Before I get started, let me just say I like visting the USA, wandering about the countryside, the national\/state parks, and enjoy the company of the people there.<\/p>\n
I am sat in Dublin airport right now.\u00a0 I am on my way to Seattle via Chicago.\u00a0 My Dublin \u2013 Chicago flight will take around 7 hours.\u00a0 Correction \u2026 let\u2019s count the amount of time that the airline wants me to spend in the airport.\u00a0 My Dublin-Chicago flight will take 10.5 hours.\u00a0 One third of the 1600 mile flight will be spent in an over heated excuse for an over priced mini shopping centre where I cannot go outside for some fresh air.<\/p>\n
But all airports are like that.\u00a0 Stuffy, dry, cramped, oh \u2026 there\u2019s a vending machine that sells cool drinks for twice their normal price, and would you like an hour of wifi for $7?\u00a0 Security queues are too long because only a small fraction of the scanning machines are staffed.\u00a0 Restaurants are full of dried, heated food that tastes worse than their airplane food and seems like it\u2019s less of a bargain.\u00a0 And there\u2019s the people \u2026 *\u00a3$^\u00a3&\u00a3\u201d% \u2026 I cannot stand the idiots who seem to pack these places.\u00a0 I long for the days when Aer Fungus had a reasonable card scheme and I could hide away in a lounge.<\/p>\n
But the experience to travelling to the USA usually starts long before you get into your car, taxi, bus or train.\u00a0 It starts once you book your plane ticket.<\/p>\n
Let me first say I have no problem filling in forms for a visa waiver or customs declarations.\u00a0 I\u2019m totally OK with that.\u00a0 I cannot stand wasted effort.<\/em><\/p>\n The first thing you need to do when travelling to the States is ESTA.\u00a0 Basically, that\u2019s an application to fill in an application.\u00a0 You know, it\u2019s like a meeting about a meeting.\u00a0 ESTA is an online form where you answer the questions that are on the paper visa waiver form.\u00a0 It must be completed in order to submit a paper visa waiver form.\u00a0 Both have identical questions.\u00a0 And of course, the answers must be identical.\u00a0 I thought that was pretty mad.\u00a0 How about giving people the chance to do one or the other.<\/p>\n I once had an argument with someone about ESTA.\u00a0 The other person said it was necessary to gather information about the passenger.\u00a0 Fine \u2026 but there is nothing <\/em>different between this and the green visa waiver card.\u00a0 The next response was that it\u2019s the 21st century and we should go digital.\u00a0 Fine, but why do we also<\/em> need to do the green paper form that is identical?\u00a0 It was an unwinnable argument for the opposing view.\u00a0 It is there just because it is there.\u00a0 You know, there must be a massive amount of data gathered for ESTA every year.\u00a0 I bet that requires a lot<\/em> of SAN storage, replication and backup.\u00a0 Someone like HP or EMC is making a stack of cash on that.<\/p>\n But it gets worse.<\/p>\n When I booked my flight I soon found out (I forget how) that I needed to complete another online form.\u00a0 I think it was called the advanced passenger information form.\u00a0 I logged in and was greeted by the same questions I had just answered for ESTA.\u00a0 The USA Homeland Security department needed a third copy of this data.\u00a0 This seems like a crude form of replication.\u00a0 Can\u2019t they order SAN controller replication instead, or maybe do it at the database level?\u00a0 I\u2019m told SQL is quite good at this.<\/p>\n Time goes by and 3 days before my flight, Aer Fungus sends me a reminder email of my flight.\u00a0 They also remind me about the need for ESTA, the advanced passenger information form, and<\/em> the passenger address information form.\u00a0 The what<\/em>?\u00a0 Here we go again.\u00a0 No wait; no one is that stupid to ask for the same set of information a fourth time.\u00a0 I log in and there are the same questions again: name, passport number, issue date, expiration date, address in the USA, etc.\u00a0 There is also a warning that the answers I give on this form must match those on the other forms or I will be declined access to the USA.\u00a0 It\u2019s incredible.<\/p>\n I am no DBA but I did do database classes in college back in the early 90\u2019s.\u00a0 Most of the lectures we got were cogged from books written in the 1970\u2019s and 1980\u2019s \u2013 they were in the library, fading and falling apart for any one to use.\u00a0 We learned about data storage optimization for relational databases called normalisation.\u00a0 1st normalised form, 2nd, 3rd, all the way to Boyce-Codd, and even on beyond that where it stopped making sense to me.\u00a0 It seems that who ever is consulting for the USA department of Homeland Security uses irrational databases instead where data needs to be inputted 4 times: green waiver form, ESTA, advanced passenger information and passenger address information.\u00a0 It\u2019s pure stupid and the only people gaining anything are the storage companies who must be laughing all the way to the bailed out banks.\u00a0<\/p>\n I just got it!\u00a0 This must be how the Fed props up the hardware companies during the recession?\u00a0 Wasted\u00a0 and duplicated petabytes of data that will never be used.\u00a0 The data isn’t being used for security reasons.\u00a0 We know that.\u00a0 A known terrorist suspect managed to get on a plane to the USA and tried to set fire to his explosive crotch … damn that sounds like the plot to a bad Jean-Claude Van Dam movie.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve got some advice for them.\u00a0 In the northwest USA, there will be 1,300 of some of the world\u2019s best IT people around next week.\u00a0 Conveniently, they\u2019ll be in Microsoft\u2019s Redmond campus.\u00a0 That\u2019ll include software developers, security experts and DBA\u2019s.\u00a0 Send someone on up and ask a few questions.\u00a0 You might learn how to gather the information you need with one form and store it just once.\u00a0 You\u2019ll accomplish a few things with that.\u00a0 You\u2019ll save millions every year and have a thankful American citizen\/tax payer.\u00a0 You\u2019ll also stop alienating the legal visitors to your country who are bringing money to spend on your economy.\u00a0 The experience of flying is bad enough without making it feel like a tax audit from hell that you might find in a book like 1985.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Before I get started, let me just say I like visting the USA, wandering about the countryside, the national\/state parks, and enjoy the company of the people there. I am sat in Dublin airport right now.\u00a0 I am on my way to Seattle via Chicago.\u00a0 My Dublin \u2013 Chicago flight will take around 7 hours.\u00a0 … Continue reading “I Hate Flying … To The USA, Irrational Databases, and Air Conditioning”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10414","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10414","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10414"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10414\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}