All my Flights

Till now, I have flown a total of 481,333 miles. That is more than 19 times around the world, and twice the distance to the moon.

I have done this via a total of 187 flight segments, passing through 37 airports, in 11 countries and utilizing 24 carriers.

I have flown as north as Edinborough (EDI), as south and east as Kuala Lumpur (KUL), and as west as San Francisco (SFO).

The longest flight I have taken is the 14 hour leg from Dubai (DXB) to New York (JFK). The shortest is the 37 minute hop between Milwaukee (MKE) and Chicago (ORD).

All these stats are thanks to two things. One, my idiosyncrasy of keeping a log of all the flights I have ever taken. The second is the site for people like me called OpenFlights.org

All I needed was a bit of excel transformation to convert my existing flight log into a format acceptable to the site, upload and done.

That is how I know that if I had taken all the flights one after another, I would have spent 43 days, 22 hours and 39 minutes in the air. In reality, if I include all the check-in and waiting times, you could call it about two months in airports and flights around the world.

Free WiFi or Secure WiFi

I wasn't a big fan of free WiFi. Don't get me wrong, I love having free stuff, but when it came to WiFi, free almost always meant it was unencrypted. And that meant that my security was basically at the mercy of everyone else sharing the connection with me.

This is because, every time you browsed on an open WiFi connection (except when it was a https page), anyone could easily see what you are browsing. There are a number of powerful tools that allow you to snoop on everyone else. To make matters worse, recent news indicates that even having https was no protection. FireSheep is a Firefox plugin that makes taking over other people's connections almost trivial.

The one protection against this form of security holes is, well, having an encrypted WiFi connection. Chester Wisniewski, a Security Advisor at Sophos, has a potential solution. To encrypt all free WiFi connections using a default password - "free". That way the connection remains just as accessible, but it also puts security high up on the agenda. And maybe, people like me would not be so wary of free WiFi connections anymore.