I have a kind of crazy schedule this summer so my blogging may not keep ahead of my flying schedule. As you may have noticed I'm defaulting to posting every second day, so that I can get wy ahead, but if I have time I can still insert topical posts as they come up without having to re-date all my queued posts. While this keeps me a few days ahead on write-ups any given day, it makes a longer lag between experiencing things and writing about them, so I'm not sure I can keep all my notes in good order.
I believe I have eight days at home between the beginning of June and mid-September, and my instrument renewal still has to be scheduled in there somewhere. I hope I get a chance to write everything up before I forget it. So if the narrative seems disjointed or if I suddenly stop blogging altogether, it probably doesn't mean that I'm snaring rabbits in the wilderness while waiting for Search and Rescue to find me.
In the meantime, here is a curiosity that didn't get attached to its proper post before that post got published. The passenger terminal at Calgary International Airport now has wireless internet, but you have to 'register' for it. You provide a name and e-mail address, then they give you limited access for fifteen minutes, during which you're supposed to check your e-mail and click the confirmation link, then you get online. That's the first airport I've encountered that does that. I wonder why they chose that route. I haven't been spammed by them yet. (I gave them a "special" e-mail address, so I'd know). I like it best when I can just tell my computer to connect, and then it does so, and then on all subsequent visits to the same place it connects automatically.
6 comments:
...it probably doesn't mean that I'm snaring rabbits in the wilderness while waiting for Search and Rescue to find me.
This would never happen as you have a 406MHz ELT, right? Right?
;-)
As far as the email registration thing - getting a confirmed email address is usually enough to provide the legal means to find out who you are if the need arose (through subpoenaing your email provider for your login history, finding when you were logging in from a residence or cell phone, and then finding out who owns the house or phone). Why they'd go through the trouble to do it, I don't know.
Of course, your email login history would be a pain in the ass to dig through, so if they ever tracked you down, you could at least be happy that they had to work for it.
If Anonymous is correct in his reasoning, it would likely be the authorities digging through it, so no need to be happy they had to work for it.
When they first rolled it out, you just connected, no registration required. I think it changed about 6 months after the rollout.
No doubt they got in hot water over something someone posted through their network.
Maybe someone tried to sue them over "hate speech", so now they make sure they can trace activity back to the actual person involved (dubious, but such decisions are rarely made by people with the technical knowhow needed).
Be happy you have free internet in your terminals.
Here in Amsterdam it's charged, costs (last time I checked, I never looked again, can do without internet while waiting for a flight) something like 10 Euro per half hour.
Later I noticed my ISP runs on the same network as the airport and as a result I can use the airport's network for free (and legal too) :)
Am I the only person wondering how you pick up your email before you get online? Or are smart phones now so ubiquitous that that seems a dumb question.
Regarding the email address precaution I can imagine that nothing bad actually happened but that somebody raised the possibility in a meeting that it might happen and once the possibility had been raised, nobody was able to dismiss it, however unlikely it was in case it actually did. I know, because I've been in those meetings...
Townmouse: There are probably others who didn't read carefully enough to see that you get 15 minutes of "limited" access just by providing something that looks like an e-mail address. I didn't test my limits to see what they were.
oh duh, yes. Makes sense now.
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