Those wacky Brazilians

[c9]

• I flew home from Winnipeg on one of Air Canada's new Embraer 190 jets. Awesome. USB ports in the seats for some reason, in-seat touch-screen TV/movie/games/music/news, and very sleek and modern styling inside.
• But ashtrays everywhere.
• Also very loud in row 24.
• And my noise-cancelling headphones had been accidentally switched on at some point during my trip, so the battery was dead when I tried to use them on the plane.

Finally, for the bored, a joke:

Donald Rumsfeld is giving the President his daily briefing on Iraq. He concludes by saying: "Yesterday, 3 Brazilian soldiers were killed."

"OH NO!" the President exclaims. "That's terrible!" His staff sits stunned at this display of emotion, nervously watching as the President sits, head in hands. Finally, President looks up and asks, "How many is a brazillion?"

Thanks very much, I'm here all week. Try the fish.

Comments

[ironmanjt.livejournal.com]

They're USB 2.0 ports, which are actually for charging things. Yes, I know, how many things do YOU own that are USB powered. I did charge my iPod though as I sat on the plane in YYZ waiting to leave for DCA....and waiting....and cancelling 3 hours later.

They are nice planes though - at least we got movies while we waited.

[c9.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I realized later that I could have charged my Shuffle. But it was mostly charged anyway.

[gotwoody.livejournal.com]

Aside from charging things (which I hadn't heard of before but sounds neat), I was told those ports are for future support of game-controllers.. In-flight entertainment at it's best. Network Halo, anyone?

[putaindemerde.livejournal.com]

That joke is one of the funniest things ever... of course, you know me. Anything that trashes our loser cowboy president makes me laugh heartily.

I'm a bit confused about the airplane... ashtrays? I mean, even as a smoker, I find that positively disgusting. :-P

[c9.livejournal.com]

Umm... ashtrays are on like every airplane. They're just not used. It's only brand new planes that have few if any -- though this one still had lots.

To clarify, there was not any actual smoking, nor anything IN the ashtrays.

[putaindemerde.livejournal.com]

*phew* because I just can't imagine sitting in such a tiny enclosed area with people smoking around me... which probably explains why I'm not too big on bars in ATL. LOL

[benjidacruick.livejournal.com]

haha nice joke. I shared it with my american relatives... they enjoyed the chuckle even know they votes for that jerk.

ashtrays everywhere on the plane? weird. better than snakes, I suppose.

[simplisticton.livejournal.com]

I was on one of these on my last flight to Washington. The design of the in-flight media system is truly atrocious.

- generally slow, laggy, and unresponsive touch interface

- it allows you to browse, select and queue shows to watch, then politely tells you that the system is currently unavailble and jumps back to the main menu, losing your settings.

- once the system becomes available, and you're watching something, if you pause for more than a few minutes, or rewind, watch out, it's likely to crash

- it crashed with about 15 minutes of the episode left and took about 30 minutes to reboot. Nice!

- once it had rebooted, she went back through the multitude of menus, got to the episode, selected it and... "system unavailable". Argh!

[c9.livejournal.com]

My experience was far less frustrating, but I agree on the slow, laggy, and unresponsive touch interface. I also had counterintuitive behaviour in the music playlist queuing.

[simplisticton.livejournal.com]

Gimicky gadgets. I hate 'em. Although my trip was in March, so it's quite possible they've released updates since then.

I'm convinced that the ease of releasing updates these days has totally undermined the quality of software. Back in the day when your program was going to be mass produced in a ROM package, it was very, very important to get it right. These days, a big crasher bug is no big deal, just fix it with a downloadable patch...

[rebelprince26.livejournal.com]

wait, your headphones are battery powered?

[c9.livejournal.com]

Yeah, they're noise-cancelling. So they listen for the roar of the plane and then spit out the opposite soundwave to make it disappear. I can listen to my music at a quiter volume -- it rocks. They're totally low-rent headphones though, so maybe for Xmas I'll ask for the spiffier ones.