Internet on a Plane

I have been traveling a lot with recent trips to Alaska, Mexico, and Hawaii. This has given me the chance to test Internet conditions for a lot of different environments including on a cruise ship. I spend all day working in front of a computer and while the device is important, an Internet connection is usually required to remain effective.

So why do I need an Internet connection? I spend a lot of time communicating with my fellow employees. E-mail is good for this but I also use Microsoft Teams and the messaging included with it. I can live without those connections for only a short amount of time before people begin to worry. I also spend a lot of time working on shared documents. While I may have a local copy that I can edit on a plane, it sure is nice to have my changes seen immediately by others working on the document also.

Delta Airlines has started offering free Internet connections to all of the passengers that are members of their frequent flyer program. You don't have be any special status to use the service, just a member of the program. I gave it a try on a recent trip and discovered it works well. Unfortunately you cannot make voice or video calls but you can use it for e-mail, instant messaging, and editing shared documents. Delta claims that it is fast enough to watch a streaming movie and so I don't see why one wouldn't be able to use it for video calls other than the FAA regulation that prohibits it. I did notice the service felt choppy in some instances and I am not sure how the upload speed is so it may be a prohibiting factor.

I also had the chance to check out Alaska Airline's Internet service on my recent trip to Hawaii. While I flew out on a Sunday, I returned on a Thursday and worked on the plane as I flew home. I made sure to let my boss know I wouldn't be available for a meeting during my flight time. Unfortunately the service is not free for everyone. As a T-mobile customer, I had an hour of free Internet service which I never tried. However I did set up texting from my phone and remained in contact with people during the flight.

The overall lesson learned from using Internet on a plane is that as long as I don't have any meetings, it is a viable option to remain productive. Unfortunately for me, I generally have meetings daily and so it is probably impossible to take a day to fly somewhere and count it as a work day. That is something I will need to remember as I make plans for future travel.

The Latest News Updates

Every once and awhile a news story captures your attention yet it doesn't seem that important to others. Fortunately we have the Internet that allows us to stay on top of the latest developments. That happened for me this week.

Two days ago, I received an e-mail from one of the sailing magazines I read regularly. They shared a story about a fellow sailor having problems off the coast of Mexico. He is in the process of bringing a record-breaking sailboat to Baltimore where he will begin to make some records of his own. Unfortunately he had some problems with his boat and is now considered lost at sea.

This is a story close to my heart as once I embarked on a trip from Honolulu to Los Angeles in a 37-foot sailboat. I left Hawaii a day or two after a hurricane came close to the Big Island. Once outside the reach of mobile phone service the only communication I had with my wife was via expensive satellite phone or e-mail using ham radio. One night early in the trip, she awoke panicked that my boat might be in danger and she waited anxiously for my daily e-mail. I'd spent 3 days sleeping off sea sickness and really didn't do much other than my 2-hour watches every 6 hours. Otherwise I was fine. 21 days after leaving Hawaii, I landed in Los Angeles and quickly caught a flight back home to Salt Lake. My whole family was very glad to see me.

Having crossed an ocean in a small boat, I know what Donald Lawson is going through as he tries to sail his boat on a vast body of water. Fortunately for me, I had 3 other guys on the boat with me and we all worked together well. Donald is alone and we don't know his fate yet. I keep an Internet search page open with several key words and update the search every hour to see if there is any news. I'm hoping he is still alive, as I'm sure his wife and family do too.

So far we know that the Mexican Coast Guard has found his overturned boat, which is a good starting point. The US Coast Guard has joined the search and as of several hours ago has confirmed they are also near Captain Lawson's boat. Unfortunately we don't know any more than that. I keep hoping there will be good news.

Normally I would go to major news networks like CNN to catch updates on the story. Unfortunately this is such a niche story, they are not even covering it. The Baltimore Banner has regular updates but they seem to keep repeating the same information over and over. They also have a cap on the number of free stories you can read from their site without subscribing. As this is the only time they will have a story I am interested in following, I don't feel the need to pay money.

I looked at the US Coast Guard's official site. They have a number of daily press releases but nothing yet on this story. I have also scoured Twitter without any luck. Usually they are a great resource for the latest updates and I use Twitter during ski season to find the latest updates on snow-induced road closures.

I sincerely hope there is a happy ending to this story. Unfortunately as each day passes, those chances diminish. I hope that when we do find the outcome, whether good or bad, it is not something that appears as a footnote instead of a headline, which it deserves. Until then, I'll be looking for updates.

Fresh Fruit From Hawaii

One of my favorite things about visiting Hawaii is getting fresh papaya. For some reason, the papayas here on the mainland just are not that great. After eating a particularly bland one here in Utah, my daughter took it upon herself to figure out the difference between mainland papaya and papaya from Hawaii. It turns out the fruit on the mainland is usually "Imperial Papaya" from Mexico and is about the size of an American football. The fruit in Hawaii is actually "Strawberry Papaya" or sometimes known as Hawaiian Papaya and is much smaller. It also tastes a lot better.

The net is that I love Hawaiian papaya and think mainland papaya tastes like earwax. I mentioned this yesterday to some friends and one remarked that he misses Hawaiian-grown pineapples. He even went so far as to say that he would pay a premium for real Hawaiian pineapples. I told him that you can get Hawaiian fruit air freighted to your home. That is what I do when I want real papaya.

For those reading that are willing to spend a little money to get some fresh Hawaiian fruit, my favorite place to get it is: Dole Fruit Hawaii. Every couple of weeks I will get a box and eagerly await its arrival.

One nice thing about the Internet is being able to find such interesting food. If you have a favorite food that you can't find in the usual stores, let me know as I am sure I am not the only one that appreciates tropical fruit during the cold winter months.

Online Research for Fun

Today I got an e-mail from Alaska Airlines letting me know about a one-day sale where they have great deals on flights but you have to buy them today. I have a lot of credit on the airline and so I surfed over to their site and started entering destinations. The first question is where to go. I thought about it for a second and looked at what it would take to go see my son in Ohio. Unfortunately Alaska does not have an optimized route between Salt Lake and Columbus. I'm not a fan of connections and the trip would require several of them. Next I checked about going to Orlando. After all, doesn't that sound like a fun destination? While the flights only required a single connection, all of the layovers seemed way too long. My final destination to check was Hawaii. Who doesn't want to spend part of December in Hawaii? Alaska Airlines has some great flights between Salt Lake and Hawaii for about $450 round trip on the dates I selected.

While I am tempted to book the flights to Hawaii, I have other things I need to do and ended my research there. I am asking myself if there could have been a perfect situation that would have me booking flights tonight. What about $200 round trip? That seems tough to pass up but I still would not have done it.

The Internet is a great tool that constantly amazes me. Tonight I did a bunch of research that would have required me to waste someone's time on the phone before the Internet. Now I can play around with a number of parameters without inconveniencing anyone. I wondered if I wasted my time this evening but got some entertainment out of the exercise. I wasted my time no more than if I watched a YouTube video or an old movie. Yes, doing online research can be entertaining and fun even if you don't buy anything.

Is Working From Home Driving Us Crazy?

Friday evening last week I boarded a plane in Lihue, Hawaii and made the disappointing trip home. I spent 5 weeks working from the wonderful tropical island of Kauai and could easily have spent another 5 weeks there. Unfortunately there are a number of duties I have back at home and am back to my old-boring routine of working from home in Utah.

In Hawaii, one of my nightly rituals included spending an hour at the pool and hot tub. Most of the people staying at the condo complex were vacationing and so I got to meet quite a few people. On one evening towards the end of my stay, I met a medical doctor who was in Hawaii for 3 weeks. His wife is also in the medical field and they only get one long break every year that they can use to take a vacation. This year they spent it in Kauai. It surprised him that I was there for 5 weeks. I explained that I didn't need to burn any of my vacation time as I was still working every day. That sparked a conversation about the negative impact of working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic.

While I have thrived working from home over the past 16 months, I am actually an anomaly. I don't have any kids at home that like to spend time on conference calls with me nor am I using my bedroom as my office. I have a dedicated office with all of the tools I need to keep working from home. My home office actually rivals my work office, which might explain one of the reasons I am thriving.

While sitting in the hot tub, the doctor and I discussed the various ailments that people are exhibiting because of working from home. He personally has noticed a lot of anxiety disorders. Part of that comes from using one's bedroom as their office. One of the work-from-home seminars I was asked to attend mentioned the problem with that. You start to associate your sleeping area as your work area and when it comes time to go to sleep at night, your mind reverts back to work and it can be difficult to fall asleep as well as stay asleep. Anxiety also arises from concern over dealing with younger children and keeping them entertained. Having a parent dedicated to watching the kids helps but a lot of families require that second income and so parents are juggling kids while trying to work.

Looking at the title of this post, I would say that the answer is definitely, "Yes," for a number of people. Working from home is definitely driving those people crazy. But with most broad statements like that, there are exceptions to the rule. The trick is to do everything you can to minimize the downsides of working from home until you are welcome back at the office. Then be prepared as some of your coworkers only show up at work when necessary.

Changing the Weather

As companies that have allowed everyone to work from home start implementing plans to return to office, they are preparing workers for changes. My own company has started recommending online training about how to prepare for the upcoming adjustments in our work environment. I watched a video this morning about we shouldn't be anxious about things that are out of our control and one of the examples was the weather. Interestingly enough, the weather is one of the things you can change and there are many examples of this around us.

I love winters in Utah because I love to ski. Unfortunately summers are just too hot for my taste. Instead of surviving this summer at home, I opted to get on a plane and spend the last 5 weeks in Hawaii. The average daily high is around 83 degrees Fahrenheit with the low around 72. I also get to see the rain daily, something that doesn't happen very often during the summer in Utah. So while I have not technically changed the weather in Utah, I have changed the weather for me by simply changing my location.

There are other examples of changing the weather. If it is raining, you can always seek shelter to where it is dry. If it is not raining and your lawn or plants need rain, you can water them with sprinklers or other types of irrigation.

How about the cold or the heat? How can you change that? Easy with modern heating and air conditioning systems. I doubt very many people would visit Florida in the summer if it wasn't for air conditioning. I also doubt may people would call Alaska home in the winter without heating systems. Sure you may not be able to change the weather for an entire outdoor area, but you can change it for where you are currently standing or sitting.

Often times you will hear an absolute that isn't really an absolute. Someone may say you can't change the weather when now you know you really can. Don't be afraid to challenge all absolutes as you may discover new ways of doing the impossible.

Internet in Hawaii

We have a unique opportunity in time right now. Those of us that can work from home can actually work from anywhere. Rather than stay in Utah and endure a blistering heatwave, my wife and I rented a place in Hawaii for 5 weeks this summer. We have been here almost 2 weeks and have enjoyed every minute of it. Don't worry, we have someone staying in our home back in Utah. We have to keep the lawn mowed and make sure the place doesn't burn to the ground on the 4th of July because of negligent neighbors.

In order for me to be able to work from Hawaii, I need a good Internet connection. So far I have not been disappointed. One of the first things I did when I got here was set up a PS4 and use it to remote into my PS5 at home. The PS4 is much easier to travel with and I actually did have a spare one that I could bring with me. The two consoles connected easily and I could play games easily.

A decade or so ago, the State of Hawaii wanted to reduce its economic reliance on tourism and so they helped build out their digital infrastructure. My Internet connection on the island of Kauai is significantly better than mine back in Utah. I don't have nearly the number of slow-downs that I do back home nor do I have the same latency issues. Basically things are working very well.

If you decide you also want to work from the Islands, rest assured that the Internet works very well over here.

Sailing from Hawaii to California

A few days ago I mentioned that I wanted to complete a sailing video I started working on about bringing a sailboat from Hawaii to California. Yesterday I used part of my day off because of MLK and finished the video. It can be found on YouTube and represents my latest effort in learning about how to make good adventure videos.

It is really easy to come up with ideas for videos but they take a lot of work to put together well. With this project, I started the video over a year ago. I pulled together all of the photos from the trip and realized that the 62 I had, weren't nearly enough. The interesting stuff that happened during the trip kept everyone so busy that nobody bothered to pull out a camera and take pictures of it. We had 2 cameras onboard but neither were any good compared to today's standards. A telephoto lens would have helped a lot but we didn't have one and never bothered to get pictures of whales or dolphins. Cameras also don't really show the magnitude of the waves on the open ocean either. You really need to be out there to understand how truly massive some of the waves got to be.

Once I had all of the photos, I needed to put together a script. To help me with that, I went through my journal and took notes about the significant events that happened daily. I then had to match story narration with the limited pictures. Needless to say, a lot of what happened doesn't appear in the video. While we started the sailing trip in the slop left over from Hurricane Jimena, the larger waves came at the end of the trip after another hurricane crossed Baja California and slapped us in the face. We were too busy hanging on to pull out a camera and take any pictures. Suffice it to say that we had several days where we surfed 50-foot waves for hours at a time.

With all of the night sailing I have done, it wasn't until this trip that I actually got to see where the story of mermaids came from. We had finally reached the coast of California and sailed into a patch of phosphorescence that lit up the water with any movement. The boat passing through created a glowing wake. We could also see fish swimming under the boat. We didn't know it but fish had been riding our bow wave the entire trip from Hawaii and dolphins knew they were there. Every so often a dolphin would swim toward our bow and grab one of the fish traveling with us. The glowing trail left by the dolphins looked very similar to the outline of a mermaid. We became so mesmerized by the scene we didn't even try to take a picture, not that one would have turned out because of the darkness.

Unfortunately I don't think I spent enough time working on the script as each time I view the video I come up with better ways of telling the story. I'd like to blame all my English teachers that required us to create a minimum essay length. Instead of learning to squeeze as much information into as few words as possible, I learned to use 20 words when 5 will do. It is a habit that will take the rest of my life to fix.

With this video I did learn a number of tricks to help with the sound. In the past I have added the background music first and then the narration. This time around I made sure to put the narration in first and that allowed me to adjust all of the narration sound levels so they match. Now the viewer is not distracted by some sections being louder than others.

Recently I browsed through a book on how to make successful YouTube videos and it suggested throwing away your first dozen. This represents my fifth video and I hope there is a marked improvement over videos in the past. After all, that is the purpose of this exercise.

E-Mail is Bad on Vacation

I just got back from a week in Hawaii and learned a very important lesson. I should say I re-learned a very important lesson: Avoid e-mail and as much technology as possible while on vacation. As usual, I brought my laptop so I could stay up on my e-mail. Each time I would turn on my computer, I would have at least one message that required immediate attention. It got to the point where I started getting mad at people for sending me work to do while on vacation. Then I realized that while some people knew I was out of the office, not everyone did.

Friends asking me to help with things in the neighborhood or with Scouts assumed I was just away during the week like I normally am. They didn't know I was trying to get some rest before the chaos that happens in the video game industry right as Christmas approaches. Once I realized that people were not going out of their way to upset me on vacation, I also figured out that the best way to keep from getting angry was to stop reading e-mail and checking my phones. In fact, I left them in my hotel room during the day and tried my best not to check them at night. I wasn't perfect, but it was nice to unplug from technology for a few days.

My 21-year-old daughter that came with my wife and I on this trip remarked how her generation found it difficult to unplug. She followed my example and left her phone in the hotel room as well. She noticed how others her age would float along on an inner-tube on the resort hotel's extensive lazy river with iPhone's in waterproof cases unable to refrain from constantly looking at the screen. She was disgusted with her contemporaries. I also noticed that younger children quickly snatched parents' phones the moment they were put down so electronic games could be played. Parents and adults were no better as they constantly ignored family members to stay in contact with their hand-held devices.

I enjoyed my trip to the islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I especially enjoyed not being connected to the rest of the world. My hope that at least one person reads this and follows our example and disconnects on their next vacation. It may only be for a day or two but you will be richly rewarded.

Happy Birthday

Today is my 41st Birthday (I like Mounds candy bars for anyone thinking about getting me a gift). When you are a kid, the whole world can stop while you take time to celebrate. As an adult it generally means that you are just one year older and nobody but your immediate family really cares. That being said, I have already received several congratulatory e-mails and phone calls from friends. Now if we could only figure out a way to send someone Mounds bars through the phone or e-mail, my morning would be complete.

Every year I see my birthday approaching and wonder how I am going to spend it. My Dad thinks I go a bit overboard and says I am building unrealistic expectations in my children as to how birthdays should be spent. I just want one day a year to stand above the rest as truly "special" (besides Christmas).

One year for my birthday I rented a little 4-seater plane and flew down to Moab, Utah for a day of mountain biking. Since I don't have a pilot's license, it was quite the adventure. One of the guys I invited to ride was a pilot but he still let me fly most of the way. I took us off but was more than happy to let him land. The only unfortunate part of the trip was that one of the guys with us fell off his bike and broke his collar bone. It makes a great story though.

When my wife turned 30, she cashed in all my frequent flyer miles and took the family to Hawaii. That was a fun trip as we got to do the tourist thing all over Oahu. On the actual birthday, we had a fabulous Luau and ate like Samoans (they don't eat until they are full, they eat until they fall down).

Yesterday I logged onto my frequent flyer mileage account and looked into getting a ticket to Hawaii. With the downturn in the economy I actually could have taken a non-stop from Salt Lake to Honolulu in the morning, spent the day in Hawaii, and then flown back during the night. The only catch was that I needed to pay a rapid redemption fee of $150. When I was a Platinum frequent flyer member the airlines would waive the fee. I could think of better ways to spend frequent flyer miles and $150 and so I decided against it.

Tomorrow a big company is looking at some software I wrote over the past year. There could be a paycheck in it for me and so I want the demo to go flawlessly. So instead of doing anything exotic on my birthday today, I am going to spend the next several hours in front of the computer sprucing things up a bit. I guess I have to be a grown-up every once and awhile.