The Lufthansa flight from Portland to Frankfurt took nine hours. It was a long journey, but time passed quickly with a self-controllable LCD in front of each of us. I wound up watching a few movies that I hadn’t seen before – and that zapped about six of the nine hours right there.

I guess I didn’t need to bring so many personal entertainment options with me after all? If only this kind of amenity was a given instead of a guess.

Too bad the “Internet” button on the remote control didn’t actually bring up anything live. Instead, I was directed to browse a locally-cached set of pages for the airline’s Web site. The seat also had a functional Ethernet port… but that didn’t seem to lead anywhere useful.

In the middle of my second movie, everybody’s LCDs rebooted themselves. This happened to me on another flight with another airline. This time, I witnessed Windows CE assigning an IP address to my location, and then making some kind of connection to another server (not sure where to, why, or how).

Our noise canceling headphones were useless for the in-flight systems, too. For some reason or another, the headsets provided were built with some kind of tri-prong adapter. I was a little baffled, but not put off. I’d rather have something instead of nothing.

Didn’t feel like nine hours – and that’s a good thing.