Doug’s World

Boeing’s Connexion system

I’m somewhere over the North Atlantic, connected to the internet via Boeing’s Connexion system. It’s a satellite internet access system that works anywhere on (or above) earth, and SAS’s international flights have had it for about a year. They connect to the internet via a satellite, and then they have a wireless system just like you use in your home for using the internet from within the airplane. I’ve used it several times, and it rocks — fast, reliable, it just plain works.

But Boeing has announced they’ll be pulling the plug on this system at the end of this year. Their strategy was to develop the technology and then sell it off, but apparently they’ve found no takers. And it’s not profitable, so they’re going to kill it.

Now maybe there’s a ton of details I don’t know about — and I’m sure there are — but this doesn’t make any sense to me. Just charge more! It’s at $29 for a 10-hour flight right now, and I think most business travelers, who are already paying hundreds or thousands for the ticket, would gladly pay a multiple of that price. Frankly, I think they could double or triple the price without losing a significant percentage of the users.

But instead of charging more, they’ve taken to giving it away, as they did on this flight. Is that to make more people aware of the service and try to seduce a buyer?

Well, from my selfish point of view that tactic sucks. I mean, check out what happened (to the right) when I finally got connected to upload the photos on that last post! I assume that’s because every laptop on the plane is trying to watch videos all at once. Hell, some guys are probably uploading huge batches of photos all at once.

Lucky for me, somebody must have crashed or gave up, because my “4 hours” turned out to be about 30 minutes. Boeing, I want Connexion! Don’t kill it! Charge more! Another gin and tonic, please!

I love Business Class.

Up the Eiffel Tower

After the workshop on my final evening in Paris, Jeff Fattic and I took a stroll around some of the sights near the Microsoft office on Rue de L’Universite. First we dropped in at O’Brien’s, our favorite Irish pub in Paris, and downed a bit of Blanche de Bruge. Then it was off to the Eiffel Tower for a trip to the top.

The line was a fraction the length it was on Sunday, but it still took an hour or so from getting in line to standing on the top level. You take an elevator up to the second level and then change elevators, so we had a chance to look around and take some pictures there first, while it was still daylight. It was dark by the time we got to the top, and the air was clear enough to give us some nice views.

I had intended to get some great night shots of the Eiffel Tower, but nature conspired against me. We returned to ground level and walked across the Seine, and then it started raining. So I rushed a couple of shots because I didn’t want to get my camera wet. I’ll be back to Paris in a couple of months, so I’ll bring the big tripod and try to get some good illegal night shots then — now that I know they’re illegal, I can’t wait to put a bunch of them on my site. (Editor’s note: Doug’s opinions on international intellectual property law are entirely his own, and do not reflect the views of his employer. :-))

We also walked over to the Champ Elysees and wandered around a bit. Then we ate dinner at a restaurant named Hippopotamus down a side street, which looked like the TGI Friday’s of France, both in terms of the decor and the menu. A few hours later, I took an early-morning cab to Charles DeGaulle Airport, and now I’m on the way home. See you in a few hours, Megan!

My First Migraine

Paris Traffic

Traffic is bad here most all the time, night and day. And the streets are so complicated and convoluted that even the locals don’t always know the best way to get from one place to another.

So traffic-related technology is used pretty heavily in Paris (and other European cities, from what I’ve been told), much more so than back in the United States. Below are a couple of photos I took today: a shot of the real-time display of traffic conditions that sits in the lobby of my hotel, and a shot of the GPS unit in the cab that took Jeff and me back to the hotel this evening. Nearly all the cabs have GPS units in them here, but you still rarely see them in the US.

For some more pictures from today, check out my work blog.

Don’t tempt me, Monsieur

Did you know that it’s illegal (under French law) to publish a picture of the Eiffel Tower taken at night? The only way around it is to pay some sort of bribe to some government agency, as did the tour agency that published the photo shown here.

The policy is mentioned on the Eiffel Tower web site here, and there are a couple of long discussions of the issue here and here.

Damn, I thought I was done taking pictures in Paris, because I won’t have much time left. Now I have to fit in a night-time trip to the Eiffel Tower, to get a photo and post it for everyone to see. Viva La France!

Assorted links

I wanted to take a good night shot of the Montparnasse Cemetery from my room, but then I realized that a cemetery at night is sort of dull from 200 feet above, and I didn’t feel like wandering over there for a closeup. So I posted this shot taken during the day, broke into the mini-bar, and surfed the net for a while …

Scott sent me a link to this video, which I’ve already watched more times than anything else on YouTube.

Wouter’s new personal blog has a link to a video that makes me proud to be an American. The video, not the topic.

Here’s another video I found pretty inspiring.

After they lost my luggage when I flew from Munich to Paris, it’s good to see I’m not the only guy who has annoying travel problems.

Speaking politics, Is it just me or does this make the whole Bill/Monica affair seem rather dignified?

And on a lighter note, it looks like the army-backed coup in Thailand has paid some dividends for the troops.

Finally, I must that say Paris is obscenely expensive, but this is ridiculous.

Seen a good link lately? Please add it to the comments, so I’ll have something to do tomorrow night that doesn’t cost any money.

Bonne nuit, mes amis.

- Le Doug

A walk to the Eiffel Tower

I expected the Eiffel Tower to be an impressive structure. But frankly, like most people I’ve seen a lot of those.

I almost didn’t walk over to the tower at all today. I had taken a bunch of photos from afar as I wandered the area nearby, and I felt sure it would be a tourist trap at the bottom of the tower. I got some good photos over at Napoleon’s Tomb (or whatever that place is called), and I almost walked back to the hotel after that because it rained for a little while. But the sun came out, and I had a Cuban cigar from Oktoberfest (and a non-smoking room), so I decided to stroll on over and see what I felt sure would be a tourist trap and find a nice place to sit in the shade and smoke my cigar.

And a tourist trap it was. The lines to go up to the top were so long I never even considered waiting in them, and there were various scam artists working the crowd. A cute young Bosnian girl asked me if I spoke English and I foolishly said yes, then she put on this incredibly sad face and showed me a crude note that explained she was living with her Mom as a refugee in Paris and needed money. “Please, please, Mister” she begged, and I laughed her off and then felt like a jerk. Note for not giving her money — for not thinking to take a nice closeup of her routine, of course! The traditional dress, the bright colors, the long wavy hair, the “cry me a river” eyes; it would have been gorgeous.

But outside of a 100-yard radius around the tower, it was a quite different scene. There were no scams at all (that I ran into), just lots of Parisians out on a Sunday afternoon doing whatever turned them on: walk the dog, toss a Frisbee, play basketball (on unicycles and in wheelchairs, no less), rollerblade, fence, kick-box, make out ( between humans or pigeons), and lots of other activities. There were little girls waiting for a chance to do competitive gymnastics routines, firemen giving kids and their Moms a chance to try out a real live fire hose, guys playing jazz to raise money for environmental causes, and kids just having fun everywhere while adults snapped pictures. And many of the people doing these routines were very creative and acrobatic. Cirque Du Soleil must have started when some French guy went to the Eiffel Tower on a sunny Sunday afternoon and said “hey, if we get professional dancers to do all this stuff on stage in Las Vegas, those dumb American tourists will pay a fortune for it!”

I could be wrong about that, but it was definitely entertaining and worth the sore feet it took to get over there and back. (My blisters from seven hours of walking around Oktoberfest got a lot worse today. It sucks being human sometimes.)

After posting all the thumbnails for the Oktoberfest photos below, I decided not to bother doing thumbnails for all these Paris shots — the home page is starting to load a bit slower than I’d like with all the graphics I’ve added lately. So you have to actually step through the Paris photos one at a time. If that doesn’t sound too tedious, you can click the image above to start at the beginning or click on any one of the other links above to start somewhere in the middle.