My Visit to Southern California - Watching the Watchers

by philgFriday, November 12, 2010 at 06:46 AM EST

Some work as a software expertwitness (on a case regarding a massively parallel database managementsystem patent) took me out to Southern California this week. here are a fewrandom thoughts occasioned by the trip…

Getting to San Diego is no longer a simple proposition. The shrinkingdomestic private economy has resulted in a lot of schedule cuts at airlines.Government and health care workers don’t need to travel much; Wall Streetersdon’t need to fly out of Boston. out of all the airlines, there is only onenon-stop per day and that left in the morning ($600/seat on JetBlue!), so Iconnected via Salt Lake City on a couple of Delta flights on Mondayafternoon.

I endured two nights at the W Hotel in San Diego, which is notable for itscramped dark overfurnished rooms. I hadn’t taken a close look at thetelecommunications charges at the place before, but they struck me this time:$15/day for Internet and about $20 for a five-minute phone call back toMassachusetts (I had brought a Sprint 4G AMOLED Samsung Galaxy SAndroid phone (very nice device, and I think all phones should have anAMOLED display, but 3X the battery capacity would have been nice), so did nothave to contemplate paying these fees). I’m wondering if our inefficienttelecommunications infrastructure, particularly in hotels, is impairingeconomic growth. in 2001 in Singapore I stayed in a hotel with free Internetand calls to the U.S. were just a few cents per minute.

After doing some work in Orange County I wanted to fly back from the JohnWayne airport (SNA), but schedule reductions meant that it simply wasn’tpossible to get back to Boston without an all-night layover somewhere. Evengetting home from LAX would be tough as there was only one nonstop redeye(JetBlue, $600, only middle seats remaining). I rented a Ford car for theone-hour drive to LAX. as with other rentals, this $25,000 product of U.S.industry had no navigation system. Fortunately the Samsung phone was ready witha navigation system that calculated a route to my cousin’s house in LosAngeles. At first it said that the drive would take about one hour, but afterchecking for traffic corrected that to three hours (I left Orange County around6:15 pm). I pushed the traffic icon and heard the sad words “no faster routefound”.

It actually did take nearly three hours to get to my destination, by whichtime I was so worn out that I decided to stay overnight in LA ($200 expense atthe Sheraton Gateway LAX). after enduring what I assume is typical LA weekdayevening traffic I wondered who would want to invest in LA. The traffic makeslife there almost as miserable as in a lot of Third World cities (and maybeeven as miserable as life in Boston in February), but the potential returns oninvestment are much lower.

The legacy carriers seem to have given up on the LAX/BOS route, which meantthat my choices were Virgin America and JetBlue. Virgin America was muchcheaper and had an earlier flight, so I tried it out for the first time. Thestaff are very friendly and in some small ways it might be better than JetBlue.we landed in Boston at the very worst possible time for driving out to thesuburbs from the city center (leaving about 5 pm), but there were no delays onthe Boston highways. The Border Collie was happy to see me.

This article originally appeared on Philip Greenspun’s Weblog.

<a href="http://watchingthewatchers.org/indepth/1376728/tag:news.google.com,2005:cluster=http://watchingthewatchers.org/indepth/1376728/Fri, 12 Nov 2010 12:18:37 GMT 00:00″>My Visit to Southern California – Watching the Watchers

airlines, salt lake city, samsung