Today is opening day for Major League Baseball. One of my fondest memories is going to Coors Field on opening day several years ago. I believe it may have been a year or two after 9/11, so there were many loud jets (more than usual for opening day, anyway) that flew over the field before the game started. It was a beautiful day, much like today is, and I breathed the air and ate a $7 hot dog and soaked it all in. Today I find myself overtired from having participated in not one but two fantasy baseball drafts over the last 2 nights. I know I recently wrote about fantasy sports and the Internet, but this take is slightly different. It’s simply too much. 162 games…. why on Earth would I choose to participate in TWO leagues? Especially when my son’s little league season starts on Sunday, and I’m coaching. I think it’s time to prioritize… or more specifically DEprioritize fantasy baseball in favor of the real deal. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to adjust my rosters before tonight’s games.

I remember the days before the E-Ticket. You’d get a thick packet of
paperwork in the mail or from a travel agent. At the airport, you’d
stand in line and use those papers to get a boarding pass. Then,
during your trip, you’d worry about misplacing that paperwork, as
you’d need it to get your return boarding pass.

Then came the E-Ticket. You could just print it. And, if you weren’t
checking luggage you could go straight to the gate, skipping the line
at the airline’s desks.

Now the future is here again. The TSA has launched the Paperless
Boarding Pass Pilot. Instead of a piece of paper, your boarding pass
is a two-dimensional bar code displayed on your phone. It’s nice; one
less thing to forget, and gone is the problem of finding a printer
while on vacation.

This technology doesn’t require a smart phone; if your phone can
receive text and display images, you already have what you need.

But with a smart phone, the Paperless Boarding Pass really shines. On
my most recent trip I flew Delta and was able to use their iPhone App
(they have an Android as well). The App automatically gets my
itinerary, pops up a reminder to check in, and then lets me check in.
It lets me view my flight’s status and alerts me when there are
delays, changes, or, sigh, cancellations.

Now, they had *me* at “lets me check in”. No more taking time out of
the last day of my trip to figure out how to check in.

Not all airlines are doing Paperless Boarding Pass yet and not all
airports are set up to take them yet. But, the ease of air travel is
taking another large set forward. Flying cars can’t be far behind.

Note: I’m working on a followup post to my last – The Streaming Video Myth, Part Two – but getting accurate Tier 1 traffic stats to build visuals and present a detailed picture of streaming video impact on various large Internet carrier backbones is proving to be an involved and time consuming process.  Look for part 2 of my discussion of the large-scale effects of streaming video in an upcoming post.  In the interim, I present an update to another previous post of mine – Jason’s Favorite iPad Apps!

When I last wrote about iOS apps, iOS was still called the “iPhone OS” and there were ~10,000 apps available in Apple’s App Store.  There were already many mature, usable, well-written apps available back then, but the continued growth of the App Store over the last 18 months has been truly extraordinary.  There are now hundreds of thousands of apps available for several different iOS platforms, and the App Store has recently passed the 10 billion download mark (Billion with a ‘B’).  I’d hazard a guess that one can now readily find an iOS app to accomplish anything worth accomplishing on a mobile platform…as well as a great many things only recently thought to be purely within the purview of desktop operating systems.  In addition to iPhone and platform-inspecific iOS apps, a healthy new category of tablet-specific apps has grown up around Apple’s iPad.  With the launch of the iPad 2 this very day, I thought I’d provide a list of my favorite iPad apps so far to augment my previous iPhone Apps list.  Enjoy, and please feel free to let me know which ones you agree/disagree with, or which of your favorite apps I missed in the comments!

Amateur Astronomy – Star Walk for iPad

Twitter! – Twitter (universal)

Wikipedia – Articles for iPad

Shipping/Deliveries – Delivery Status Touch (universal)

Music Appreciation – Sound Hound (universal)

News/General Awesomeness – Flipboard

Remote Desktop – iTeleport for iPad

Remote Shell – iSSH (universal)

Periodicals – Popular Science+

Noting – Evernote (universal)

Saving for Later – Instapaper (universal)

Jotting – Penultimate

Movies – Fandango (universal)

Mobile Gaming – Fruit Ninja HD

Mobile Gaming – Pinball HD

Mobile Gaming – Infinity Blade (universal)

Mobile Gaming – Osmos for iPad

Mobile Gaming – Stick Golf HD

…and the Apple native iPad apps which are well worth the monies:

Productivity – Pages

Productivity – Numbers

Productivity – Keynote

Video Editing/Crazy Awesomeness – iMovie (universal)

Audio Editing/Crazy Awesomeness – GarageBand (universal)

…or are free as in beer:

Remote Controlling – Remote (universal)

Finding your iPad – Find My iPad