Airplane Tickets Printed or on Your Phone

I do a lot of travel for my job and am coming up on having flown over 2 Million miles. When it comes time to print out a ticket for a flight there are 2 options. The first is to actually use an old-fashioned printer and print a paper ticket. The second is to send a QR code to a smartphone and use that to board the plane. One would think it is a no-brainer and the smartphone is the way to go. For the technically savy, I would agree. My preference is to print a paper ticket though.

Yes I know that my seat may be updated between the time I check in and when I actually board my flight. If I used the airline's app, the seat is automatically changed and I don't have to pay attention to the monitors in the terminal. I also don't have to worry about losing my ticket. As I have said, the smartphone ticket seems to be the way to go.

The problem is that smartphones slow the boarding of the plane. I'm not sure how so many people can have such problems getting the ticket scanner to read a phone screen but it happens. I have waited for several minutes behind passengers who don't know you need to turn up the brightness so the QR code can be read properly. I have also seen countless travelers not able to find their ticket on the phone. Then of course there is the dreaded screen lock. You have your ticket ready to scan only to have the screensaver kick in and blank out the screen as you go to scan it. Ultimately I have found that pulling out a paper ticket speeds things up and gets me onto the plane quicker.

Amateur Scientists and Explorers

It is no secret that I enjoy my job at Sony. I love what I do and my work conditions could not be any better. However that doesn't keep me from thinking about changing careers every now and then. I've thought about being a high-school teacher and even spent a week as a substitute one. Unfortunately kids treat substitutes with an insane amount of disrespect. The morning of the first day of class a kid walked in and said, "You must be a total looser if this is the only job you could get." Little did he know that I could afford to be a substitute teacher because of my successful career in the tech industry.

I've also thought about making my passion my career. I could follow my youngest daughter's career path and be a ski instructor or work at a ski resort. My fear is that skiing would then become like work. Right now when I head up to the ski resort before work, it doesn't matter what the weather is like, I will only be there for an hour and don't mind skiing in storms. If skiing became my job, I might learn to detest snowy days instead of embracing them like I do now.

I've also thought about doing something relating to sailing. I currently have a sailboat that I keep in the Great Salt Lake and love to take it out as my schedule permits. The only problem with a sailboat is that it is a hole in the water you pour money into and there are not a lot of ways to make money with them. Sure I could try to offer tours but that requires getting a captain's license and that takes a lot of work.

I was thinking along the lines of how to make money with a sailboat and came up with a new idea related to our planet's oceans. It doesn't require a sailboat but tiny submarines instead. Imagine a spherical submarine the size of a softball or large grapefruit with 3 or 4 fins and a propeller. When it sits in the water, it barely floats so that if it loses power, the submarine would automatically rise to the surface. Now put a solar panel on the top of it to charge the device's battery. You could include a number of sensors such as GPS, pressure, and temperature. You may even put a 4K camera on the front of it with some sort of low-power LED illumination. If you do it right and control costs, my guess is you could keep the price under $100. That would allow all sorts of amateur scientists and explorers to use them for any number of purposes.

I think the idea has merit and am looking for feedback. No I don't plan to leave Sony to create such a device nor do I think they have any plans to create one, though I could always ask. Instead I would like to open source the idea and get feedback on what sensors should be included and how it would be used. Some simple ideas might be tracking the changes in ocean currents or using AI and the camera to have the device follow specific marine life without attaching a tag. Who knows, it might best provide a platform to improve current marine research technology.

Let me know what you think and if there is use for such an inexpensive robot submarine. How do you think it would best serve the marine research community? With an idea like this, feedback is always appreciated.