But in the past two and a half weeks, I’ve taken four Virgin America flights, and found its Web site completely crippled. Everything I want to do on an airline site, I can’t do.

• Most of my flights haven’t shown up in my account;
• Even with a confirmation number, I sometimes haven’t been able to check in online (or using the machines at the airport);
• I tried to buy a ticket for another trip online, and got a message saying it didn’t go through–and then an e-mail confirmation saying I had bought a ticket;
• When I tried to cancel that ticket on the Virgin Web site, it told me I had to click a button on the bottom of the page–and there was no button;
• When I try–repeatedly–to make a change to yet another trip, all seems well until the very end–when I get bounced back to the home page without the change having been made;
• The points I’ve been theoretically accruing for recent trips aren’t appearing in my account.

At the moment, the Virgin America site is so broken that its press section has an error message where the press releases should be.

The Twitter chatter about Virgin America is rife with tweets from unhappy campers, some of who are crabbier than I am…

Many of the complainers refer to interminable wait times on Virgin’s phone line; presumably, it’s being flooded with calls from people who are currently unable to get anything done online.

The woes stem from Virgin’s switchover from its old reservation system, iFly, to the industry’s 800-pound gorilla, Sabre. The change happened on October 28th, and the company knew it wouldn’t be silky-smooth: It suspended ticket sales that weekend, beefed up its phone staff, and warned customers about potential snafus. But it apparently expected things to be largely back to normal after the first weekend.

Instead, almost four weeks later, the glitches persist. The more things I try to do on the site, the more I discover that’s busted.

Virgin isn’t trying to cover up the problems. There’s a large announcement of them on its home page, as well as a detailed accounting of what’s not working. Nor is the airline discounting the inconvenience they present to travelers. In fact, the @virginamerica Twitter feed is currently dominated by apologies and attempts to resolve issues.

And after a flight earlier this month–which was trouble-free–both my wife and I received unsolicited form e-mails signed by Virgin America President/CEO David Cush in which he acknowledged problems, apologized, and said we’d get 5000 complimentary points apiece in our frequent-flyer accounts. (That’s enough for a free short-haul round trip.)

Then again, the e-mail from Cush, which was dated on November 9th, almost two weeks after the switchover, also said “Over the next week, we expect to work through and address the final website-related issues associated with the transition.” That didn’t happen: Most of the problems I’ve encountered happened starting on November 18th, when I took a trip to Chicago and found I couldn’t check myself in at home or at the airport.

So what’s going on?

To find out, I contacted Virgin America, which sent my inquiry right to the top. I ended up speaking with President/CEO Cush, who’s been in the airline business for more than two decades.

He pointed out that other airlines such as WestJet and JetBlue, have struggled with system migrations. (Here’s an interesting article with lots of details about just why they’re so painful.) But he didn’t mince words, describing the aftershocks of the switchover as “extremely irritating” for Virgin America customers.

“These are difficult transitions,” he said, “but this has been more difficult than we expected.”

Cush told me that he pushed to move to Sabre quickly because the existing reservations system, iFly, couldn’t keep up with Virgin’s rate of expansion. The airline has grown by 50 percent over the past 18 months and expects to grow another 30 percent in the next year. It needs to be able to deal with big-airline complications such as bookings through third-party sites, code-share flights, and reciprocal frequent-flyer program agreements with airlines in other countries.

“I went into this with my eyes wide open…We were in a race against time,” he explained. “I was willing to change on this accelerated schedule because staying with the old system might have been catastrophic–it would go down for days at a time.”

(I knew that already–in fact, I wrote about an extended breakdown last May.)

The new system, Cush said, powers far more than the Virgin site and airport self-service terminals, including flight planning and crew scheduling. Most of the behind-the-scenes functions are already working well, he told me. And he said there are signs that the situation for customers is improving: Web check-ins, which had fallen to about 20 percent of all check-ins, are now in the high thirties, close to their typical 40 percent. The average hold time for phone callers is now under 30 minutes; that doesn’t sound so spectacular, but it’s an improvement over the recent figure.

Virgin continues to work on ironing out the new system’s remaining kinks, and plans to give its site a major update on December 1st. “I’m confident–and crossing my fingers–that it will solve most of our remaining problems,” Cush told me. Another update is scheduled for December 8th.

I’m crossing my fingers, too. The site’s woes have made clear to me, in a way I didn’t quite understand, that modern businesses, of all sorts, don’t have Web sites. To a remarkable degree, they are Web sites.

Virgin says that the system failure hasn’t affected the flights themselves, and once I’ve gotten airborne, the four trips I’ve taken in November have been just as pleasant as usual. But it can’t go back to being a great airline until it has a Web site that doesn’t require any apologies or explanations.

Slowly but surely, many of the best iOS apps are coming to Android, and their quality once they get there is improving. Case in point: The excellent air travel search engine Hipmunk, which arrived in a version for Android phones this week. Its Android version is just as good as the iOS one–good looking, easy to use, and brilliantly useful. (It ranks flight options by a price/complexity formula it calls “Agony,” and, as you can see above, shows which flights have Wi-Fi.

Hipmunk does flight search better than competitors such as Kayak and Bing Travel, but it’s not the only airfare research tool you’ll ever need, mostly because it only shows prices available through Orbitz, and routes you there when you’re ready to buy. Still, even if you just use the app to look for flights you’ll buy elsewhere, it’s invaluable. And it’s nice to see it didn’t get watered down on its way to Android.

Here’s how it works: your reservation for a car is placed through Uber’s iPhone app. You’ll then receive a text message when the Uber is expected to arrive, and when it is about to arrive at your location. No money exchanges hands because the payment (with tip included) is done via credit card stored with Uber. Fast and easy.

I can tell you from personal experience during CE Week back in June that the service is nice. In addition to the text, I received calls from the driver confirming my location on his way there, as well as also letting me know he was there in case I might have missed the text message. Pretty good customer service!

I was happy to share the ride with Mrs. McCracken herself (aka Marie Domingo) and we were both impressed with the ride. Yes, it’s more expensive than a cab. But sometimes you’ve got to step it up, you know?

The company is staying pretty tight lipped about its future expansion plans, but it’s obviously taking its time in expanding. If I could make a suggestion, I’d love to see Ubers in Philadelphia (hint, hint).

Usually, the Virgin Web site is part of what I like about it–it’s nicely designed and makes buying tickets and checking in pretty painless. But at the moment, the site is down. The notice alerting visitors to that fact has a timestamp of 5pm on Sunday night; as far as I can tell, though, it’s been suffering from nagging problems for days now. It’s been nearly a week since I started trying to book a trip to San Diego, and I’ve failed to finish the task every time–the site keeps choking before I get a confirmation. And the price of the tickets in question have gone up in the interim.

No, I can’t call Virgin and talk to a real person: the reservation system they use is down, too. And the computer problems are impacting people who are already flying, too, judging from the Twitter chatter:

It’s interesting that the people who are on flights seem to be a little less irate than those who are trying to use the site: it’s possible for a human staffer to make the best of a bad situation. Web sites, however, can’t show grace under pressure. I winder what’s wrong, why things seem to be getting worse rather than better, and when things will be back to normal?

Photo by Flickr user Secretlondon.

I know it’s possible to live without access to the Internet. (Hey, I lived the first fifteen years or so of my life before I heard the dulcet tone of a dial-up modem connection for the first time.) But a funny thing has happened as broadband, cellular networks, and Wi-Fi have put the Internet within my reach the vast majority of the time: I’ve gotten really bad at doing without the Net.

Case in point: Earlier this month, I flew from San Francisco to Alicante, Spain, for an event called the IFA Global Press Conference. The trek involved three plane flights and took close to 24 hours. And aside from a couple layovers, during which I fiddled my iPhone and futzed with iffy airport Wi-Fi, I was disconnected the whole time.
The experience made me antsy, in part because I was cut off from a bunch of the tools I use to do my job, including Google Docs, Gmail, and WordPress. I felt incapacitated and isolated, even though I had brought both a laptop and an iPad with me. I started mourning the fact that Virgin America, my favorite airline–it has Wi-Fi on all its flights–unaccountably doesn’t offer service to Alicante, Spain.
It wasn’t all that long ago that I kind of liked being deprived of Internet access on most flights: I’d buy a stack of magazines to read, snooze, and otherwise relax rather than work, work, work. But somewhere along the way, my brain rewired itself. It wants the Net, as surely as a cigarette addict’s brain wants nicotine.

(Incidentally, I ended spending a chunk of the trip writing a TIME.com column–this one–in Word. For years, Word was my most-used piece of technology, but lately it’s become That Word Processor I Use When I Can’t Get Online.)

Airplanes aren’t the only places where the Internet doesn’t go, though–I know of dead spots in San Francisco where, as far as I can tell, there’s no publicly-available Wi-Fi and no adequate coverage from any major wireless carrier. And speaking of Wi-Fi, as useful as it is, it’s often rotten–at many hotels, it’s so sluggish, sporadic, and otherwise erratic that it may not be better than no Internet access at all. (If you hold out hope that you might be able to get online, you waste hours trying to do so; if you know you can’t, you don’t bother to try.)

I may be an extreme case: I make my living writing a blog, and you can’t blog if you can’t get online. But I’m not that much of an outlier. A lot of us look forward to the day when Internet access is truly pervasive in a way it still isn’t. And tech companies are already introducing products–like Google’s Chrome OS--that are built for a world of truly dependable, universal Internet access even though it’s not here yet.

Thinking about this, I looked back at the history of consumer Internet access (and before that, access to proprietary online services). There have been five eras so far:

The early years (late 1970s-early 1990s): If you were online at at all–which was not a given, since plenty of computer users weren’t–you paid an hourly rate to dial into a proprietary online service such as CompuServe, GEnie, or an upstart called AOL. (Sometimes a stiff hourly rate: It could cost more than $30 an hour to use CompuServe once you’d paid for network access.) You might also have dialed into free bulletin-board systems, some of which were only available when their proprietors weren’t using their computers for something else.

The middle years (mid-1990s-turn of the century):You were on dial-up. You still encountered the occasional busy signal. And unless you had two phone lines, using the Internet meant you couldn’t receive phone calls on your home number. But at least you paid a flat rate for all-you-could-eat access to the entire World Wide Web.

The recent years (turn of the century to a few years ago): You had broadband, eliminating the need to dial out and hog a phone line.

Right now: You’ve got broadband–faster, more reliable broadband than you had a few years ago–and a smartphone that puts most of the Internet in your pocket, as long as you’ve got coverage.

The next era will come when it’s truly unusual to be without Internet access. We’ll know it’s here when not being able to get online when you’re out, about, or in the air is just as unusual as it is for wired broadband at home to conk out today. It’ll be a time when smartphones just work, when Wi-Fi is bulletproof, and every domestic and international flight is Internet-ready.

I think that day will come, and while I don’t know when it’ll arrive, I’m going to be awfully disappointed if 2020 rolls around and it’s not here.

[NOTE: This story was republished Technologizer's T-Week newsletter--go here to sign up to receive it . You'll get original stuff that won't show up on the site until later, if at all.]

When I’m on the road and enter my hotel room for the first time, I turn on the light, survey my surroundings to mentally rate the quality of the accommodations for the price I paid, and then open the curtains so I can judge the view. So, I’ll bet, do you. But it always feels like a crapshoot–by the time I know much about the room, I’m in it and have agreed to pay for it.

Room 77–which was the first company to demo today at the Launch conference here in San Francisco–has a (potentially) better idea: It’s collecting and sharing information about individual rooms in specific hotels. It knows the features rooms have; it knows whether they’re corner rooms and how large they are; it uses Google Earth to generate simulated views as you’ll see them from specific rooms. If a particular hotel is in its database, you can judge its rooms from the comfort of home (or anywhere else–there’s an iPhone app).

I love the concept, but it does leave me with a bunch of questions. Will the site be able to map out all the hotels in every location that travelers care about? (Right now, it’s covering 16 cities and has 425,000 rooms, or a bit less than three times the quantity of rooms in Las Vegas alone; it’s also concentrating on better-class hotels.) Will hotels cooperate or complain? (The company says it’s collecting data on its own, but that some hotel chains are helping.) Even if I know that a particular room is a delight–or a dog–will I be able to do anything with that information? (You can’t specify the room when you book, and I wonder what would happen if you showed up at the front desk of a Wyndham for check-in and demanded room 1792.)

For Room 77 to change the world, it would have to…well, change the world. Or at least the way we deal with hotel companies. Maybe the day will come when we can pick rooms the way we do when we pay for a seat in an airplane or a theater. We might end up paying more for the very best rooms than we do now; then again, we might pay less for unexpectedly tiny rooms that overlook rusty ventilation systems.

If it does, Room 77 would be awfully handy. And if it catches on, it might help nudge the hotel business in that direction.

Unfortunately, there’s something not quite right with their Internet connection in relation to Twitter. As you can see, I wasn’t the only one in my account:

The interloper acted in the same manner I would have. Not entirely benign, but mostly benevolent as far as I can tell by merely firing off that lone alert. I’m not so concerned about anything in my archived Twitter direct messages, as it’s mostly boring stuff. I operate under the assumption that everything/anything online can become public at any time. Internet privacy is an easily shattered illusion.

Now it’s possible this person swiped my credentials off the network using something like Firesheep. But I’d expect a person dabbling in such affairs to more proudly proclaim I’d been p0wned. Followed by additional mayhem. So I’m taking him/her at face value and suspect somehow the packets were unintentionally crossed. And at the time there was super high latency on the network. Combined with Southwest’s proxy and framing of every web page (see below, left), I guess anything is possible. Although it shouldn’t be.

At the time of discovery, two hours after the fact, I was obviously startled and the only action I came up with was to delete the tweet. In retrospect, I should have left it be so as to not impact any possible forensic research. And to provide a more compelling post. But the screen grab will have to suffice. Once I deplaned, I changed my unique Twitter password, as a precaution, via aircard.

So consider this post a public WiFi PSA in addition to a security vulnerability notification to Southwest and Twitter. I’ll provide updates if either of them choose to respond.

(Thanks for alerting me, Steve!)

(This post republished from Zatz Not Funny.)

This time, the phone showed signs that it wasn’t an orphan. The AT&T branding was gone, replaced by that of GTL (a company which appears to specialize in providing phones to prisons). And the keyboard had been repaired (mostly: the “3″ and “5″ keys were missing)

But the phone still didn’t work–no display, no dial tone, no nothing. I wonder when anyone wanted to use it–at least for a purpose other than making a voice call–and was frustrated by its sad condition?