It was a pleasant surprise to discover that my American Airlines flight this evening from JFK to SFO is one of those graced with in-flight Internet service, courtesy of GoGo Inflight Internet (and a nice revenue-sharing deal with American Airlines, no doubt).  It’s an even more pleasant surprise to report that the service is superb.  I just tested my bandwidth and came up with a surprising 2.4Mb downstream (haven’t done an upstream test, but I just emailed a 12Mb file to a colleague who got it reasonably quickly).

To put it mildly, I suspect these services will have an immediate and profound impact on my personal inflight productivity.  There are some silly For one thing, it will probably make “offline availability” a little less important for some of my company’s internal enterprise applications (NetSuite comes to mind, as does Sharepoint).  Moreover, I’m in the middle of two negotiations, and it’s refreshing not to go dark on them for five hours while I fly across the country.  Of course this service opens up all sorts of interesting etiquette questions.  For example, my seat-mate and I exchanged cards and “nice to meet you” emails while aloft (total “send button to new mail bing-bong on other computer” time of 15 seconds, including two Exchange servers and two VPNs—impressive).  Is the protocol to add each other to LinkedIn after the flight or during?  And what about VOIP calls?  (I’m pleased to report that GoGo says it’s blocking VOIP, a decision of which I’m heavily in favor.)

Of course, let’s not forget the side benefits.  I’m listening to my “Office” Pandora stream (zero hiccups, credit both Pandora‘s excellent Flash app and GoGo) and tracking my flight location:

My Flight Location: American 177 on 9/22, in real time

I’ll have to check the traffic back home before I land….

And then there are a few I don’t quite get:

…a few that that are simply too good to be true…

(My heart goes out to this poor scaffolding.  I recommend Valium or perhaps something in a nice benzodiazipene, under the circumstances.)

…and now for some parting thoughts and a dose of British advise:

Sachs too frequently lapses into a sort of reductio ad PowerPoint. It seems every catastrophe can be averted if we take fewer than 10 simple steps.  Sachs presents “four compelling reasons why the poorest countries need to speed the demographic transition,” “a list of seven requirements to enable family planning programs to accelerate the decline in fertility” and “six steps to transform” American “security policy into a workable framework for the 21st century.”

Maybe it was the little thrill of seeing a Latinate/geekspeak mash up, or just the fact that, structurally, PowerPoint and absurdum are in parallel, but it made my evening.  Sometimes it’s the little things….

One slightly sad point: the beautiful iguanas (green iguanas to be precise) you see above are the target of serious resident-led zoocide (hereptocide?). Evidently, these beautiful and utterly harmless but nonetheless exogenous creatures leave droppings in inconvenient places, and this causes them to attract the ire of local residents. (They come out around 11:00am every day to sun themselves and raise their body temperatures; they generally head “home” around 3:00pm.) At least for this tourist, getting a chance to see a few “wild” iguanas while I was relaxing was a lot of fun, and I can’t imagine why anybody would begrudge them their sun-bathing. Bah Humbug!