Flight 014: O'Hare, By Day Or Night

This is what O'Hare looked like when I arrived there at around 3pm CST for my departure. The security line at the United terminal was one of the worst I'd seen lately, and then I had to walk the long walk to Terminal C afterwards. Please, O'Hare, please enter the Clear program so I can use my awesome FlyClear card next time!


In contrast, the picture to the right is O'Hare at around midnight - utterly empty and calm. I love this picture of the Kids' area at O'Hare, all I wanted to do was crawl into the womb of that plane and sleep there for a few hours. There was something really peaceful about just walking through the terminal that late and seeing the last few travellers still waiting to head out.

I don't particularly like O'Hare - I think the terminals are too far apart and each process is often delayed. I also hate trying to find a plug for your laptop. They've got a bank of seats with outlets in the middle of the terminal but it's not at all obvious and there's often a line of people waiting.

Flight 013: Home Sweet Home

I've gotten the chance to play with some new applications this week in my time off the road. The first is Wix - a really cool site that allows you to create Flash sites through their own UI. While it's still currently in beta and has a ways to go in offering all the touches needed for creating a full custom site, it has a pretty fun and intuitive UI that can definitely help you get a basic site up and running in just a few days. They also state that search engines will still be able to scrape the contents, a big problem that most Flash sites are facing today. I've started a redesign of my personal site through it so we'll see how it goes. I gotta say that it's a hell of a lot more fun than opening up HTML-Kit and starting from zero. To the right is a screenshot of the UI.

The other product I'm looking at is Woopra. Since readership here is still a bit low right now, I don't think I've gotten to experience all the cool features. However, one way it distinguishes itself from all of the other web analytics applications I've seen is that it has a real-time view of who's on your site in that moment. For example, the image on the left shows that 1 visitor is on my site. Sadly enough, it's just me! :) I've read that it's even cooler for those who are on Wordpress though - the plugin will automatically display the name of who's on your site if they are logged in. Cool and creepy, eh?