I have a hundred stories I could tell about the Europe trip, but I'll just post a short, easy one here because it's fresh in my mind.

Our trip back from Frankfurt to Philly was on one of the somewhat-newer Airbus A330 jets. I was amazed and impressed with their in flight entertainment. Each seat had a small LCD display embedded in the back, and there was a wired remote built into each armrest. Instead of being the standard "everyone watches the same crappy movie on crappy headsets you paid $5.00 to rent", it actually was a pretty amazing system.

Each display was essentially a networked media player. You used a web-based system with the wired remote to select from movies, TV shows, and albums stored on a server somewhere in the plane. The quality was very high, the audio was in full stereo, you could pause/FF/RW, etc. I noticed no hitches or glitches in the playback, despite the fact that a majority of the people on the plane were streaming content at the same time. VERY impressive.

Basically, no one needed to be bored during the flight. There was something to keep you busy the whole time. The movies were even pretty decent titles, although they were ones you probably already rented on DVD. I took in a couple episodes of Frasier I hadn't seen, a couple of movies, and an episode of a series called "Scrubs" I didn't know about that I really enjoyed. My only complaint about the content was that I would have wanted a few more feature films available. The titles were mostly ones I'd either already seen, or wasn't interested in watching. But that could be just because I was picky, they had several feature films available in different genres, including an entire section just for kids.

A neat feature was: when the crew needed to make an announcement, whatever you were watching got paused and the word "announcement" appeared in a bar at the top of the screen, and their voice came over the public PA as well as over your headphones.

The only problem is that it is based on Windows.

How do I know? Because mine crashed on me, of course.

Locked up in the middle of playing a film. No response to keyboard input. Another nearby user had the same problem at a different time. I spent some time looking for a hidden reset switch and trying key combinations to get it to reboot, no dice. Muttered a lot about having to troubleshoot locked-up computers even when I was on vacation. Finally got the Space Waitress to show me the secret key combination to reboot the thing: Press and hold the bottom three buttons on the telephone keypad (back side of remote control) while simultaneously pressing the EXIT key on the front of the remote.

After a few tries, this rebooted my station, and I got to watch the system boot up. Yup, I was right: Windows. You see some kind of a stripped-down NT or 2000 installation, with an automatic logon (password was one character long) and a batch file that pings a TCP/IP server and does some other stuff before launching into the web-based media player.

Thank God they didn't use it for the avionics.