Some things you should do, just because you can. For example, when I was sixteen, I jumped out of a plane at 3,000 feet, with a parachute tethered to the plane, of course, landing near a chicken farm, surrounded by barbed wire, somewhere in rural North Carolina. That was an experience I’ll never forget, but I haven’t repeated it, at least yet.
Rapidly advancing technology, of course, continues to make the "things you should do, just because you can" list, longer and longer, but here is my effort for the day: Researching and blogging about brands and trademarks from 30,000 feet. So, I’ll scratch that one off my Bucket List too.
On a Delta flight today, as in right now, this very minute, somewhere in between Phoenix and Minneapolis, I’m publishing this blog post from scratch, images, links, tags, and all, on the fly, so to speak.
I didn’t board the plane intending to do this. I didn’t even know I could use my laptop to access the wonderful Internet during flight, but my boys noticed a logo on the plane when we boarded indicating Wi-Fi is available On Board. When I took a look at the available Wi-Fi networks, I selected Gogo, set up an account, and paid with a credit card.
Since all that was too easy, I thought I’d do a quick blog post on a non-traditional non-verbal trademark that Aircell appears to have trademarked, so I searched the USPTO database from 30,000 feet and learned that Aircell owns two federal registrations for these four characters in sequence (Aircell describes the characters as forming an Emoticon), not including the colon or the ending period: *-)-.
One registration in Int’l Class 38 covers broadband and narrowband communication services and the other covers computer network and communications hardware and software in Int’l Class 9.
Actually, the toughest part of this exercise has been that I’m cramped between two full-size men in Row 16. Neither one appears to care what I’m doing since I’m doing my best to keep my elbows within my allotted space, as one reads a magazine, and the other watches a movie on a really tiny screen.
Uh oh, now I see my battery is running low, so signing off now . . . .