Stranded at the airport? A tip

You've been held up on a delayed flight, and when you finally get to your transit destination, you find that you have missed your connection to get home...

 

Most business travellers have been through this at some stage. Typically, the airline staff will tell you to collect your luggage, go to their ticket counter, and book yourself another ticket. Unfortunately, you are often not alone in being stranded, and you end up in amongst an angry crowd, queuing around the counter, waiting to get assistance and hopefully a new flight out of there!

 

This happened to me again recently, and I was again reminded of how to best get out of this situation quickly, particularly if you are travelliing on business and have a decent corporate travel agent.

 

Rather than getting stuck in the crowd, and possibly wait for hours while others cut into lines, hold things up by shouting at the ticket staff etc, I suggest you do the following:

 

1. Pull out your ticket and itinerary, and call your travel agent's 24 hour assistance number if it is listed, or their office number if it isn't, so you can get the 24 hour number off their out of hours message. (It is best to always have a copy of your itinerary with you in your hand luggage, no matter how basic or straight forward your trip schedule is.) 
   
2. Dial the 24 hour number, and explain what has happened to you. (Again, have your itinerary handy so you can quote ticket numbers, booking reference etc.)
   
3. Ask for another flight and wait for your new booking details. Write them down for reference, although if you're lucky and have a decent agent, they will send them also by email automatically whenever there is a change.
   
4. While you are at it, ask them to book you a hotel if there is not one on offer from the airline and are stuck overnight. I myself prefer to secure a room where I know I will be comfortable, although this is typically then an additional cost. Some airlines use decent hotels, some don't, or won't offer to accomodate you at all. My personal view is I would rather incur some expense in exchange for being comfortable for when I need to travel again, rather than hang around an airport and be in poor condition when I arrive at my ulimate destination.
   
5. We're done. Time to relax before your next flight.

You might think this is pretty obvious, but it is amazing how easy it is to get caught up in the wait and tension around that ticket counter, and waste hours before you get assistance. Using the above, I was in the hotel within about 45 minutes of being stranded, and in that time, the queue around the ticket office had not moved.

 

...and again, this all reminds me of the importance of having a decent travel agent, particularly if you are travelling on business.

 

Later, and happy travels.

Update: Linux Mint 10 on the netbook

Hi there.

Here we are one week later, and I'm still using Mint 10 on my Ideapad s10. How's it gone so far? Quite nicely actually! I initially found the wi-fi to be a little flaky for reasons I never really got to the bottom of, but it is fine now. I know it wasn't poor reception because I was using the netbook under Windows in the same locations without issues, and if I rebooted under Mint after the wi-fi dropped out, it would reconnect again with full signal strength.

It hasn't come back again as a problem after the first few days, so I haven't looked into it further.

The only other area of frustration I can report was screen resolution. The desktop looked great "out of the box" on the netbook's own 1024x600 screen, but when I tried plugging it into a monitor, I was limited to 800x600, or 640x480. Yuck!

I spent considerable time digging through the menus and included config applications, and then tried looking through additional packages I could install to fix this, but nothing jumped out at me. Finally, I reverted to my old friend, Google. My first searches for "changing screen resolution in Mint 10" weren't that successful, so I then made it more direct with "changing screen resolution in Linux". That was much better, and I quickly became aware of, and used the xrandr command in a terminal window to see what resolutions were supported, and picked the one that best suited my monitor. This reminded me of the fact that with Linux, you can often do things much more quickly and simply by going to the command line, rather than looking for a distribution's specific configuration tool, as long as you know the correct command to use...

All in all it is working very well now, and going through this process has made me realise how useful this little netbook actually is. I am now trialling making it my main "desktop" machine for email, social networking, downloading, blogging, surfing etc, but also enjoy being able to simply unplug it from the monitor and keyboard/mouse in my study and take it with me when I go anywhere.

It is now the central storage and access for my main email accounts and personal documents, all within Linux (Mint 10) and it is very portable to boot. (...and yes, I am keeping it backed up in case I drop/lose it somewhere.)

Have I walked away from Windows entirely? No, of course not. I still have my media encoding box here running a patched up copy of Vista."MediaPC" still contains my bluray burner and has AnyDvd installed so I can easily burn home audio and video projects, or rip and encode any video or audio for storage in my central media NAS that serves up movie and music goodness throughout my home network. (I really must blog about that sometime...) What has changed though is that the Vista box is now headless (no monitor or keyboard) and I simply access it and assign it new tasks etc through a remote desktop on the netbook. That way, I don't even have to be in front of it and see what it is up to when I need to check encoding progress or do some housekeeping on it such as moving encoded projects over to the NAS.

So far, so good. I'll let you know how it goes again in a few weeks, or report any significant problems in the meantime, but I'm not expecting anything significant now after this first week.

Later.

Linux Mint 10: Time to give Linux another whirl

Hi,

I've tried Linux many times before, and at one stage I tried to make it my sole OS, but over time realised that it couldn't do everything I needed, particularly around using certain devices, and also for my gaming needs, I still needed Windows. Sure, there were some decent games and ports of mainstream titles available for Linux, but overall, it was still a better and more consistent experience to stay with Windows in my case.

Where Linux did come into its own was for development work, which was the main area where I became intrigued with it, before eventually moving back to Windows. I loved the range of tools available within Linux, but would be frustrated with something I installed undoing a setting somewhere deep in my PC, and I had to then waste considerable time tracking it down and fixing it. I got sick of it, and was also not really spending much time doing anything with the development tools. I found in the end that I was a more user of content than a creator, so I fell back to Windows, with no regrets.

I've come back to the Linux fold now because I have an old Lenovo Ideapad S10 netbook, which I sometimes lug around in my bag on weekends, for surfing in cafe's etc where there might be wi-fi around, or I have a dying need to type something up for later. It came with Windows XP, and it has worked quite well, but support for XP is getting less and less, and over time it was starting to bog down with the normal digital fluff that tends to accumulate in aging Windows systems, particularly in the older versions like XP.

On a whim yesterday, I tracked down a copy of the Mint 10 Live DVD, plugged in a USB DVD drive, and booted from it. It worked first time, and with only a minor change, I managed to get the wifi and all key hardware items working immediately. Navigating within the Mint environment was a little slow, but that was largely due to running directly from the DVD as far as I could tell, so I dived in, hit Install, and installed Mint 10 onto the netbook hard drive itself. I had little on there, so I went for the complete wipe and install on the entire disk.

About 20 minutes later (although I didn't actually time it), Mint came up, and away we went. It again detected the wifi adaptor and prompted me to activate the driver, and everything from there has gone smoothly.

I had used Ubuntu before and was quite impressed, but it still suffered from occasionally being "broken" from something I would install, and like most Linux distributions, the places to find where to change things was a little inconsistent. Mint is based on Ubuntu, but they have to my mind streamlined most aspects of it, and I find it overall much more consistent with its user interface and locations for things I need so far. The other big plus for me is the inclusion of the search box immediately off the main menu. When you hit the menu button on the task bar (like the start button in Windows), there is a search box like in Vista/7, and you can simply type in there what you are looking for. Not only will it show up the applications or settings that most closely match what you type, it will also show available installation packages, which you can simply click on to download and install if they are not present in your distribution.

For example, I immediately wanted to install Chrome/Chromium and Dropbox, so I simply typed these in and the packages showed up. I then clicked on them and provided my admin password to proceed, and hey presto, they were installed and operating with no further intervention from me. Fantastic.

I have now been using Mint 10 for 24 hours, so we'll have to see how it holds up, but on this basic netbook hardware, and with my limited and spotty history with Linux in the past, so far so good. I would be naive to think that I will never need to roll up my sleeves and get my hands dirty to keep this Linux installation running at its best, but so far, so good.

If you have never tried Linux but are intrigued with the concept, or you have some older hardware that can't really run the latest Windows properly and do it justice, you just might want to give Linux another go, particularly with one of the more user friendly and well supported distributions, like Mint. The search bar for installing and locating software alone makes it remarkably accessible for relatively inexperienced Linux users like me.

I'll let you know later how I go, or blog about any significant issues that arise.

Later.