Musings From The Road

Last week I spent almost entirely in Arizona - attending the one of a kind COSM technology conference. It has been the only non-lighting related event for me in 2025. Very valuable, as it has a mixture of politics, philosophy, economy, and - of course - technology. Once Discovery Institute posts the conference videos, I will link and comment on some of them.

I the meantime a number of assorted observations.

I flew to Los Angeles on Lufthansa Airbus A380. There is a small sections of economy seats on the upper deck. The best seats ever. This plane is so unbelievably quiet. Like a Zeppelin blimp, only much faster. It is a pity they are being withdrawn. The in-flight internet sucked. Completely. I responded to the email with the purchase receipt and they acknowledged the problem, issuing a refund. Probably the simplest refund procedure ever.

Then after some business meetings in LA, on the next day a short United flight from LAX to PHX. This one - on the other hand - was equipped with Starlink. It was free and for the first time I experienced close to half a Gigabit downlink speed, while in the air. While technically impressive, I don't really think we need this. Go read a book or listen to a good (downloaded) podcast instead. Or just dream...

Waymos pick up now directly from the airport terminals. I figured out how to connect my Spotify to Waymo and now every time I ride, it continues playing the podcast episodes I'm in the middle of listening to. 

Car rental is as messy as ever. I picked up Sixt, as supposedly we now have a corporate rate with them. But despite my efforts in bot the app and on the sixt.com website, I could not apply the rate to my rental. But still booked with Sixt (it was just for one day), especially as I remembered their in-app mobile check-in worked well and allowed to skip the usually long lines. I was only to present the app QR code to pick up the keys. But they asked for a credit card. I used Apple Pay with a virtual card for the mobile check-in. The agent at the Sixt counter demanded a physical card that must have matched the car reservation. Mine did not, so they had to cancel my check-in and told me to re-do the whole procedure again. USA is probably the last country where people use physical cards. Everywhere else on the planet people pay by phones. 

Finally - the car user interfaces suck more than ever. The car was a brand new BMW X2. They compete with Mercedes on who designs worse UX, so I was prepared for it to be bad. It exceeded my expectations. It had CarPlay, but wanted to pair with my phone every time I was starting the engine. Then going through multiple pop-ups offering me to use the factory BMW iDrive instead. Designers of car entertainment systems clearly live in deep down bunkers. My only wish is to use Google maps and Spotify from MY phone. Go away with your other offers. There were other quirks like (after dark) the headlights were "automatically" changing from low to high beam and I did not know how to disable that. Had one emergency braking to avoid deer on the road, after which wanted to use hazard lights, but there was no hazard switch in the middle of the dashboard. In the morning I realized the hazard button was in the armrest. Who makes this design? Vivienne Westwood?

PS> Flighty - the prettiest most useless travel app shows more bugs. It told me to check-in for the upcoming PHX-IAD flight 30 hours before the departure. Because I had it under the Lufthansa code-share number, LH7877. Lufthansa check-in is 30 hours before. But the flight is really a United flight and check-in is available the standard 24 hours before. So much for more useless notifications.