Photo: Lufthansa 747 At LAX

Just got into Los Angeles, headed straight for the In-N-Out Burger on Sepulveda, next to the airport and spent some time watching planes land.

This one here is a Lufthansa 747:

That’s what I’m talking about!

A Portable Solution To Cramped Keyboards

OnBoard Travel Keyboard

As anyone who reads this blog knows, I love my little Acer Aspire One netbook. I’ve adjusted pretty well to the small screen, but I have to admit that sometimes typing a lot on the small keyboard cramps up my hands.

Enter the Atek onboard travel keyboard that I bought last month (for my husband, incidentally). It weighs less than a pound and attaches to the USB port of my netbook or my husband’s laptop.

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Long Walk, Cool Video

My friend John Ward found this video and posted it to Facebook. It’s a time-lapse view of a man and his facial hair on a one-year walk across China:

The Longest Way 1.0 – one year walk/beard grow time lapse from Christoph Rehage on Vimeo.

New Site, ctwatchdog.com

I haven’t been slacking off on my blogging, exactly, but I’ve been on the road. And I’ve been working with my partner in the Digital Media Cooperative, Tom Twitchell, and our former colleague at The Hartford Courant, George Gombossy, on George’s new site, ctwatchdog.com.  George is an investigative consumer columnist who writes on a wide range of topics, including travel. If you haven’t seen his site yet, you should check it out.

Lessons In Customer Service

It’s startling sometimes how differently the passengers on a given cruise or the guests at a particular hotel can view the experience.

This can become evident in conversations with fellow passengers or guests and also on review sites like TripAdvisor. Even when the vast majority of guests give good reviews, there are unhappy exceptions. And I think I know why.

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The Latest In Unruly Passenger News

There have been lots of unruly passengers in the news lately, including two incidents that prompted emergency landings of transatlantic flights Saturday.

An American Airlines 757 flying from Paris to Boston was diverted to Gander, Newfoundland, on Saturday after a French passenger attached a device consisting of some kind of putty and what looked like a GPS unit to the fuselage of the aircraft, Canadian Press reports. The passenger was arrested in Gander and the flight continued to Boston, where it arrived more than an hour and a half late.

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NY Times: Free Air Passengers

A New York Times editorial on Friday called for passage of the Air Passenger Bill of Rights (the Senate version) on the grounds that it is not cool to hold people hostage in a metal tube parked on the tarmac with an overflowing toilet, no food and screaming babies. I paraphrase, of course.

Southwest Wanted Frontier, But Not Friction

Southwest lost its bid for bankrupt Frontier airlines in part because its pilots couldn’t reach an agreement about seniority with Frontier pilots, always a touchy issue. In the view of Business Week, Southwest chose to support its pilots because it didn’t want to risk the harmony of its corporate culture. So Republic gets Frontier (after Southwest forced it to sweeten its offer) and Southwest gets to keep being Southwest.

Photo: Beach Artist, Santa Barbara, California

This man creates a new sand sculpture daily at the beach in Santa Barbara. "This is my job," he told us. He lives on tips from passers-by.

Strategy At The Gate

It is my husband’s habit to inquire, whenever we are waiting at the gate to board a flight that’s looking full, to ask the gate agents if they’re looking for volunteers to take a bump.

He did that for a recent connection from JFK to Los Angeles, where the flight was so full that we hadn’t even been able to reserve seats next to each other. And it paid off, though not exactly as we’d expected.

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