I usually have some time to pass at airports before I leave. I don't like the pressure of having to rush through security checks, running though gates barely making my flight. Well, this time it was a bit more extreme because we were going to stay the entire evening and a almost full night at one of the newest airports in the middle-east: Tel Aviv terminal 3.

I checked the local situation at the airport in advance, so I knew that WiFi would be free across the airport. That is a good way to do some work: being stuck without any place to go and having no other option but to be productive. If you are lucky you can actually see the productivity on the tarmac as well, stimulating me even further. This is actually a pretty good scenario for me, which leads to highly productive hours: me, a laptop, nothing that disturbs me and a comfortable, stimulating place to work.

This usually works as long as my batteries don't die on me. Normally that takes about two hours. Then I found out to my horror that there is no convenient way to get electricity at Tel Aviv airport. There is electricity used by all kinds of equipment, but they put the open sockets at places which are so uncomfortable that they are impossible to use. What about the cleaners, where does he get his power from? The sockets for the cleaners are safely locked away behind small panels in the walls. The panels are placed quite well for a traveller, near the nice row of chairs, but locked. So somebody actually made a point in putting panels with locks, with all kinds of practical key management implications, in front of power outlets. What a great way to annoy a customer.

Then it hit me: this is actually one of the biggest paradoxes of working at modern airports. Many airports claim to provide for the needs of the modern traveller, but none of them really do. There isn't a single airport I've seen that provides both free WiFi and electricity near a convenient place. Some leave a couple of power sockets open near a couple of well-known seats to a couple of energy hungry world travelers to use. Others provide free WiFi to all passengers. None of them do both. None of them provide a great working atmosphere if you are waiting for your next flight. To me it is amazing than in a modern world these simple basic needs aren't provided to modern travellers. I saw all the new airports, none of them were really business oriented like that. The airport designers still live in the days that flying was much more than a glorified bustrip, and that tax-free really was somthing that made sense. If airports really want to make a change, lets focus on providing facilities for business travelers that make sense from a productivity point of view: provides us with internet and electricity.

Posted on Monday 25 of August, 2008 [21:18:11 UTC]

Time to leave the hot and humid climate of Israel and go home. Finally. Unfortunatly, our flight would be leaving at 5:00. We anticipated a lot of security measures so we checked in on-line (removing the dependency of the airline desk to be open) and went very early to the airport. Being practial we went at 19:00 to the airport: we had to go there very early in the night anyway, so there would be no use in going to our hostel anyway.

I have seen a lot of airport security in the past decennium. Security is a totally new experience in Israel. Normally a passport check is a formality: they just want to know if you are the rightfull owner of the passport. Not in Israel. Every visum that left its marks gets questioned by the officer. So I have colleagues that travel a lot to exotic places, which had left its marks. Even countries like Marocco are questioned. So that is a bit more inquisative than the usual inspections.

Then we have the next step: the physical check before entering the airport. That is a totally new one to me. Believe me, I have seen a lot of inspections at modern airports, including the new one at Schiphol which completely X-Rays your body. It wasn't the check of my person that was different. It was my luggage.

This thoroughness of the inspection of my bags was a first for me. Routine prescribes that you have to take your laptop out. Nothing unusual there. About 25% of the time I am requested to take out my media player as well. This check went beyond that. All electronics had to come out seperately through the scanner. My bag is packed as a preparation for this kind of request, but it always comes as a surprise when they do ask to put in each part seperately. Not a big deal there.

But to top it off, they want to "sniff" all electronics with a pad. Each bag, laptop, camera, phone and media player were rubbed with the pad, which subsequently was analyzed by special machine. In the US and UK they use the same equipment if something odd shows up on the X-Ray. In Israel they inspected all of our electronics in much detail with the pad. Each small piece of electronics is touched and inspected.This kind of thoroughness is unseen but also very time-consuming.

I have a bit of mixed fellings about this kind of thoroughness. Yes it makes mee feel safe: there is no way in the world you can mask anything bad as electronics and fool the security. Multiple redundancy is better than a single check. On the other hand, it is a huge delay when a lot of peaple are in front of you. It is particular annoying when you see that local citizins are not checked with pads.

As I said, airport security in Israel is a new experience to me. Although I admire its thoroughness, I do wonder about its practical implications on travel behaviour: at some time it will become time/cost efficient to go by train instead of the airplane....

Posted on Monday 25 of August, 2008 [20:37:16 UTC]

Normally checking in is a formality, an optimization of the seating arrengement providing a bit more comfort as well as a way to evade a lot of waiting. Not this time. This time we were quite motivated to make very sure we would be on the flight to Amsterdam. We really wanted to go home after three days of work in a warm climate and less comfortable nights in a hostell. One of the most important reasons to be anxious was that the flight was overbooked to the maximum. Our booking agent also indicated that this was the case for the three days following so missing the flight effectivly means that we would have some chance three days later.

Another thing with our flight was that it would leave at 5:00 in the morning. So you really don't get a decent night of sleep when you are flying. Being bumped off the flight means that you have to be there the next night to repeat the same procedure. That isn't the best way to spend your nights.

Since we where treated by the airline as employees, we would not get the same rights as other passengers: being bumped off the flight does not mean an alternative flight the same day. Nor would it mean that we would be helped in finding a hotel in an already overcrowded Tel Aviv. So missing the flight would imply that we probably had to spend three days sleeping in our hostell without shower or airconditioning and spending the night at the airport hoping to get onto the next flight home. Those are quite powerfull motivators to make very sure to get onto the flight by checking in very early.

One of the challenges is that checking in has to be done on time if you want to have something to say about getting a seat. You can check in 30 hours in advance through the internet. This is really the way to go. When you check in the airport, you can only do that three hours in advance, leaving 27 hours for others to fill the plane. Side-effect is that you can only enter the airport when you are checked in, so you have to be there at 2:00, a great time to be something with papers and security. So the internet way is the only way on a very busy early morning flight.

Questions remains: how? We had to check in at 23:00 and without a trusted infrastructure of WiFi at a decent hotel this would prove to be difficult. Our Hostell lacked anything modern, and finding a hotel that was more into the current centure might be a bit dangerous: sniffing for WiFi might get us arrested. Getting arrested would solve our housing problem and might even be an improvement, but it wouldn't solve our getting home problem. So "borrowing" a WiFi connection wasn't an option.

The expensive way is to use GPRS and our airline had a mobile optimized website, making this an expensive internet connection but not ridiculously expensive if we keep it to just confirming our seats. There was a catch to this solution: there are three of us travelling as group and the mobile site only allows the check-in of individual travellers. This is actually a strange limitation: the browser is capable of handling more than one line of text. So for our check-in, this definitely wasn't the road to go.

So we tried the most expensive option: using the mobile phone as a modem for the laptop and go for the full-fledged website. This is expensive because most sites are quite heavy in terms of graphics and scripting. Unfortunatly, Vodafone has something against certain types of Java-script which is used to power the internet check-in of the full-fledged site. The site was impossible to navigate and data couldn't be entered, making the check-in impossible. Again we hit a hurdle that was impossible to take.

So we reverted to the ultimate back-up: one of us called his wife and asked to enter all the data on the website while we talked to her. After completing the reservation she sent the resulting pdf-file to our e-mail adresses, so we could print them during the day. Not the cheapest solution and certainly not the simpelest solution, but it made sure we had confirmed seat numbers on the flight, which means something (but certainly not everything, we also assumed we had confirmed reservations at our hotel). One worry less on our way home.

Posted on Sunday 24 of August, 2008 [21:56:49 UTC]

For our customer we had to travel to Israel. It was kind of a rush-job and getting tickets was already extremely difficult because of the huge holliday traffic to Israel. The next step was finding a hotel to stay for three nights. That proved to be even more challenging: every major hotel in Tel Aviv was fully booked. Even when we opted hotels near Jeruzalem, everything was also fully booked. So we opted to include the smaller, less known hotels. Generally there is nothing wrong with these hotels: they are smaller and are mostly run by dedicated people living to serve thier guests. They just aren't huge with large corporate holdings behind them. We use smaller hotels more often and generally there isn't much of a problem there.

So we booked the Ophir hotel in Tel Aviv for three persons. It certainly wasn't our first choice. In fact it was our last choice: reviews were extremely negative. It was supposed to be filthy with rude staff and a lot of noise. There was talk about cockroaches. But then again, you shouldn't believe everything you read on the internet: stories do have the tendency to become negative. Somehow, complaining is a lot easier then praise on review sites on the internet. Anger is a powerfull motivator. Given, it was the worst reviewed hotel in all Israel, but it was also the only one with hotelrooms below $1500 per person per night. And our customer did mind the budget. One might think of a causal relation here: worst reviewed hotel in the country and plenty of vacancies. But you never will know for sure until you try and again, you shouldn't believe everything you read on the internet anyway. Since it was our only option to meet deadline and budget, we went for it. Sometimes you have to be adventurous to make a project work.

One of the disadvantages of the flight was that it landed at 2:30 in the morning. After security, customs and some travel it was 3:45 before we arrived at the hotel. Just enough to sleep about 4 hours before going to the vendor and start work. It's a tight schedule, but that is the disadvantage of working on a project for an airline.

Unfortunately, the boy at the desk could not find a reservation for us. I don't blame him. Given the huge pile of disorganized papers and rubbish on the thing they liked to call the front desk, I would be surprised if he could find the desk itself. As experienced travelers, we are a "bit" more organized. In fact, with less known hotels, everything is triple-checked and reported to us. So despite him not being able to find any records of reservations, we could. All our mobiles contained the same e-mail track of the hotel reservation. We could show him the reservation by the travel agent, we could show the final confirmation of the travel agent and we could show that our office had contacted the hotel directly to perform the triple-check. We had records showing them accepting our company credit card in advance for the payment as well as the reservation numbers we got from them.

All the records we showed did not impress the boy at the front desk. Above that, he didn't have a room for us because the hotel was booked full completely anyway. So there we were, about 4:00 in the morning and no bed in the whole of Tel Aviv to sleep in. I must say sleeping in a barn, like some historical people did 2000 years before me when they were in these areas, was not an option for us. A check on my mobile quickly revealed that Expedia still did not report any hotels providing any beds in or near Tel Aviv, besides the Ophir hotel. We all knew that that wasn't the case.

The only remaining option was to lower the standards even further. It is hard to imagine, but there is actually a class of hotels below the Ophir hotel. After some pressure on the boy behind the desk, threatening to sleep in the staircase until he got his boss to come to the hotel, he started to make some phone calls to sleeping places around him. It wasn't his biggest priority: MSN was more important to him, but he kept making phone calls to the sleeping places in the neighborhood.

Finally, after half an hour pressuring the boy into making calls, he found a place to sleep for us. It didn't have a shower, no air-conditioning nor a TV and it was actually just 4 beds in a room. We were quite happy to sleep everywhere where it was safe and dry, so we went over there. Finally, at 5:00 we could grab some sleep.

That was not the end for us. The next morning we made the call to the office. After they made some calls, they found out that they cancelled on us, but they forgot to tell anybody. It was just a "small" clerical error on their side. No apology, no nothing. So although it does help to have a very organized iternary, it does not protect you from incompetence of your hotel.

Posted on Thursday 21 of August, 2008 [19:35:18 UTC]

10 years ago I bought my first PDA. Since then my needs and technology used have changed a lot, but in essence it still is the same device, helping me to keep my life on track. I like to share this history, in the hope it will shed some light in what the trend of technology and my personal use is, but above all because I think it’s a good story to share.

My reason for buying my first PDA was simple: I hated the overhead, errors and omissions that came from copying appointments from our electronic system to my paper agenda. The company I worked had the policy that all appointments had to be registered in the central groupware system. My secretary also was able to make appointments in this system as well, so it was quite challenging to keep my paper copy of the calendar in sync with the electronic version. After several planning incidents with customers I concluded that my core competence was not copying appointments back and forth between two versions of my calendar: to me it was a huge waste of time and I wasn’t good at it either. Printing wasn’t an option either, since it only removed half of the duplication effort. So I decided to go the completely digital road.

It was august 1998 and Palm ruled with its Vx-line. Although it was a great looking device, I felt that it lacked the robustness I was looking for. It also demanded me to change my handwriting to something it would understand, instead of trying to understand mine. I hate it when technology requires me to change behaviour to use it. By accident I stumbled upon a newcomer in the market. I lived in Eindhoven, home town of Philips. They had just introduced the Philips Nino to the market, which in a small town like Eindhoven doesn’t go unnoticed. It was a first for them, but it looked great, so I decided to buy it, against market trend. I knew Philips would always deliver a high quality product that stood the test of time.

On hindsight that was a great decision. The Nino 300 is in fact a fantastic device. Although syncing my calendar to Novell Groupwise proved a little bit challenging at the time, the device was great in the field. It was a robust device with a strong touch-screen. It had room for 2 AA-batteries which kept it running for about two days. It also was ahead of its time by providing handwriting recognition which was about 85% accurate when it was decently trained. It was biggish but it was comfortable when you had it in your hands.

I quickly discovered that it wasn’t just a good tool for making appointments. I also learned that it could contain contacts, a to-do list and could take notes as well. That added functionality was actually a great boost for my personal effectiveness. You simply jotted down a task and it was recorded. I had to learn to execute the task, which still proves challenging, but that is another topic altogether. All my business cards went into the Nino as well, which allowed me to find them quickly when I needed them.

In mid-2000 I was assigned to run a project: the acceptance testing of the air traffic control center of EuroControl in Maastricht. Since I just moved to the other side of the country, I was looking at 5 to 6 hours of travel on a daily basis. Although that kind of long travel happened occasionally before, doing this on a daily basis really changed my needs. Since I had a Eurocontrol desktop, there wasn't much need to toss my laptop around. This made my Nino the only device for making notes during my trip. Although the occasional note would work fine, entering any long text quickly was painful; the recognition accuracy was too low and it was too slow when you are really in a flow: it basically broke the flow. I also got frustrated by the fact that I had to toss around my Nino and a MP3-player, which sounded a bit overdone to me.

Another new point was triggered by the level of isolation of an organization of EuroControl. It is a busy organization and it was disconnected to a fairly big degree: there literally was no outside news available there. That led to the situation where I started travelling at 6:00 and arrived home at about 20:00, without seeing any kind of news. Although my Nino had an internet browser, it could not deal with any kind of mobile phone acting like a modem. And I really wanted to stay in the loop.

So in December 2000 I bought the HP Jornada 548. Its clamshell-like design really felt great. It was a lot smaller than the Nino and had a colour screen. The screen was smaller, but it looked great. It could play MP3’s which I could store on the 32MB CF card I bought with it. Because it had a jog-wheel on the side, it could even be fitted inside my pocket and still change the song. Handwriting recognition was about 90% to 95%, which proved enough for the time, even when making longer texts. Energy wise it lasted about a day when used normally and about half a day when used as a MP3-player, but since I could charge it on both ends of the trip, that wasn’t much of a problem. I could also hook it up on my phone. By using my phone as a modem through infrared, dialing in to my own ISP, I could grab the news while travelling to and from work.

This was quite allright until in February 2002 I switched jobs and ended in a very small company of high-end IT specialists. My life became less predictable: I had customers at locations I had never been before, so I wanted to use maps to find my way around. TomTom Citymaps was the only maker of PDA-maps for the Netherlands, but they required more than the Jornada could give. Battery life became another major issue: I could not charge at both ends of the trip anymore. I also got fed up with InfraRed for grabbing e-mail and browsing: it wasn’t robust enough and when you are on a platform of a train station it becomes a bit of a juggle to set it up while boarding a train and still grab that big attachment. There had to be a better way. So I started looking for something new.

In that time, there were 2 big competitors in the Bluetooth space: the HP Ipaq 3970 and the Fujitsu Siemens Loox. The Loox was a better looking device, better styled for my job. The Ipaq was bulky and far less appealing with its shiny surfaces and buttons. The Loox had an innovative ergonomic design with far less toy-like appearance. So after a wait of a couple of months I could finally buy one: I was the first in the Netherlands with that device. It gave me my maps. The Loox gave me bluetooth, which worked great with my phone and horrible with anything else. In combination with my phone it was great: my phone could stay in my bag while I grabbed my e-mail. However, it took me weeks to get any kind of bluetooth sync working with my laptop. It has some funny hardware bugs, like the backlight of the screen not turning on when it was too dark, but it was a great device. It was robust, light and quite reliable.

A couple of months later, we were taken over by a bigger company: CIBIT. Initially that didn’t mean much for my work, but later on in the process, I got more internationally oriented work. International work isn’t much different than national work, apart from the fact that many things embedded in your daily routine are ridiculously expensive. One of these things was GPRS. Although it was not cheap to use it in the Netherlands either, it reached absurd prices when used abroad: $50 per megabyte was not an exception. So I had to find another way of grabbing my e-mail and read the news. In mid 2004 I discovered that many places started to offer WiFi, some of them even for free as long as you were willing to pose as a paying customer. If I could grab the e-mail through WiFi it would be a huge improvement because I could still be as responsive as usual even while I was abroad.

There was a small wave of mobile devices with WiFi and I quickly discovered the HP Hx4700. Apart from its cryptic number it did provide a superbly engineered device. It looked great in its dark metal finish, not shiny at all. It also had a huge 4" screen, the thing I longed for since I left the Nino. It was great for note taking. It was a brilliant VGA screen which meant that everything was a bit sharper, which is easier on the eyes.

Near the end of 2004 my personal phone (an Ericsson T39m) was end-of-life: I had it for about 3 years and it was beaten up. I decided to change my simple personal phone for the more sophisticated i-Mate Jam. It was the first Windows Mobile power phone with a decent formfactor, which was important to me. It provided some more comfort when browsing the web, as well as a decent sync of my contacts to my phone, which comes in handy when you have a lot of people to keep track of. I really liked its candy-bar formfactor and its modest size. It would allow me to leave my Hx4700 home when away for pleasure. It worked quite well, although the smaller screen proved challenging for quick note-taking and inputting parts of names with handwriting recognition.

This was resolved a year later by the i-Mate K-Jam that had a keyboard. This was the Jam, but then with a keyboard. The frustration with the limited screen when taking notes was so big, that I was really happy to pay for another device. I loved the Jam, but the keyboard on the K-Jam simply completed too many important scenarios for me to let it slip by.

Also at the same time, i-Mate introduced the JasJar. A VGA device that also made calls (yes, it was that bad). First of all, it merged my busisness phone and PDA, making the number of devices to be managed one less. To me, it improved my effectiveness when travelling for business a lot. Until then I used my Hx4700 while travelling. Which was great, but writing e-mail is a lot easier if you do have a larger keyboard and can press send and forget about it. Actually the later spooked my mind a lot: I did not want to become too dependent on a shaky bluetooth connection to send critical e-mail: it was a huge stress factor for me to constantly check if the mail wasn't stuck due to some connection error. I just wanted to press send and get on with my life. Although it certainly had its limitations, it was a huge improvement with respect to the stand alone Hx4700.

So I replaced my PDA and two phones by two smartphones at the end of 2005, which was quite a nice and efficient setup. However,  in the beginning of 2007 I discovered a new kid on the block: the HTC P4350, which fixed major frustrations with the JasJar: its collosal size. I kept the K-Jam as business device, but I soon replaced it. The K-Jam had a smallish keyboard. The P4350 had a much better keyboard, and that was actually all I needed to resolve all my frustrations.

Looking back at this effectiveness experience, what you see is that many changes have been driven by optimizing technology to become more comfortable. The core functionality has never actually changed, it was just the connectivity and integration that changed, as well as the size.

Posted on Sunday 17 of August, 2008 [22:32:10 UTC]