Automatic arrival messages

I have signed up as beta tester for a service, ArrivedOK,which sends a text message to chosen mobile phones when your flight arrives at its destination. How does it know that you have arrived? You have to provide your flight schedule to their web-site. Then 30 minutes before your scheduled arrival, it starts scanning the mobile network for your number. Of course, if you have followed instructions, your phone is turned off. When you land and are allowed to turn on your phone, the ArrivedOK computer senses your phone and notifies the chosen mobiles with text (SMS) message of your choice.

They have built in rules which are supposed to prevent errors due to changes in flight schedules, or diversions, etc.

The site also allows you to list blogs, which are updated with arrival messages, similar to the text messages sent to the mobile phones. So look for messages on this blog in the near future. After the beta test, there will be a charge for this service, it will be interesting to see what they feel is the value to us frequent travellers.

For more information, click on the title above.

***LATE BREAKING***
I ran into a problem because their registration process did not filter out US based phone numbers. Currently their service works only for European based mobile phones. I heard from their customer support and they are working on a couple of solutions, the long term will take a few months to implement but will provide full SMS capabilities. They may also implement a short term solution which involves only email alerts and this could be ready in a matter of weeks.

Flight tracking gadget on blog

At the top of the blog page, I have added a gadget which shows the statistics of the flights I have taken since the beginning of 2009. The gadget shows a summary of miles, hours and count of flight segments, but you can view detailed information, including maps, by clicking on the summary.

Portable Speakers for laptop TV viewing

I am now carrying around (in my main suitcase, not laptop bag) a pair of USB driven speakers. I bought these from TigerDirect for less than $20, including shipping. They work really great when I use my Sling connection or Netflix Instant in my hotel room.

They certainly beat the puny speakers built into the laptop.

Ode to small airports

One of the advantages of visiting many different locations as a consultant, is that you often get to experience small airports. Currently I am travelling reguarly through GSP (Greenville-Spartanbug). It has 7 gates on the A side (I think) and 4 on the B side (I know). They also provide free internet service. So I have something to do while I wait fro my departure. of course, since it is such a small airport and the TSA lines are normally negligible, I do not need to worry about arriving early for my flight.

So I do not usually have time to enjoy the free Wi-Fi. :-(

Save some paper...save a tree

With refernce to my NW flight a few weeks ago, I forgot to mention that NW have an excellent green initiative. When checking in on-line for a multi-segment itinerary, you only print one boarding pass, which contains info of both (or more?) flights. DL is still printing one boarding pass per segment (per page), even if you select to not print the destination information. So here is another idea that DL will hopefully merge into the the new DL-NW system.
Actually there are quite a number of computer related items that DL can learn from NW:
Multi segment boarding passes
Segement related Outlook update (instead of just one for the whole itinerary)
User friendly flight status notification (i.e. ability to look up active items, even if you do not thave the notification number)
2D barcodes for mobile check-in (Strangely enough the original blog posting about the DL trail at LGA actually shows a 2D barcode!)

Oh well, maybe one day they will get their tech act together