Technology penetration

Well its finally happened, I'm writing this blog from 10km up in the sky currently over the Black Sea at little under mach 1, and as you can plainly tell, I'm on the net! I must admit I was pretty sceptical when, bleary eyed, waiting to get on the damn plane this morning I was greeted by two attactive lasses who tried to give me some cards, and were muttering what I took to be something for sale. My normal scepticism almost cost me the best freebie I've had in a while, one free hour of wireless net access on my flight. Of course, as a geek I normally find it hard to engage women and ask for favours, but with the right incentive I've found that its quite easy... needless to say I now have enough net access to make my flight bearable :) Its not blisteringly fast, but its actually far far better then I thought it would be, perhaps at about ISDN speed, maybe even slightly faster just with an unusually high latency of around 2 seconds or so, which I assume is the time taken for it to bounce of various satellites.
On a different note I recently bought a pair of new ear phones, or more accurately, in canal ear phones. The concept of the in ear phones is simple, put the sound as close as possible to the ear drum directly by making you insert the head phones into your canal, it sounds a little odd, but after a few attempts you get used to it (for those of you, who like my father, panic about the idea of putting anything into your ears and the consequences of loud bursts of noise from your audio source, you needn't be worried as it comes with a sound filter that will block out any loud spikes in the audio feed). The benefits of doing this are that you need less power to drive the speakers and the speakers can be smaller, there is much more clarity as there is no interference due to sound traveling through the air. What this also means is that you effectively make a seal by inserting the ear phones, which means, you guessed it a MASSIVE reduction in back ground noise. This is the key thing on a flight, I'm sitting here surrounded by people talking, babies screaming and some lovely big Royles Royce engines and I can only hear Beethovens 9th symphony. Bliss, no really, its fucking bliss I have my own private world of sound. There are other benefits as well, most ear "buds" are actually detrimental to your ears, primarily because they don't block out ambient background noise and result in the user turning up the volume to drown it out and thus causing long term hearing damage. Due to the fact that the speakers are so close to my ear drums and the seal I lose about ~30db of background noise, meaning that I have to turn down the ear phones in order for it to be comfortable, from my reading it would appear that the in canal ear phones are actually the best of ALL the different personal speakers you can get for your long term hearing.
So you'd think with my ear phones, and wireless net connection I'd be able to amuse myself, and you'd be right. What's even more amazing though is that I am still spoilt for choice, I have on demand movies, not the normal timered, 4 or 5 heavily edited movies, but a solid 150 all of which I can play when and how I want. I just watched the "Edukators" are really good german art film which I meant to catch when it was at the cinemas a few months back but that caught my eye when flicking through the on demand movies.
Now if the plane doesn't drop out of the sky I might JUST be able to have a pleasant flight :)