Monday, November 24, 2008

Delta Airlines Entertainment

A few days ago I flew from San Jose back to my hometown, Panama City, Florida. To be accurate, I first flew from San Jose to Atlanta, and then from Atlanta to Panama City. On the flight from San Jose, the 757 was equipped with an onboard entertainment system. There was a free part and for-pay part. The main component of the free part was satellite TV courtesy of Dish Network. The other part was a decent selection of free music to listen to. The for-pay was comprised of movies, HBO programming, and a few games.

The Dish Network TV was a major disappointment. It did not work at first. Then it started to work, but would consistently freeze up. This would cause a reboot of the system. The only amusing part of this was that it was Linux system and I got to repeatedly watch the Red Hat reboot sequence. I was never so annoyed to see that freakin' penguin... I've flown JetBlue on several occasions and always enjoyed DirecTV on it with no problems. Actually the first time I flew JetBlue was the night that the Iraq War began (Shock and Awe! Go America!!) Talk about a surreal experience: watching live coverage of the beginning of the war while on a jet (flying to Vegas for the beginning of March Madness...) I digress.

The free music was not so bad actually. I was lending my MacBook to Michael, Jr. so he could watch some DVDs, so I was going to listen to my Nano. I wanted to listen to Coldplay's latest, so I was distressed when I realized that I had loaded up all of Coldplay's music except Viva la Vida. However, I noticed that Delta had that album available, and so I listened to it. The sound quality was even worse than the average sound quality of the Nano, but I still appreciated it.

I didn't try out the for-pay entertainment. Michael, Jr. finished watching the Leap Frog DVDs that he wanted to see, and wanted to draw. So I got the MacBook back and reviewed some chapters from a couple of books-in-progress. I did notice that Delta will begin offering Wi-Fi on flights for $10-13 per flight, depending on the length of the flight.

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