I’ve ranted a number of times about the TSA, so I’ve decided to offer the TSA some suggestions on how to handle airport security. I ask for nothing in return, even though I’m sure my ideas would be worth millions if I was contracted to do an overhaul of it.

In no particular order:

• Redeploy military personnel to patrol the airports with M-16 machine guns. The wars overseas are not winnable, so put the soldiers in our all volunteer military (not the national guard troops) to work at the airports. The machine guns and troops in fatigues is at a minimum an excellent deterrent. Having flown within the months after 9/11, it was almost comforting to see the military there. The TSA officers at the checkpoints are not very menacing and aren’t even armed.
• Bring in bomb sniffing dogs. They’ll likely be able to detect explosives more efficiently than the full body scanners or the random swap testing. In addition, if someone is nervous, dogs will make them even more nervous.
• Profile people. This seems obvious, but train personnel to be more observant and watch people that fit certain profiles.
• Watch behaviors. Train all the personnel to watch passengers’ behaviors.
• Get rid of the full body scanners. They’re a waste of time and money. Return them and get our taxpayer money back.
• Stop the 3-1-1 rule for liquids. Confiscating a bottle of hair spray is ridiculous.
• Do the full body pat downs on people that show signs of being uncomfortable or are acting in a way out of the ordinary; don’t do a full pat down on a child that doesn’t fit a profile.
• Stop confiscating nail clippers, nail files, etc. If you can get a knife inside of security like I had used for dinner last week, nail clippers aren’t going to hurt anyone. Also, look at maintenance workers that have all kinds of tools that could be used as weapons.
• Tighten up perimeter security. There was a story the other day about a castaway in a wheel well that got onto the tarmac.

There are a few things that I don’t mind that have been done:

• Reinforcing the cabin doors.
• Prohibiting lines from forming outside the cabin door.
• Taking off shoes; while a little inconvenient, I can handle it.

Let’s get real TSA and start being smarter about how the billions of dollars are being spent. The costs can be cut tremendously if we didn’t waste it on useless screening techniques.

Ever since I bought my first laptop well over a decade ago, I think that I’ve taken one on every trip with a few exceptions. With the rise of the iPad, no longer do all my trips necessitate me taking a laptop. In the last year, I’ve been on 2 trips with just my iPad, a Bluetooth keyboard (to make it easier for me to blog ), and a MiFi for connectivity. The first trip my wife forbid me from taking my laptop and I survived; the second trip which was last month I actually didn’t want to travel with my laptop.

The iPad 2 has pretty much sealed the deal that I don’t have to travel with a laptop on non-work trips. Now that I’m a salaried employee and actually get time off where people are bugging me, I don’t feel compelled to fix bugs, write code, tweak a server, etc. Also the power of the iPad to edit videos makes it an ideal device to take on a vacation where I can take pictures and shoot video, then assemble a movie while still on vacation (the catch here is that our digital camera has to store the video in a format that the iPad can read when I put the SD card in the camera connection kit; I’ll address this in another post).

The “limited” abilities of the iPad are a huge plus to me as there is no way that I can write code on it and I don’t feel guilty about it. There is no doubt in my mind that on my next vacation, my laptop will be left at home.