Off to Boston on Monday, to do four 90 minute and one afternoon long presentation at Lotus Developer 2008, at the Sheraton Boston in Dalton Street. Sweet.

This involves divuling my itinerary to the US authorities via the KLM internet check-in process. So far, so very boring and predictable. But - KLM to the rescue. Unaware that internet checkin facilities are now ten-a-penny with other carriers, offering such boring facilites as say reliability - KLM snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by:

• Offering a site that just doesnt work in Safari. Harumph.
• That fails in Firefox. What are these bozo's testing on, given that IE doesnt actually have any testing tools?
• That fails in Internet Exploder v6- which as MS love to remind us, still represents the bulk of the internet users out there, certainly in corporate-land.
• It fails in Opera, but Opera is the only browser to actually provoke an error message. Clearly, something is amiss at one of the THREE KLM data centers, and it being a Sunday, no-one has noticed.

(I have to say that I had the opportunity to fly via BA/BAA's flagship new terminal - Terminal 5 at Heathrow, but since I dont share the same travel karma as Francie (who's hitting it four times in the next six weeks!), I would only be sadly disappointed as the baggage handlers loot my luggage (as they did last year at LGW). So I'm going via Schipol in Amsterdam, on the grounds that its clean, efficient, and has the more than evens probability of delivering me and my baggage to the place I want to go. )

Airline travel sucks. I think I'll do the US by Boat next time.

Update: The KLM telephone number in the UK for check in is 02 0736 50752. Much faster than the web site.