Last week I flew to LA for the iDate LA 2009 conference. This was my first flight on Virgin America and I definitely picked the right day to fly. Virgin offered free wifi and hosting Day In The Cloud with Google. Google Ambassador Paul was a few seats up and the LAX to SFO plane was full of tech media types.
Day In The Cloud is an online scavenger hunt, and quite a fun concept. Players were given an hour to answer 9 levels of questions, multiple questions per level, and a 10th bonus round where creativity counts. The idea of the hunt is to answer questions by using various Google Apps; spreadsheets, GTALK, Calendar and of course Google search . This proved far too difficult for me on 4 hours sleep and no caffeine. I ran out of time and had to skip 4 levels because I was frustrating myself with some of the puzzles, which appear to have been concocted by evil Google engineers who like to torment us non-Mensa types. This made me want to complain to the guy next to me, but he was busy making use of his shiny red Virgin America barf bag.
My score was not so hot, I climbed a miserable 5500 feet and need some schwag to compensate for my poor showing. One free t-shirt and an invite to Grand Central later, I felt better. You can Follow Day In The Cloud on Twitter at @dayinthecloud track the tag #dayinthecloud or better yet, play along on the ground at Day In the Cloud. I’m sure they’ll do something like this again, it was a lot of fun.
About flirting in airplanes. Virgin America has a cool seat-back entertainment system with games, shopping, music and much more. A lot of the features are not currently turned on for some reason. Of the ones that are working the one I like the most so far is the seat-to-seat chat and the chat room. Once I stopped using the wrong controller for the seat next to me and was able to join the general chat room, I was able to talk to a few people. I wouldn’t be against flirting with the woman a few seats up from me, who (I think) was checking me out in the boarding area.
On the way home on the red-eye I chatted up a few random people who joined the general chat room. We never acknowledge each other when we landed, probably because sleep-deprived semi-anonymous late-night chat falls under, “what’s said on the plane stays on the plane”. If you can’t sleep, chatting with random strangers is actually pretty cool.
You can order drinks and snacks from VA consoles, smooth and efficient. I will never fly another airline across country again if I can help it, VA puts all other carriers to shame.
I wish I had talked to 18C, she was single and cute. Talk about a great Craigslist Missed Connections: “You were there blonde, aisle seat, tray table was down, watching CNN. I was playing Mario Brothers, black laptop.” I wonder who the first people will be to get married after meeting in a Virgin Altantic chat room.
