty close to what I care about. Of course:
gmail knows about me. I prefer not to realize that. And
I would like to do things at my pace, pick up information
instead of having it pushed my way.

good thing you can turn those things off …

update 12/9:
“Note: Clips of your favorite RSS and Atom feeds are displayed randomly, and aren’t targeted to the contents of your mail.”

so it say in the Webclips answer part of google.

os x server: 10.4 and I still hate it

Apple linux malware

File servers. No big deal. I am dealing with kind of thing since more than ten years. And it works.
We tried OS X Server 10.2.8 a while back, and it was bad. Now I have to deal with it again: OS X 10.4.3
and it still is junk. It is broken. Things don’t work as they should. Apples way of doing things is
incompatible with everything. It is such a waste of time. If they add a guy then they should leave
the way things are done underneath as everybody would expect them. XServers get bought by people
for their shiny facade. Which is all ok for me. Just that the inner workings of it are simply rotten.
The non server version of OS X is much more consistent with having all features in the system preferences
sharing.

it’s all gory details. I don’t even want to go into it. It was broken with 10.2.8. With 10.4.3 it is still broken.
Fileservers are not THAT important that you want to waste your entire worklife administrating them.
And with Linux (or even SGI for that matter) you don’t have to. You learn the meaning of a few commands and
are done with it.

It really is bulshit. If you consider to get a server, don’t get an Apple one. They are too expensive and work not in a way that would make any sense …

Boston Hotel

misc

If you should ever stay in Boston and don’t need the generic upper class marble stuff. Or don’t want it, or can’t afford then I can wholeheartly recommend the

Newburry Guest House
261 Newburry

800 437 7668

Very nice rooms, decent atmosphere.
I like it allot.

song thong bong

daily life marketing

flying song. They have baby colored plastic utensils, colorful plastic seats, and the TV in front of your nose. 24 channels of not even basic cable channel line up. No HBO nor Showtime. The aspect ratio on those LCDs is not 4:3 so everything is squeezed and everybody looks real fat. Movies on demand are five dollars, the soso turkey sandwich is 8. Not much more choice on the menu. I remember ads with sushi. There are supposed to be 1600 mp3 that you can add to a playlist. The interface for this is beyond dismal, and the music choice looks rather dull. at best. NWA says you can not collect miles on ‘Song’. So far the general song impression.

My specific one was even more horrible:
The flight was supposed to leave at 10:30am, we entered the plane at 4:30pm and took off an hour later. During those 6 hours they pushed the departure time hourly and requested that we stay at the gate. In the first 3 hours
I had once the opportunity to get a drink served, despite the decimated passenger count of forty people. All that nice marketing money: Down the drain. Song simply sucks. Just in different plastic colors.
When I got to get a drink myself I realized why the flight attendants never showed up: I found them both being maniacally engaged in a minesweeper/tetris like game that they must have discovered on their iPaqs. Those Song had given them to process all those food purchases.

easy

daily life marketing

Watching commercials: ‘easy’ is a very prominent word these days. Maybe stuff becomes too complicated for the average consumer so that now things need to be ‘easy’.

quick quicktime

free of any reason

if you like explosions

explore

history internet

Amanda was asking people in NY if they prefer IE or firefox, and then why that is. I wonder if it smart from Microsoft to call IE7 “internet explorer”.
The brand is fucked. It stands for virus, exploit and popup. There are two internets out there: The one you use with “internet explorer” which is hell and the other one is the ‘take back the web’ one in Firefox. “take back” from whom? Certainly not from Microsoft, they are still no force on the internet. But their monolithic market dominance combined with technical ignorance towards the threats of the net degenerated the Internet user experience for all those people being stuck at IE. Browsers are actually no big deal, unless they suck. And only IE sucks royally.
Safari is a browser by Apple. So, who cares? You can use it or not. It’s a minor detail, since it works well enough and is secure.

Maybe it’s the name that bad? “explore”
Now you like to “explore” things if you are confident, and what you are going to find is worth the risk. Since the Internet is a pretty mean djungle these days, most people don’t feel like “exploring” the net. Too often they can into trouble when they did so. The “Ford Explorer” is in trouble too. It’s sales are down by roughly half, despite that there is a new model. IE is as stupid as an SUV. But maybe “exploring” was something you would like to do in the end of the last century: venturing out there into the future. Now all there seems to be waiting are Oil companies reaping record profits and sites that will take control of your machine, just because you visited a simple page with Internet Explorer.

I looks like that it shares the fate of the “Ford Explorer”, which does not want to sell.