IFExpress: Blog From The Beach!

The Long Beach Conference & Exhibition Center is the location of the 31st annual WAEA for the inflight entertainment crowd. If you are coming, here is a good place to start: the free Long Beach iPhone App: Downtown Long Beach, so if you want to go to the beach, prepare all your implements including a beach chair, a turkish beach towel and more. A waiter at the Rock Bottom Brewery and Restaurant sent us to it as a good source for the city and more information on the free red bus that covers a lot of the Conference vicinity and downtown dining hotspots. We got recommendations about the following pubs and eateries near the Center as follows:
PF Chang
The Auld Dubliner
California Pizza
Rock Bottom Restaurant and Brewery
Hooters
Pictures have been posted on Flickr – WAEA & AIX Day 0.

Welcoming Reception
Probably ranking as one of the best, this year’s get-to-know-get-together on Sunday night really clicked. The food was great, the bar was fab and the crowd was jovial. What more can you say – while the regulars were there saying, “You have gotten fat!” and the newbies were saying, “How thin you look,” and we were there writing it down. We were glad to see the likes of Michael Childers, John White, Neil Morgan, Rich Salter, Jim Snyder, Geoff Underwood, Linda Palmer, Wendy Campnella….the usual suspects. Check out the photos.

Sneak Peek: You are looking at a complete wide-body shipset of HD IFE from Lumexis…this is a first. After all, they were the first IFE vendor we know who brought a full single-aisle shipset of IFE to the WAEA conference a few years back. Amazingly, the servers (solid state) that powers the whole rig are about 4 MCU…and one is a mirror – they could operate the whole plane, full content from one. The transparent seat group in front of the IFE demonstrates the seat wiring (or lack thereof). Two power wires and a F.O. cable…the whole harness is smaller than the wire to a floor lamp. State of the art, Lumexis.