I'm writing this at Berlin's Tegel airport, waiting for my flight home to Heathrow. Only I shouldn't be here. I should be in the new, gleaming Brandenburg International airport on the other side of Berlin. Only I'm not, because the 2nd. of June closure date for Tegel has come and gone and Brandenburg still isn't finished or open. This isn't the first time Tegel's doom has been postponed, the airport was originally slated to close in November 2011, only it didn't because Brandenburg wasn't finished or open. Currently Tegel is slated to close sometime in March 2013, whether that comes to pass or not is a matter of speculation.

There's a lot to like about Tegel; it's small and efficient, each gate has a security and passport control section and you can get from plane to taxi in under a minute on a good day; try doing that at Heathrow.

Another day, another flight, another addition to the ever growing and increasingly arcane number of steps that you need to go through in order to get through an airport and actually take off on a plane. I've written before on the world of airport security, be it having your bags X-Rayed or searched and on engaging flight-safe mode on your mobile phone/tablet/e-book reader/laptop.

Last week, flying from London Heathrow to Berlin's Tegel airport I found a new addition to the increasingly detached-from-reality world of airline security ... the electronic boarding pass. In principle, the electronic boarding pass is a great idea. First introduced in 1999 by Alaska Airways, checking into your flight online and putting a QR code on a graphic of your boarding pass cuts down queueing and waiting at the airport. Some airlines either send you the boarding pass as an SMS message, as an email attachment or as a time limited web URL. Some airlines provide an app on your phone; British Airways falls into this category and their app covers Windows Phone 7, iOS, Android and Blackberry.

Since I started my role at Nokia in Berlin in May of last year I've swapped the daily commute from home to work by train to a weekly commute by plane. This means I have to pass through airport security at London's Heathrow and Berlin's Tegel airports around twice a week. I tend to travel as light as I can, with a hand baggage sized suitcase so I can get off the plane and out of the airport as quickly as I possibly can, something Tegel airport excels at.

Taking the law of averages into account, I should be subject to random additional security searches and although the law of averages is generally considered a fallacy, about once a month my hand baggage gets that extra special level of attention. But it always seems to be for the same thing.

In September I'll be at the 46th. Annual Society of Cartographers Summer School at the University of Manchester where I'm lucky enough to have been asked to give a talk on geographic data. This topic should come as no surprise to anyone who's come across one of my blog posts.

I'll be talking about Welcome To The World Of The Geo Data Silo; Where Closed Data Is Open And Open Data Is Closed; the talk abstract is now up on the SoC web site and it's reproduced below.

I find myself travelling a lot for work these days and that means a roaming service for wifi hotspots and hotel internet connections really makes life simpler. I could maintain subscriptions to The Cloud, T-Mobile Hotspots, BT OpenZone and so on and so on, but fortunately Yahoo! provides me with an iPass subscription.

iPass is great; it allows me to connect to pretty much every hotspot and hotel internet service there is. I've been using it for over 4 years now and can only think of a single time when I haven't been able to get a connection. I'm using it right now, sitting in the departures lounge at Berlin's Tegel airport waiting for my flight back to London.

So far, so great, but the current, Snow Leopard supporting, version of the iPassConnect app, v3.1, seems to have been designed by someone with scant regard for anything approaching consistency and usability. Let me count the ways in which this app frustrates.