As I write this posting, I am about 38,000 feet above Colorado, on JetBlue flight 169. And, as is usually the case on JetBlue, my TV is on.

What’s unusual is what I’m watching: live coverage of passengers evacuating American 31, which returned to LAX when they found smoke in the cabin.

As far as I can tell, everyone is fine, but it sure makes me think about how much has to go right every flight.

I’m also under-impressed with the amount of speculation that the anchors are doing to keep chattering. The phrase “we don’t know” seems to have vanished from the CNN dialect of the English language.

Of course, by the time this actually gets posted, I will have landed. Then I just have to worry about ground traffic, which is mostly not operated by trained professionals.

Diane and Jeff gave me Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything for Father’s Day, and I finally got around to reading it over the past week. It seemed familiar, and, after a while I realized that I had already read the original (getting it from the library), but it hadn’t made enough of an impression on me to recognize the book soon enough to exchange it.

Like Star Wars, the added material isn’t worth the extra running…err, reading…time. But the basic book is of interest, and the need for an enterprise to find a balance between proprietary and the commons is vital.

Worth a read, or at least a close skim.