Here am I sitting on an America Airlines plane traveling NY to LAX. I’m watching The Hurt Locker movie on my laptop while I receive and transmit email. Yes, a plane at 35,000 feet with fast wireless Internet. $14.95 for the trip. The movie is engrossing (at least to me) — far more than Avatar. A cute irony of these two is that the directors of of both — James Cameron of Avatar and Kathryn Bigelow of Hurt — were once married. They’re now vying for an Oscar for best director.
I check into our La Quinta, CA holiday house rental and check its Internet speed:
That’s hugely fast. It’s Time Warner’s RoadRunner turbo service, running wirelessly on a Linksys (Cisco) router. I’m 20 feet from the router. I bet it would be even faster if I plugged in or moved closer. I’ll check today. Meantime, its speed is a joy.
“Joy” means it’s both more reliable and you can do more things reliably — like watch online movies, send and receive all those big mega-pixel photos from last week’s party. And suddenly, WordPress becomes magically reliable. Remember WordPress? It’s the software I’m using for writing, editing, composing and designing this web site.
It’s only yesterday that I wrote a piece on a NYC to LAX plane, then begged an American Airlines lady to let me plug my “laptop” into her landline so I could transmit the story back to my editor — all at 300 bits per second. My line today here in California is 6,500 times faster! That’s in about 20 years. Truly amazing. Imagine in the next 20 years.
And, to think I once was a part of it with my telecom, networking, computer telephony and Internet magazines and trade shows. Heh, my distributor tells me sales of Newton’s Telecom Dictionary (see in the right column) are picking up.
Consumer confidence numbers are awful. But I’m healthy. The weather in the desert of California’s Coachella Valley is gorgeous. There was lots of rain recently. And this week the wildflowers will explode. I promise I will not bore you with flower photos. My partner on the old publishing business is already boring me with bird pictures. He was great in the business at selling and organizing all our salespeople. Now he can identify a bird from five miles away — without even looking at the thing. His new ability gives boredom a whole new meaning.
I shouldn’t complain. It amuses him. And Nikon sells him a lot of long, big, expensive lenses.
I continue to like China, Chile, Australia and Brazil. The markets have recently come in, but I believe they’ll come back in coming months.
Good news from the stockmarkets:
Cartoon from The New Yorker.
And now for one stupid idea the Obama administration hasn’t thought of, yet. The Mortgage Police.
Cartoon from The New Yorker.
Harry
Your charts are still being hidden by the grey column on the right side. I can see the bars on the chart but not the numbers.
I thought it was fixed….
Press the control key then roll the wheel on your mouse. Font and charts enlarge or shrink as needed.
Harry – so good to see you've finally moved this over to WordPress. I remember emailing you ages ago asking when you would, and you asked what benefit it would have.
I don't think I was able to answer then, but now I know I'll be able to add your rss feed to my different readers, which means I'll probably be checking back much more.
I seem to recall reading some of the new providers for internet on aircraft at work: http://www.AviationWeek.com
And as a footnote, here at worked they launched a tool call Top Performing Company. It was initially intended to provide CFO's and the like of A&D companies a way to benchmark their performance against their peers, but I kept thinking investors like yourself would actually find it potentially interesting, but not at the price point they were looking to charge.
All best!