I was totally stoked – they have Internet on the plane. Satellite service broadband. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to go online – it seems that their credit card processing system wasn’t processing. I initiated a text chat with their support personnel and seconds before they were about to grant me free access to their Internet service for the flight, the battery on my laptop died…. Of course, flying economy means that there are no recepticles to charge your laptop and the power in the Kitchen was 1000W and had a frequency of 400Hz. I didn’t want to risk the frequency and what it might potentially do to my laptop so I decided to not charge it on the plane.

One item to remark, we flew in on an Airbus A340. The Internet service is known as Conexion by Boeing. Only in the airline industry would they do this. I’ve never heard of a Toyota with a Nissan radio or GPS onboard for example.

Not having Internet on the flight, I was forced to go Analog. I finally got around to doing some reading and also spent some time getting to know the person beside me. The fellow was from South Africa, going to Belgium from Vancouver (attended a conference). We learned about each other in depth and will probably hook up at some point in time – he works with satellites and has been taking a University research project to fruition in this genre.

He commented about how Africa wasn’t advanced and the mentality which was underlying – the story stuck:

A tractor salesman comes to a home on the edge of a small maize farm in Africa, the owner is sitting on the porch smoking his pipe and drinking his beer. The salesman comments to the farmer how if he doubled the size of his farm, in the next year he could supply maize to his neighbour and then if he doubled it again the year after, he could supply it to his other neighbours and then the following year, to the villagers and then he could buy a tractor to turn the fields for him. This would give him more money so he could come home and sit on his porch and drink his beer.

The story stuck about how in Africa there is abundance and so people don’t think about tomorrow because there is plenty for today. Things are changing with the wars, famine and AIDS epedemic but slowly.

Some pics from the now…

Next stop Nice for Etre 2004. Incidentally, I just got off the line with Jimmy, they need me out in Japan ASAP. I’ll be there November 1st for at least a couple weeks.