First of all, why the hell do they call it the Mid West anyway? If you draw a line down the middle of the continental United States dividing east and west, it bisects North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas. Everything west of that should be west, and everything east of that should be east. The Mid West, according to my reckoning, would be somewhere around Idaho and possibly Arizona. It sure as hell ain’t Chicago. That would actually be the Mid-East, or Middle East if you prefer. Confused? Me too.

Secondly, where do hotels get off charging exorbitant rates for Wi-Fi access and then give you a thin dribble of bandwidth that shuts on and off like a bad neon light? Multiple 13 bucks a night by 200 or 300 rooms for an average size hotel. That’s about 3000 dollars every day, or a million dollars a year. This isn’t rocket science people. For that money, I should have a data pipe the size of a Volvo plugged into my laptop. And don’t even get me started on the connectivity you find at most digital conferences.

Perhaps you could take some of that windfall Wi-Fi revenue and put it towards something extravagant, like an extra power receptacle in a hotel room that doesn’t already have fourteen lamps, a TV set, a coffee maker and a radio plugged into it. Did the designers of the average hotel room not think that electricity might fall into the category of a “nice to have?”

While I’m on the travel theme, why can’t seats be reclined when you take off or land? Does it throw the delicate aerodynamic balance of the plane off, sending it doing cartwheels down the runway? Is there some drastic physiological effect on your body if you’re not at a 90 degree angle, like your eyelids inverting or your nasal passages spontaneously combusting? Just wondering.

And what, exactly, will happen if I don’t power my electronic device “all the way down?” Does some residual power leakage cause the plane’s navigation system to think east is west or up is down? If so, that’s something we should crack down even harder on. Perhaps if we just connected a simple cell activity detector to an ejection seat system. It would save the flight attendants a lot of time and grief.

By the way Mr/Ms Airline CFO, if I spend six hundred dollars on a ticket to fly from Toronto to Chicago, will giving me a full can of pop, rather that a 2 ounce thimble already jammed with ice, really send you into bankruptcy? If the edge of profitability is really that narrow, perhaps a better place to save money would be the hundreds of pounds of fuel you burn circling O’Hare for 45 minutes before you get the okay to land. It’s worth checking out, anyway.

One last thing. On behalf of all the office workers who work in high-rises across North America, please remember that as you prance around your hotel room in various states of undress, you can see in those windows as well as see out of them. That’s not one-way glass separating your room from the office across the street. There may be occasions where the view is agreeable, but I suspect they’re few and far between; based on the people I usually share a hotel elevator with.

Okay..I feel better. Thanks for the therapy. Feel free to go back to your work now.

Originally published in Mediapost’s Search Insider September 30, 2010

We’re in the fortunate position of having our very own eye tracking monitor, so we designed a study and put Google Instant to the test last week. My colleague, Ian Everdell is crunching through the data this week, and will be sharing our findings at SMX East in New York on October 5, participating in the panel discussion “Google Instant’s Impact on SEO & User Behavior”. The panel will be moderated by Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Land, and will include Othar Hansson, Senior Staff Software Engineer with Google. If you want to know more about Google Instant, this is a discussion you won’t want to miss.