Cyber Monday and the Wrong Flight

I am on a flight today headed back to Salt Lake City. I picked today to fly trying to avoid the tail-end of Thanksgiving travel. I also knew I could get some important work done on the flight with the help of in-flight Internet. I'm glad I planned to work as the plane's entertainment service isn't working. They've reset the system 3 times now without success. It is kind of annoying but it means I can focus more of my attention on getting work done. Sometimes you pick the right flight where there are empty seats next to you or something amazing happens. Today is not that day.

Today also happens to be Cyber Monday when all of the online stores have their biggest sales. Once again my e-mail inbox received a flood of messages encouraging me to spend money on potential Christmas gifts. Once again I am not really interested in spending money. It would probably be a good idea to come up with a list of gifts for those on my list before Black Friday and Cyber Monday roll around. Then I could take advantage of some of the deals. Fortunately the discounts seem to stick around up until the big day. Then everything really goes on sale.

One sale I knew would happen today is that from the airlines. I received a special e-mail from both Alaska and Delta as those are the two carriers I use the most. I'm sure I also got one from Southwest but skipped over it as I have not been flying them recently. Don't get me wrong, they are a great airline with spectacular deals. I just prefer nonstop flights and Southwest seems to have multiple legs whenever I want to go somewhere. That doesn't mean I don't check their schedule first as it serves as a great baseline price.

I also received a lot of e-mails from hotel chains that I tend to use for business travel. There are some great deals out there. Unfortunately, for my personal travel I have been scouring AirBnB for most of my overnight accommodations recently. For about the same price as a hotel, I can get a living room and a kitchen. It is only business trips where I use hotels any more. Since the company is paying for it, I don't mind staying in hotels and eating out at restaurants.

Speaking of business travel I should probably get back to work. There is a lot going on this week and I need to get ready for all of the events. Then I can wind down for the Christmas break.

Free Airport WiFi

Last night I was in the Delta terminal 2 at JFK trying to read my e-mail. The airports I visit most frequently have free WiFi. All I have to do is turn on my computer, pull up a browser, confirm I am willing to abide by their use policy, and I have Internet access. In Salt Lake there are no strings attached. In Oakland, I generally have to watch a 30-second video advertisement. That one video gives me 30 minutes of use. If I need more, I just watch another ad. You can imagine my surprise when New York's largest airport didn't have free WiFi.

All I had to do was go onto my phone and I could read my e-mail. While the process is painless to get my e-mail, I prefer the full-size keyboard on my laptop. Fortunately I only had to respond to one or two e-mails before catching my flight and none of my messages needed to be very large.

Here is a list of airports that I have personally visited and know have free WiFi:

• Haneda, Japan
• LAX - Los Angeles, CA, USA
• OAK - Oakland, CA, USA
• SLC - Salt Lake City, UT, USA

The list is small right now, so I will have to continue to update it as I fly. Hopefully you find it useful.

No VPN Access

This morning I got up early and immediately went to work in my office at home. I got through my e-mail in a hurry and was feeling like I had a great start on the day. Then I had to run a quick errand. Rather than remain logged into my company's virtual private network (VPN), I logged out. My errand only took 20 minutes and when I got back in front of my computer, I tried to log in again. I got an error saying: "Your primary account has been disabled." Gee, I hope I didn't get fired. I like my job.

Actually I have a pretty good idea what the problem is. When I first started this job almost 2 and a half years ago, I was given 2 different accounts. On some of the computers at work, I log in using a mix of several characters from my first name with my complete last name. On the rest, I just use my first initial with my last name. It can be confusing at times and I ran into a problem a few weeks ago. Now our IT department is making an effort to unify all of my accounts and I am sure this is a temporary side-effect. It is a good thing Snowbird is open as I know how I am going to spend the rest of my day while they get this resolved.