Emerging from customs into the main hall of Copenhagen’s airport I encountered the usual crush of friends, family and limo drivers waiting for arriving passengers. This included a small woman with a large sign that said simply “Anthrax.” Which, as you might imagine, I found somewhat unnerving.

It turns out that, as the Sweden Rock Festival starts tomorrow, and as Sweden is handy by, Anthrax was, indeed, due to arrive.

I have heard two people use “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander” in casual conversation today. I have only the vaguest notion of what the saying means, something like “if it’s good for one person, it’s good for another person.” Odd.

If you carefully position yourself on the window sill just outside the Air Canada lounge in Dorval airport in Montreal, just in front of Gate 3 in the domestic / international terminal, you can grab the lounge’s Bell-branded Wifi.

Here in the Air Canada lounge at Dorval Airport there are two “showcasing” areas: a Sony-branded entertainment area, and an IBM-, Xerox- and Steelcase-branded business centre.

Presumably the thinking goes “we will expose our products to the elite and powerful and thus increase sales.”

“I used some peachy IBM software down there at the airport, Bob… I think we should buy IBM!”

The problem is that these “showcase” setups are usually new and twinkly and wonderful when they’re first installed. And then they get old. Fast. And people use and abuse them. To the point where here in the IBM slash Xerox slash Steelcase Business Centre the showcase is more of a disincentive.

The workstation I type this on, for example, is a slow old IBM NetVista PC running Windows 98. Internet Explorer took about 30 seconds to start up. The keyboard is a replacement — a generic one that probably replaced the original IBM one several years ago. The Steelcase furniture is dirty; part of the foam is ripped out of the side of the chair handle and it no longer adjusts properly. The sleek, well-designed lamps are missing bulbs.

The whole picture is akin to a grocery store handing out samples of rotten produce to entice people to buy.

The solution: treat showcases like this as a constantly evolving system rather than an <>install. Every time a new product is released, make sure 5 get sent over here and installed. In fact you should probably rotate bring young tech people through here — set them up with a desk and let them help people out of jams. Then give them a free trip to Paris for putting up with all the grief.

Is there a better way than podcasting to fill the empty hours in the Sargasso Sea of the airport? So taking a page out of Adam Curry’s book, here’s 5:43 from the third floor of the Trudeau (nee Dorval) Airport parking garage.

Recorded on the iBook internal microphone with Sound Studio. I tried recording from here inside the Air Canada lounge (where I’m doing the upload), but this seems to be some sort of electromagnetic vortex — flourescent lights, air conditioning, microwaves, and who knows what else — so I got a fierce background hum that I couldn’t shake.

More from Europe tomorrow morning.

I’m off at 5:00 p.m. on Air Canada (North America’s favourite airline!) to Copenhagen via Montreal and London, arriving tomorrow afternoon.

My old friend Stephen Southall will be popping in with a movie review podcast every week or two from his home in Lakefield, Ontario. I’ve seen more movies with Stephen than with anyone else, and trust his opinion more than most.

Today’s review is the Ron Howard film Cinderella Man, which opened in North America last week. Stephen’s take, in a nutshell: “there’s nothing there… it’s empty.”

New entrant into the Canadian mobile phone business, Virgin Mobile Canada has expanded their coverage to include almost all of PEI.

How can life be dull when you have a job like mine: today I am working on a system that supports, in part, the promotion of a service that promises to “remove evil spells.”