Sitting in the front row. Behind me, three boys between the ages of 6 and 9, unaccompanied by any adult. How is that even legal?

Thank god for the Sensaphonics earbuds. I’ll be blasting Alice in Chains the whole flight, I think.

George Carlin wasn’t wrong when he used to complain about the tortured language used during air travel.

I just heard part of an announcement over the loudspeaker here in Phoenix: “…For your convenience, please use the adjacent parking facility.” For your convenience, please use? What the hell does that mean? At least put a subject in there. “An adjacent parking lot is available for your convenience.” That’s still a lie, but at least it’s a sentence. How about “No Parking here. Park over there” Plain. Simple. Direct. Not rude, just honest. No parking.

My battery went from 100% down to 58% in the two hours from leaving work to taking off in the airplane. I was listening to music, checking and writing a few emails. One or two texts in that time. Most of the time, screen off, just the iPod going.

On the plane now, where I’m forced into airplane mode, of course. Been watching videos, listening to music, typing posts and tweets or later publication, etc. Nonstop use for an hour and fifteen minutes. Battery is still at 58%. This happens all the time, too. Clearly, my poor AT&T signal is draining the crap out of my battery. Bluetooth and WiFi matter, too, of course. But even when I shut those off and just leave the phone itsef on, battery often goes dead in a few hours. And it varies from day to day, too. Will have to keep an eye on it this week. If I get good signal in El Paso, I’ll be curious to see how the battery does.

GoodReader: as much as I love that the Drobox and MobileMe Disk apps for iPhone give me easy access to stored files from the cloud, I have to admit that they both suck for reading long PDFs. GoodReader is an excellent, cheap way to navigate those giant user manuals.

FlightTrack Pro. I love this app for checking in on flight delays, gates, arrivals and departures. Comes in handy when I’m flying myself or picking up someone else. MotionX GPS Drive. Since this trip involves driving someone else’s car half way across the country, I needed to consider a good GPS app. I have SatNav in my own car, so I didn’t want either a standalone unit or a big, expensive package with subscription fees. I literally needed something for one week only. MotionGPS Drive seemed like the perfect solution. Not only did it get an excellent review from Andy Ihnatko, but it also has the perfect pricing option for me. $2.99 for the app, which comes with 30 days of free service. That’s all I need. If I want to use it again on another trip six months fom now, I pay a one-time fee of $2.99 for another 30 days of services. I tested it out a few times around my own neighborhood in the last week, just making sure it works well enough. All tests were successful. We’ll see how it performs in the actual trip. Dungeon Hunter. I’m minutes away from killng the Queen, but this game is bound to provide me with some great entertainment on my flight. Best game I’ve played yet on the iPhone. (Thank you, Jason at Webomatica, for the suggestion.) Avatar. Only Played this game for a few chapters so far, but very well done. Actually makes me want to see the movie. Crosswords. An old favorite. So addictive. Tweetie 2. Have to keep up with the Twitter somehow. Can’t think of a better way. I wish this guy made cars. The ultimate example of what an iPhone app should be. Picposterous. Just picked this one up. Let’s see of it works well enough for posting from the road. I’ll take the real photos with my trusty Nikon D40, but the iPhone works well for quick documentary shots. Mail and Safari. Of course. I use Google Reader in Safari to keep up with RSS feeds. Lots of other apps on the iPhone, of course. Music and videos loaded in, as well. If my battery doesn’t die too fast, and AT&T holds up somewhat, I should be good to go. I know those are big ifs, but I’m optimistic at this point.