Returning from a week in India, I started recording this podcast in the business class toilet of an AA flight from Delhi to Chicago. For the sake of listeners’ ears and the bladders of fellow passengers, I finished it in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago. We talk about how Twitter has led me to some great meals while on the road, a poor experience with GoGo in-flight Wi-Fi, and how ATMs revolutionized business travel. I talk about my experiences inside the “travel bubble” while traveling in India, and compare my HP netbook to my Apple iPad. Here’s a direct link to the podcast file or you can listen to it right here by clicking on the arrow below.

Here are the transcript from TravelCommons podcast #83:

• Intro music — Warmth by Makkina
• Coming to you today from Business class toilet on an American Airlines 777 flying somewhere north of the Iceland volcano, flying back from my first trip to India. After spending 2 days each in Guragon, Pune, and Bangalore, I got on this non-stop flight back to Chicago – left Dehli at quarter past midnight Thursday night and some 14 hours later, get into ORD at around 4:30 am Friday morning. I’ll talk more about my India trip in the first topic, but now, I’m going to get out of the john before someone thinks I’m doing something strange in here – not that recording a podcast in the bathroom is normal for any except me.
• OK, I’m back in the TravelCommons studios outside of Chicago – landed safely and am now spending the day trying to get my body clock reset. The first time I flew home from Asia, I arrived before I took off – left Tokyo around 5pm and got into SFO around noon. Made my brain hurt a little bit trying to figure it out. Now, I just roll with it. Flying to Europe, I make a point to get on the destination time right when I sit in the airplane seat. Flying to Asia, that takes too much work. I just sleep when I want and eat when I want and leave it to my iPhone alarm to help me power through the consequences.
• One more quick India note – I was standing in line to board my return flight – we had to run the gauntlet in the jetway of repeated security questions (“Has your carry-on been out of your possession at any time”) and another wanding and pat-down — and now waiting to board when I heard a guy describing the scene to someone on the phone. It took about 20 seconds for it to hit me – Hey, I recognize that voice. I turned around and about a half-dozen people back was a guy I had worked with 6 years ago. Now I’m used to running into friends and former colleagues at ORD and LGA, but DEL? It’s either a really small world, or I know way too many people who fly.
• Bridge Music — We Are Complex by Curl

Following Up

• We’ve talked in past episodes about ways to find good restaurants on the road. I’ve mentioned Chowhound.com – a popular foodie forum – as one of my main tools. But Twitter has also become very useful. The last time I was in LA, I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to do for dinner. I tweeted – “What should I eat – sushi or In ‘n Out Burger?” – really thinking out loud to my family than anyone else, and then one follower replied “Try Kogi BBQ truck”. What a great idea! I had read about these guys a few months prior – some guys running 3 taco trucks doing Korean-Mexican fusion food – like kim chi quesadillas – and tweet every day the locations of their trucks. I hit Twitter, found the closest truck – a 30-minute drive – and headed out. I found it and queued up with about two dozen other Angelenos past an Arco gas station, ordered up some tacos, and ate them on the hood of my car. It was great – and I wouldn’t have thought about it without someone responding to my tweet.
• The best meal on my last trip to Seattle was courtesy of Twitter – Denrael saw where I was and suggested the Steelhead Diner and I ended up with another great meal. I think this is how the whole social media thing is supposed to work.
• Another thing that’s worked for me this year is hand-washing. When all the panic about H1N1 virus started up, I ignored most of it – except for the talk about the benefits of extended hand-washing. 20 seconds with soap and water, they said, was more effective than those little bottles of Purell. OK, I decided to give it a go – investing a bit more time under the faucet. One day, at the beginning of April, as Chicago began to warm up, it came to me – I haven’t had a cold this season. For the first time in as long as I can remember, in spite of doing the same amount of cohabitating metal tubes with sick people, inhaling their recycled exhales, I didn’t get sick. I guess those airplane HEPA filters work after all.
• I broke down and tried GoGo’s in-flight WiFi a few months ago. I’d like to say that I did it purely from an investigative standpoint – so that I could report on it to you, my podcast listeners. But actually, I had a half day in Phoenix, was racing to make the flight, and still had a bunch of e-mail that I wanted to get out before the end of the day, so rather than queueing up 25 e-mails and then blasting them out when I hit ORD, I ponied up for GoGo. So here’s my bottom line — Gogo inflight wi-fi is a pig, a slow one. And it’s not so much the bandwidth to the ground, but just the response time from the web server in the plane – airborne.gogoinflight.com. Maybe because it was a full plane with lots of laptop-toting professionals needing to get on-line in the middle of the day, but still, come on. When I first connected to the Buy page, the price was $10 for the flight. But that in-plane server timed out, so I had to start again from the start – great user experience. Even better — the second time I got to the Buy page, it was $13. I haven’t used GoGo since.
• Maybe it was a goofy day, though. On that same flight, the guy next to me tried to buy a cheese-&-cracker snack with cash. And then was – should I say it? No, I shouldn’t… but I will – he was “cheesed off” that American no longer takes cash. I was amazed — when was the last time this guy flew?
• And finally, listening this week to The World’s Technology Podcast , I heard about the death of John Shepherd-Barron, the inventor of the ATM – the automated banking machine. For the business traveler, the ATM revolutionized our lives, as much, if not more than mobile phones. I remember traveling before ATMs were ubiquitous. You’d pay American Express a chunk of change for a wad of $100 traveler’s checks, and then spend a good bit of your trip getting ripped off by currency exchanges in the airports, and cutting out of meetings in mid-day Fridays to hunt down a bank before it closed so you would have some cash for the weekend. It took a lot of planning ahead. Contrast that with this last weekend. On Sunday, I woke up in Guragon, wandered over to the mall next door, found a Citibank ATM a couple hundred feet from the front door, punched a few keys and out popped 10 crisp 500 rupee notes. And without taking much note, I now had a bit of cash with which I could buy a cup of masala tea. Thanks, John.
• If you have a question, a story, a comment – the voice of the traveler, send it along. The e-mail address is comments@travelcommons.com, you can send me a Twitter message at @mpeacock, or you can post them on the web site at travelcommons.com.
• Bridge Music — Crazy by Beth Quist

Business Travel in India

• Long-time listener Marc Loehrwald came back to me in the midst of my Tweet stream from India asking “Are you collecting some stories for a new Travelcommons episode?” Even without trying, I came back with some.
• Deplaning at Indira Gandhi Int’l airport – IRI to the locals – was pretty uneventful, though the Immigration officer did comment that I looked much younger in my passport picture. After a 15-hour flight, I’d have been surprised if it was any other way. I told him “it’s not the years; it’s the mileage”, but I think he was a bit young to catch the Indiana Jones reference.
• Getting out at our hotel, I had the first of many security screenings during my stay. At every hotel and major building, I walked through a metal detector, was wanded down, and had my briefcase X-rayed. The whole exercise took 90 seconds and the employees were exceedingly polite (because they worked for the hotel, not an overblown government agency), but given what happened in Mumbai a year and a half ago, the security was understandable.
• Sunday afternoon, I was back at IRI, but this time at the domestic terminal for a flight on Kingfisher Airlines – yes, owned by the same person as Kingfisher Beer, but no, it’s not served on board; all domestic flights are non-alcoholic – to Pune. I walk up to the door and am stopped by a security guard – polite, but not as nice as the hotel guys – asking to see an itinerary. I have an e-ticket, I say, so I don’t have an itinerary. No paper, no entry. He points down the terminal to the Kingfisher ticketing desk and says they can print it out for me. 10 minutes and some aggressive line jockeying and was back with the necessary piece of paper – a printout of my flight itinerary. Now I can go in.
• And face more security. Going through security screening, everyone kept on their shoes and belt, but then everyone was wanded and patted down after passing through the metal detector. Every carryon had to have a tag, which was stamped after X-raying. These tags were then checked by a security guard as you boarded the plane. No stamp and back you went to security.
• Leo Vegoda, another T/C listener, responding to my security line Tweet – “Is the line still 2 hours long?” No, even with all this extra security, the lines weren’t long – there seemed to be enough staff to handle it. I don’t know – perhaps I was traveling at non-peak times; or perhaps their staffing algorithm is better than the TSA’s.
• What struck me most by the middle of the week was how isolated my travels were. In past T/C episodes, we’ve talked about the “travel bubble” that business travelers inhabit – seeming to float above the day-to-day activities of a given city – kinda like Glenda the Good Witch in “Wicked” (I’m just full of pop references today…).
• In India, I was in an extreme travel bubble – eating breakfast in the hotel, taking a private car to my meetings, then driven to dinner (usually in a hotel restaurant), and finally dropped off at my hotel around 9 or 10 pm. But unlike everywhere else, I wasn’t trying to escape it. I don’t think it was the poverty or a concern about security – I’ve dealt with that in places like Joburg and Rio. No, it was something else, but I didn’t know what it was.
• Finally, looking out the car window one day, on one of my many rides, I realized that it was the crowds – everywhere I was, everywhere I looked, there were always huge numbers of people moving to and fro – much more than I’d seen before, and never letting up. Maybe all the extra security got to me subconsciously. I’m sure that, in time, I would’ve gotten comfortable with the crowds, but the pace of the trip – 3 cities, 7 days, 15 hours a day in meetings and then another 3 hours back in the room catching up on things back home – I never got situated, never got comfortable with where I was.
• I finally fell out of my travel bubble transiting between the domestic and international terminals in Delhi. It’s a 30-minute bus ride, but security wouldn’t let me on because I forgot to print my American Airlines itinerary. I had to go outside and catch a cab – not a car, not a minibus, a regular street cab. Careening through the streets, I remembered the story one of my hosts told me a few days past, about how he had taken a cab between the two terminals – the cab went off to a side street and only continued onto the international terminal after he gave them $100. I watched the street signs – why wasn’t he taking the exit for the airport? Down and around the support pillars of the expressway, past a strip of hotels with neon signs, driving in a sea of motorscooters, we emerged in front of the access road to the international terminal. A couple of more jigs and jags to avoid construction and we were unloading my bags in front of the terminal. I tipped the driver 200 rupees on a 250-rupee fare and slipped back inside my travel bubble.
• Bridge Music — Blues for a Rainy Day by Mark Cook

iPad vs. Netbook

• At the beginning of the month, I swapped my standard corporate-issue Dell Latitude E6400 laptop for an HP Mini 5102 netbook running Windows 7 and an Apple Wi-Fi + 3G iPad. After trips to Scottsdale and India with my lighter (by 1.4 lbs) briefcase, I found myself liking both devices, but for very different reasons.
• The main reason I was willing to dump the 14-in Dell screen for a 10-in netbook display is that most of my computer time is now spent running e-mail. Back when I was developing code or creating PowerPoint decks, I was willing to lug some extra pounds to get extra pixels. Now that my life revolves around Outlook, screen size isn’t as important. But a good keyboard is, and the HP’s traditional keyboard is much more usable for a touch typist than the iPad’s onscreen keyboard. You can’t rest your fingers on the iPad’s virtual keys, and eliminating the semi-colon key causes some real problems for touch typists. Also, being able to work in the actual Outlook client on the HP – looking at other people’s schedules when setting up meetings, browsing shared Exchange folders — is a huge advantage over iPad’s mail client. HP is the clear winner with e-mail.
• Even though the HP’s screen specs out larger than the iPad (10.1-in diagonal vs. 9.7-in diagonal), the iPad’s screen looks bigger and brighter. Perhaps it’s the 132 pixels per inch, but it probably because the iPad’s tablet form factor frees it from the desktop (or your lap) and makes it seem natural to bring it closer to your eyes. And if you’re browsing rather than typing, touching the web site is a more direct interaction than connecting your finger to the cursor through the touchpad. Unless, that is, your browsing involves web sites like Hulu, which lands you directly in the cross fire of Steve Jobs’ Flash jihad. But for non-Flash web browsing, the iPad is the clear winner.
• When I’m writing, the best keyboard wins out. While I’m getting better on the iPad virtual keyboard after a couple of weeks’ practice, I switched over to the HP’s physical keyboard to write this episode. A number of folks have suggested that I use a BlueTooth keyboard with my iPad, but one of my travel principles is to travel with the least number of electronic things as possible. Having lots of electronic bits show up on the X-ray screen makes any TSA screener twitchy – it significantly increases the probability of a hand search – something any frequent traveler wants to avoid.
• It’s also easier to get files on and off the HP. The iron sandbox that Apple has erected around the iPhone and now the iPad may improve its security, but makes it difficult to use as something other than an isolated machine. When I’m creating a document more than a few lines, I find myself switching to the HP.
• Now, moving from the Dell’s 2.26 GHz Core 2 Duo processor to the HP’s 1.66 GHz Atom chip, you’d expect to wait a few more seconds for applications to start up. And you do. But if you’re just doing e-mail, web browsing, and some light Word/Excel/PowerPoint work, the Atom keeps up. But there are no such compromises with the iPad’s custom A4 chip. Video is smooth, screens snap, and there’s none of the stutter-step scrolling that has become so frustrating on my 3G iPhone. From a user experience standpoint, the iPad’s performance smokes the HP.
• Probably the biggest disappointment with the HP is the battery life. The 4-cell battery specs out at 4½ hours, but it was dying after my 3½ hour flight from Chicago to Phoenix. It could be that I don’t have Windows 7 configured correctly, but I couldn’t get much more battery life even after some deep Power Option tweaking. My experience with the iPad’s custom battery is the complete opposite. I have yet to see the battery gauge turn red, even after pretty constant use on my 15-hour flights to and from India — a pleasant change indeed from the usual iPhone experience.
• Now, doing a straight feature/cost comparison is tough — these are two very different machines. Comparing the two machines in my briefcase — the HP 5102 Mini netbook with 2 GB memory and 160 GB hard drive lists for $535 on HP’s web site while my 64 GB Wi-Fi + 3G iPad goes for $829 on apple.com — HP looks the winner. But if you factor in the delta between the price of a typical cellular data plan for the HP and the iPad’s lower cost 3G plan from AT&T, and can drop down to the 32 GB Wi-Fi + 3G iPad, you get pretty close to breakeven after 12 months. Is it a fair comparison, I don’t know — but it’s a data point.
• What’s the bottom line? It’s not clear. I really like both machines, but for very different reasons. The HP is a solid little machine — great keyboard, reasonable performance, and a compact size that doesn’t get crushed when the guy in front of me pushes his seat back in an American Airlines MD-80. The iPad provides a much better way to browse web sites (non-Flash, of course) and watch videos. I’d love to drop one of them, but since the TSA doesn’t make me take out my iPad before X-raying, I’m not in too big of a hurry.

Closing

• Closing music — iTunes link to Pictures of You by Evangeline
• OK, that’s it, that’s the end of TravelCommons podcast #83
• I hope you all enjoyed this podcast and I hope you decide to stay subscribed.
• The bridge music is from Magnatune
• If you have a story, thought, comment, gripe – the voice of the traveler — send ‘em along, text or MP3 file, to comments@travelcommons.com or to @mpeacock on Twitter, or post them on our website at travelcommons.com. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to send in e-mails, Tweets and post comments on the website
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• Direct link to the show