Friday was terrible for travel. The weather at Ohare was awful. From 2PM to 11PM I watched standby flights leave iwthout me, themselves later and later due to bad weather and intermittent airport closings. Mine left many hours late. Numerous flights to secondary fields were cancelled, filling the open seats with standbys.
When I arrived at my home airport, the offsite parking shuttle was no longer running, and only an answering machine answered their phone. So I checked into the airport hotel for a few hours sleep. I caught a morning shuttle and got home for breakfast.
It's the first time I've seen the new Boston skyline from harborside in the early morning light. It really is as beutiful as the tourism posters.
The WiFi at Ohare was useless. A little network monitoring revealed that it was melting under the intense load of a packed house of people trying to use it. Municipal WiFi plans and others will need to face the reality that there is no magic free lunch. Shannon's law still applies despite all claims to the contrary and there is a finite capacity for WiFi.
As an accused "old man afraid of change" I must admit wasting almost a half hour before I remembered that I also have GPRS service on my cell phone. It was also suffering from heavy utilization by the thronging masses, but I was able to track the incoming flight (my airplane to be), check radar, and get some work done. Bandwidth was poor, so I didn't take the risk of trying to synchronize or move large files.
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