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Now here is the geeks view of my recent trip to Italy. Later I will ad a version of all the less important stuff such as food and wine.

The In-Flight Entertainment System

It’s not often that I get so excited that I clap my hands together like a giddy school child, but when I do so it’s always slightly embarrassing. My most recent incident of such occurred when I boarded eurofly plane on my way to Italy. This happened when I realized that the in-flight entertainment system was run on Linux which was unfortunately only evident because it was displaying an error screen which had Tux, the little penguin which is the linux mascot, sitting in the top left corner.

Here is a more up close view of Tux, isn’t he cute?.

The excitement faded quickly and turned into disappointment because the system wasn’t really that great, which ofcourse has nothing to do with the underlying OS.

The worst part was the interaction design. When I stumbled on the chess game I got pretty excited about the “play with another passenger” feature and I remember thinking to myself “oh my … they are so far ahead of their time having a social feature on a in-flight system, thats so brilliant!” So I decided to see if one of the 300 other passengers where waiting to play chess with me. After a long wait I gave up and decided to try again later when the swarm of passengers had settled. I had no luck in finding anyone to play, even towards the end of the flight, when I figured everyone becoming so bored that they would have found it. It was only then when I realized that the feature “play with another passenger” didn’t mean what I though it meant. As it turns out it basically meant you could play with someone you could hand the controller to … essentially either of the passengers next to you. Now English is not my first language and my expectations might be blinded by the fact that I work on social software so perhaps that affected my anticipation by seeing “play with another passenger” on a computer console, but I was dissapointed and embarreshed a little.

iPhone in Europe

After I had gotten over the whole “no one wants to play chess with me” fiasco and the plane had landed and the airplanes doors had been open it was time to turn off the airplane mode on my iPhone and see how Edgy europe was? and they sure where … I was roaming on the internet so fast I forgot all about that chess thingy. The untold story here is that I haven’t yet seen the bill, which I imagine is pretty steep since I never did read the phone print to discover how much one would have to pay for data transfers roaming in another country, if it ends up being a real shocker I will update this post and display the cost. I am especially worried because the last two days my connection suddenly died so either I exceeded some kind of limit or they realiced that the iPhone shouldn’t be working in Europe.

Where to Get Internet in Rome when iPhone was Shut Down

When the iPhone is no longer a reliable source of internet I started looking for wifi signs around the city and as it turns out they still have more hifi signs than wifi so my second best option was the laundry mats that also come equipped with internet machines … which in my opinion is quite brilliant and essentially how I do laundry here in the states except for that fact I go next door to the coffee shop with wifi.

Computer Books as Window Display in Book Stores

To wrap up my geek/tech impression of Italy check out this window display in a Rome book store, above! These skills are also in high demand in US but I still always have to go to the far dark corner of any book store to find my computer book titles, in Italy I don’t even have to be looking to find them.