In the previous entry, I made mention of SeatGuru.com, a web site that provides a comprehensive guide to several airlines’ seats, specifying which ones are recommended and which ones are to be avoided. If you fly often and get the chance to pick out your seat, you’ll definitely want to make use of this site.
In case you missed the first two blog entries about my trip to Northern Ireland, here they are:
6:30 p.m.: I haven’t been to Newark nor its airport in a long time. That was back when my Dad’s sister and her family lived in Jersey City. To give you an idea of how long ago that was, the last time I was there, construction walls were plastered with posters for an upcoming movie titled Dirty Dancing and Michael Jackson’s new album, titled Bad.
My original flight plan included a six-hour layover at Newark, so I’d planned to make use of the Continental President’s Club lounge, with its comfy seats and valuable freebies: free non-alcoholic beverages, snacks and wifi. As a non-member, I’d have to pony up US$45, for the privilege, but my personal travel rule is that any serious layover time justifies either a trip to the city or hanging out in the elite business travel lounge.
The plan had changed. Since I volunteered to arrive at Newark at a later time in exchange for a flight voucher, I had two hours and change until my connecting flight to Belfast. In my books, that’s not enough layover time to justify the additional expense of the President’s Club. I decided to take a tour of the terminal instead.
I’m proud of Accordion City, but I feel a little shame when I walk through other cities’ airports. Despite having the dubious honour of being the most expensive airport at which to land in the world — an airline would have to pay CDN$13,000 to land a 747-400 — Terminals 2 and 3 can best be described as “ghetto”. Terminal 3 was once the jewel of Pearson airport, but what were once considered clean and spacious check-in areas and departure lounges are shabby and cramped (although there are signs of improvement with the current renovation). As for Terminal 2, it’s a cramped bunker with below-average food solds at above-average prices. I can get that in the UK, and they’ll throw in some local atmosphere for free, dudes.
(Yes, Terminal 1 is pretty decent, but despite flying an average of once every six weeks, I never end up going through there.)
Newark’s Terminal C has high ceilings, wide corridors, some decent-looking restaurants and enough shops to keep a traveller busy. If I needed to, I could buy a suit there. The only department where Toronto’s airport beats Newark is in availability of electrical outlets. I had the audiobook version of Imperial Grunts loaded on my iPod and I wanted to be sure it was fully juiced.
I was hungry, but my itinerary said that dinner would be served on the flight. I opted to go light and just get a frozen yogurt from the food court. The stall beside the Yogen Fruz had a line of people with Irish lilts, all ordering something either fried or deep-fried. I figured that they were to be my fellow passengers on the flight to Belfast.
About an hour and a half later, the boarding call was made. Boarding was a bit slow, as the majority of the passengers seemed to be Irish tourists laden down with shopping and souvenirs from nearby Manhattan. I boarded when the call that included my row — 16 — was made.
If you’re flying “cattle class” on a Continental 757-200 and you have the opportunity to pick your seat, row 16 is a very good choice. It’s the rearmost of the over-the-wing exit row seats, which means that your seat can recline, but the seat in front of you can’t. This isn’t hard-to-find knowledge: I found it on this page at SeatGuru.com, which is a site you should be aware if if you fly often. I chose seat 16D, which is an aisle seat: plenty of room for the legs.
I worked my way down the aisle towards my seat. Row 12, 13, 14, 15, then finally row 16. Which was completely occupied. By a gaggle of Irish teenage girls travelling together, fidgeting with newly-bought iPods (they still had the Apple Store bags).
“Hi there,” I said to the girl in my seat, showing her my boarding pass, “my pass says that I’m in 16D.”
“So does mine,” she said, showing me her boarding pass. There it was in bold: 16D.
“I think I’ll check with the people up front,” I said. As worked my way forward, I looked at the rest of the plane. Full. It dawned on me that after years of dodging the bullet, it was finally my turn to be a victim of overbooking. Not only would I not get my primo seat; I might not get any seat.
I showed my boarding pass to the chief flight attendant, a friendly guy with a nametag that read “Dave”.
“Hmmm…” he said, looking at papers on a clipboard, which I presumed was a passenger manifest. “This could be tricky. We’ve got a full plane tonight. Would you be interested in taking the next flight, this time tomorrow, in exchange for a voucher?”
I held out the vouchers I’d earned for taking a later flight to Newark, explaining that not only have I done my good deed for the day, but also that the people at the Continental counter in Toronto tried to pull a bait-and-switch on me and that I had a wedding to catch.
“You make a good case,” said Dave. “Look, stay here in the galley. I’ll take your boarding pass to the ticketing desk and see what we can do for you, Mr…” — and then, after looking at my boarding pass — “..deVilla.”
He then turned to the stewardess who was standing beside us and said “Could you get Mr. deVilla a drink while he’s waiting?”, and then ran down the jetway.
I was expecting to be offered a coffee, but the stewardess turned to me and with a sympathetic voice asked, “Heineken?”
“Sure,” I replied.
Dave returned, with a facial expression that seemed to say that there were no free seats. He also held up a finger in a way that said “Wait, I’ve got one more thing to try.”
He picked up the allcall headset and made a general announcement, offering a free night’s stay at an airport hotel in Newark and a $500 voucher to anyone who’d volunteer to get off the plane. A minute later, a soccer-shirted guy in his twenties grinning for ear to ear, nattering about getting drunk in Manhattan for an extra night deplaned, and a half-minute after that, I got his seat: 27D.
The rest of the flight went without incident. (Inflight movies: Take the Lead, starring Antonio Banderas as a French dance instructor, complete with lame-o explanation of why he had a Spanish accent, followed by Vegas Vacation. Watched the first, which actually wasn’t too bad, briefly thought about making good on that promise to The Ginger Ninja to take ballroom dancing lessons with her, slept through the second.)
Pictured above is Yours Truly, nearly 8 years ago, checking out a CD vending machine at the train station in Kyoto, Japan, where I was visiting my friend Anne, who was there for a year to teach English. The trip marked the beginning of a big “things are looking up” phase; shortly after it, the Worst Date Ever would take place, I’d pick up the accordion and things would never be the same.
Sarah Marchildon, a Vancouverite who blogs at The Hollywood North Report, relocated in July to a rural town on the island of Shikoku in southern Japan to teach English. Given its small-town-ness and its removal from more cosmopolitan places like Tokyo or Osaka, it’s quite likely that there are locals who’ve never seen a real live white person before. Go visit her blog and see what she’s been up to!
I think I’d better finish the Ireland travel diary before I start recounting my last trip to Japan, but I’ve got a Japanese story or two to tell…
Here’s the cover art for the upcoming album by The Who (their first studio album since 1982), Endless Wire:
Yeeeeugggh.
The best response to this cover that I’m aware of was made by a guy on a private discussion forum who said: “I’m Kent Brockman, and this is ‘Eye on Springfield’.”
There’s an article over at Chris “factoryjoe” Messina’s blog that’s been getting a lot of attention from the web application development crowd titled The Future of White Boy Clubs. I could describe his article, which is about the race/sex makeup of the speaker list at the recent Future of Web Apps summit, but I can do a better job of summarizing it by borrowing the graphic that Chris created for it:
More crackers than an hors d’oeuvres plate!
Chris’ argument is based on the assumption that multicultural societies are good. This too is is my general leaning, but it’s not everyone’s: the neoconservative side of the blogosphere would very strongly disagree, and I can make some cogent arguments that in a multicultural society, there has to be some agreement on a baseline set of common cultural rules (men and women are entitled to the same right, privileges and opportunies, freedom of speech is a basic human right, and so on).
I think I’ll save the serious commentary for the working week. In the meantime, I’d like to offer my services as a speaker at your next Web 2.0 conference. I’m the Technical Evangelist for a well-respected and long-standing internet company, I can speak and I am very clearly a member of a visible minority:
Even better, I play the uncoolest rock instrument — keyboards — in their uncoolest forms, accordion and keytar. It’s like minority squared! Seriously: every speaking gig I get will come with a free accordion performance. C’mon, can even Scoble promise this?
What are you waiting for? Sign me up as a speaker today!
Back in my early days at Crazy Go Nuts University, a drinking joke that always got a laugh described the “Four Stages of Tequila” as:
The ad shown below predates that joke, but the copy, which reads “If you’re a midget, FLESICHMAN’S makes you a big guy! 90 PROOF is why!” comes from the same basic thought:
(Picture courtesy of davebug and Miss Fipi Lele.)
This morning, I decided to voice my displeasure over a lack of visible progress by ICT Toronto, which purports to be a group whose mission is to make Toronto one of the world’s leading centres for information and communications technologies.
Strangely enough, an ICT Toronto breakfast meeting was held yesterday. The only reason I know about this is because Mark “Remarkk!” Kuznicki, whom I know from the DemoCamp/BarCamp scene, acts as a sort of advisor to them and attended that meeting and blogged about it this afternoon.
In his post, Mark reminds us that this is a government initiative run by “grey-haired folks” and unlike we Gen-Xers and Millenials who live in the “Web 2.0” world, they don’t move in web time.
I will counter by saying that even by the standards of the 1970s, ICT Toronto’s publicity effort is either lazy or pathetic. I’m not asking for them to start up a blog, wiki, RSS feed or instant-messaging setup or start setting up “unconferences” like BarCamp or DemoCamp. They could still be effective using tools that they’re comfortable with: press releases, networking with local technology and business journalists, hiring a PR agency or communications company to get the word out (and maybe freshen the web site, even if only once a month) — basically using publicity and communciations mechanisms that have been around since Ernst and Young were still earnest and young.
ICT’s silence is the sort of thing that makes people automatically associate the word “government” with “sluggishness and inefficiency”. This is why entrepreneurs and techies tend to have at least a mild libertarian streak.
The Canadian Opera Company and the Art Gallery of Ontario aren’t what you’d consider to be citizens of the world of Web 2.0, nor do they have the resources to devote to reaching a new audience in that world. They realized this and did the smart thing: they contacted a few prominent local bloggers and gave them “sneak peeks” at some of their events. The Canadian Opera Company number of us were invited to view the new opera house, the Four Seasons Centre, a few days before its grand opening. The Art Gallery of Ontario invited a number of us to a special session before the grand opening of their Andy Warhol: Supernova exhibit and even gave us a one-on-one interview session with its guest curator, David Cronenberg.
The end result was that both institutions were able to concentrate on what they do best — producing and housing art — and were able to reach a new audience of online world denizens by harnessing the power of interested bloggers and letting them do what they do best: communicating in the online world. Although the technology currently used to do so may be unfamiliar to the grey-haired crowd, the concept of inviting communicators to see your what you’re doing and then spread your message is older than the written word.
Simply put, ICT Toronto doesn’t have to be hip and “with it” in the Web 2.0 world: they need only to harness some of the citizens of that world, whose goals are aligned with theirs. It can be a team effort.
I’ll say it again: go read his post (and the comments as well). In addition to covering what happened at that breakfast meeting and what’s being done, Mark has some good suggestions. The most important of these is that ICT should embrace a role as being a convening body for the various communities of practice, interest and geography that make up the technology scene in the Toronto region.
In the meantime, I’m going to let my thoughts about ICT Toronto percolate over the weekend. As a reminder that I’ve made it a pet cause of mine to keep putting their feet to the fire, I’ll close with a little message for them, courtesy of the Stephen Colbert “On Notice Board” Generator:
