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Showing posts from 2011

Time Travel to the Past - Today's Airline Cabins

During a recent flight, while I was suffering the indignities that befall travelers these days, I was struck again by how primitive the experience remains inside the cabin, particularly flying domestically on US carriers. This is not not the mindset of an Information Technology / CIO speaking, rather the thoughts of an experienced traveler. Quite literally, it is as if time has stood still in those airline cabins. Thinking back to some of my earlies tmemories on the Lockheed Constellation ,  Douglas DC-7 , and the  Boeing 707  not much has changed, and what has, is for the worse Domestic airline cabins today are the equivalent of technical “ Death Valley ” devoid of and hostile to technology life. It seems inconceivable that Wi-Fi broadband access is not available. Moreover, the lack of personal video screens for everyone strikes me as an opportunity lost for the carriers. To begin, the screen’s absence, certainly impacts customer satisfaction in my view. I think this is especially

Spring Thaw: Good Time for CIOs to Check Their Offsite Data Centers

It has been a long winter for many of us in the US . Many horror stories were common, spanning from the humorous to the downright tragic. I am not sure if homeowners or business were harder hit this year, I just know that everywhere I went it seemed that I saw damaged property, especially roofs and people with assorted winter related injuries --- many from too much snow removal. Focusing on the business side, my impression was that most commercial buildings suffered leaks at one point or another. Flat roofs tend to precipitate that outcome, particularly in a year with more than 2x the average snowfall as we have had here in the greater Boston area. More troubling, as Murphy would have it, the leaks make their way into conduits and/or data centers in some cases. I had a recent conversation with an associate who thought they had made it through the winter unscathed until some of the ice recently started thawing. At that point, water started flowing into a wiring room. For t