Remember PeerDrive^tm? Well, either TomTom has stolen my idea and gave it a twist to make it work, or my idea wasn’t so new and revolutionary to begin with (pick your version).

TomTom has recently implemented a new feature in their GPS devices called IQ Routes. To quote:

“This new improved technology calculates routes based on the real average speeds measured on roads every day compared to speed limits. This uses historical data that TomTom users have been adding to over the years. It will always provide users with the smartest route hour-by-hour, day-by-day, saving them time, money and fuel.”

Pretty darn clever idea, even if I say so myself.

Ryanair is now going to charge customers to check in online. If customers fail to check in online, they’re charged a ridiculously high fee they call a “boarding card re-issue fee”.

This once again proves that Ryanair is not an actual airline. Their business model isn’t flying passengers from A to B. No, they have a business model very similar to that of organized crime.

You see, Ryanair’s business model is to lure customers in by advertising very cheap tickets. Then, when the customer has been snared, the real business starts: the business of extorting customers for every penny they’ve got. Mandatory fees for everything begin to heap on top of one another: fees for checking in, fees for luggage any bigger than a sandwich bag, even fees for paying your fees!

Ryanair is a company that doesn’t deserve to exist. It’s a blight on the airline industry as a whole and deserves to die a quick, gruesome and hopefully painful death. I will never fly with Ryanair again, ever. I’d rather give my hard-earned money to a proper airline or a discount airline like Easyjet that at least tries to treat its passengers like human beings.

On the first day of my vacation in Portugal (which was great by the way) my girlfriend drags me into a dusty looking liquor store, tightly packed from cracked-tiled floor to dirty ceiling with all kinds of booze.

I immediately head for the whiskey section, of course. It’s not particularly elaborate, but then my eyes fall upon a sight I’d never expect to see here: an original boxed bottle of Jameson 15 year old Limited Edition.

This particular vintage is a true collector’s item. Bottled especially for the millennium, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to get your hands on this glorious whiskey. And an obscure little liquor store near Albufeira, Portugal has not one but two of these wonderful gems. The price is €60 - nearly half the average online price of €115 for this rare vintage.

I’m inclined to by both but keeping my baggage limit in mind I opt for only one. It’s a fine addition to my collection, and I don’t want to spoil the joy of the discovery for the next Irish Whiskey connoisseur to stumble into this establishment.

Best dining experience I’ve ever had: Ninja New York restaurant. Superb decoration, fantastic food, and you are waited on by ninjas. Ninjas! How cool is that?

(I’m in NYC for the SES conference.)

Ever had a dream of flying a huge passenger jet? No? Me neither. But I’d like to mess around in the cockpit of one, just to see what all those little buttons and switches do.

And now I can. Sort of. I can’t exactly take off, or really do much of anything, but it looks great. And it’s from the Airbus A380, officially (in my world) the coolest jet airliner ever made.

More people should listen very closely to what this guy has to say.

I loved Cory Doctorow’s TunePay idea in Eastern Standard Tribe and it inspired me to an offshoot idea. Someone’s undoubtedly thought of it already, but I’m going to elaborate on it anyway: social GPS navigation.

Millions of cars have a GPS navigation system nowadays, whether it’s an external system like TomTom or an application on a smartphone or an integrated function of the car’s onboard computer. Navigation is handy. It saves you time and effort. But everybody who has one always complains about having to fork over cash for updated maps and lacking functionality for road construction and other short-lived route obstructions and no embedded warning system for speed cameras and the like. So here’s my idea: bring social networking to GPS nav systems.

Our cars are quickly becoming mobile personal networks anyway. Soon all our vehicles will be connected to us and to the world via Bluetooth, UMTS and who knows what next-gen protocol. So let’s connect these cars. Let cars talk to each other. Let us talk to other drivers through our cars.

Imagine driving along a particular road and suddenly an accident happens ahead of you and you get stuck in a traffic jam. Or you come across the early moments of a road reconstruction effort. Or a new road has just been completed and isn’t in your nav system’s map yet. Or you get your picture taken by a roadside mobile speed camera. Your GPS nav isn’t showing any of this. So, you update your nav. With a touchscreen and a stylus or perhaps a Bluetooth interface with your cellphone or PDA you update your nav map, marking the spot as an accident zone or a construction zone or new road or a temporary police checkpoint or whatever. Your car then beams this update to other nearby cars. They process the update into their own nav maps, marking it as a potential. Another driver on the same road makes the same update and this is also beamed to other cars.

The more people beaming this update as an original change request, the more validity the update gets in the GPS software, upgrading it from a potential to a probable to a definite. The nav software starts taking this change into account the moment it becomes a probable, at whatever threshold that is, and adjusts the route accordingly and/or informing the driver of it. Maybe temporary markers such as traffic jams and speed cameras get integrated after just one or two user submission, while new roads take half a dozen or more driver updates before they become a fact for your nav system.

Cars beam updates to one another continuously, everywhere they go, thus enabling a national or continental network of constantly updated nav maps. You could add a peer review system to it, giving higher credibility to route updates transmitted from reputable cars/drivers. The end result is that everyone drives around with the most up to date route navigation system possible. It makes buying route updates obsolete, as the new system doesn’t rely on the old map seller businesses such as Falk. Which is why I believe it’s not gonna happen anytime soon, those guys have too much to lose and too much grip on the market at this point. Not to mention that networked cars are still a minority these days, and nav systems are far from standardized on software.

But it’s gonna happen, sooner or later. And when it does, remember that you read it here first. Or second, or third, or four hundred and seventeenth, depending on how many others before me have had a similar brainfart. I call it PeerDrive^tm. Maybe I should file a patent.

I hate flying. It’s not that I’m afraid of it - contrary to the idiotic masses of humankind I’m not particularly intimidated or brainwashed by fear mongering authorities and rating-craving media channels. If one plane fell out of the sky every fucking week I’d still merrily get on one, since it’d still be infinitely safer than getting in my car and driving to work.

No, I hate flying because it’s cramped, noisy and mind-retardingly boring. I’m a big fellow and airplane seats are fit to spec for smurfs. When I manage to ignore the screeching engines, wailing children, snoring elderly and bitching flight attendants, I’m still faced with the task of entertaining myself for eight hours straight strapped into a tight seat with a jittery screen ten rows ahead featuring whatever passes for inflight entertainment. Four hours I can manage - eight hours is a stretch.

Not to mention having to deal with airports. An airport is a focal point of the typically human concept of waiting. An airport is a place where you go from waiting for one thing to waiting for the next. It’s a succession of waiting experiences. You wait to check in. You wait to pass security. You wait for boarding. You wait for take off. You wait for landing. You wait for unboarding. You wait to pass customs. You wait to get your goddamn luggage. You wait to get your connecting flight. You wait and wait and wait until waiting itself seems to be the whole fucking purpose of existence.

Airports do their best to make you forget that you’re nothing but human cattle waiting to be shipped out, but it’s all commercially inspired. Ridiculously overpriced stores try to sell you shit you know you don’t need but you still feel urged to buy just because it distracts your attention from having to wait. Flatscreen TV’s show you Fox ‘news’ channels that specialize in terror-stories intended to scare your fucking wits out so you’ll happily comply with a body cavity search by a fat black woman in a crumpled uniform who always picks well-dressed white men out of the security queue. Airline personnel kindly remind you how happy they are that you chose to fly with their airline because they realize you do have a choice, but I don’t really have a fucking choice because my company selected the cheapest fucking airline they could find so I’m stuck with the smallest seats, the crappiest inflight food, the worst inflight entertainment and a collection of ridiculously gay or 50-year old flight attendants (or both!) who couldn’t get a paying job at a proper airline!

So yes, I hate flying.