All In One Boat

I know I’m going pretty far afield here, but having just experienced Southwest and Jet Blue on two consecutive weekends this caught my attention. Virgin Airlines:

For the instant messaging generation, there’s an IM feature on the plane. You can invite up to 14 other passengers to join a chat room. Just remember where the hottie you saw boarding earlier is sitting and then invite him/her into a chat. You just pull your media controller out of the armrest and turn it over and there’s a QWERTY keyboard. Typing is a little stiff but definitely doable.

Under each seat is an electrical plug. Seems like a small thing, but you won’t find that on almost any domestic coach-class seat. That means your laptop won’t have to go on batteries – which is a good thing if you have a computer like mine, with fast-fading batteries.

A couple of services are still waiting to be enabled, but they also show you how cool this in-flight service is going to be. Users will be able to e-mail and text message people on the ground and connect to the Internet. I’m sure how much that’s going to cost, but it’s nice to know we’ll have that feature. Soon, you can drop your friend a quick text message if the flight is a little behind or ahead of schedule.

There are games. No, nothing current. No Nintendo games like on a Singapore Airlines flight. But you can still pass the time playing an early version of Doom, Bomberman or Vectoroid, an Asteroid knockoff.

You can watch satellite TV a la Jet Blue’s DirecTV set up. What’s nice is you can actually set an alert for an upcoming show so you don’t miss it. In addition to the regular lineup, you can watch special episodes on demand for $1.99, including “Heroes,” “The Office,” “Prison Break” and “Scrubs.” You can also watch select recorded shows in Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. The movie setup is nice, too: You can rent one for $8.

Music lovers can tune in to a radio service or pull up music on demand. Choose from dozens of artists and listen to select songs from their collection. There are also music videos, all for free.

You can also order food from your seat. All the flight attendants have computers with their food carts that allow them to see what people are ordering.

SF Chronicle: Tech Chronicles

Dan Frost at sfgate.com/blogs/tech alerts us to a long-past-due software device that will show you, prior to printing, those stooopid pages with one url on it, or a long disclaimer, or even pages of pages of a site from which you only want the one you are viewing.

GreenPrint, a small startup in Portland, Ore., has an easy answer. GreenPrint, developed by a young former Ford Motor Corp. executive, is able to flag those pages before they print, and make sure they’re something you really want to have in hard copy.

Print Greener

Here’s the product home page. http://www.printgreener.com/ I haven’t tried it yet. I’ll let you know, or you let me…