I’m on my way from Pittsburgh to Boston, at the end of a day-long meeting, to attend the 3-day weekend Wikimania conference — which I’ll be blogging about over the next few days.

It’ sobering to remember that we sill have to transport flesh and bones from one geographical location to another in order to participate in face-to-face meetings about this hyper-connected era of the Internet. I’ve taken four or five day-trips and overnight trips during the past month, and every one of them has been delayed by two hours or more.

But this morning’s 6:15 AM flight left right on time…. Road-warror’s advice: take the first available flight, if you’re traveling anywhere on business this summer. With heat waves, thunderstorms, overbooked airlines, and overcrowded airports, the delays get worse and worse as the day progresses.

And watch out for a new twist on the check-in procedure: several airlines, including US Air, now let people get their boarding pass on-line, up to 24 hours in advance, by accessing their web site. This sounds like a great convenience, and I suspect it reduces some degree of congestion at the airport. But I experienced the downside of this convenience when I checked in this afternoon, at the airport: I got in the line to get my boarding pass at the e-ticket kiosk, got the required slip of paper, and then concentrated on the hassle of getting through security without losing my cell phone or laptop — not realizing that the kiosk had given me a boarding pass without a seat number.

I had arrived at the airport two hours before departure, and it was only after an hour that I thought to look at the boarding pass to see if I had ended up in a window or aisle seat — only to find that I had no assigned seat. Thinking it was an oversight, I asked the gate agent; she responded that “that’s how the system works when the flight has been over-sold, and there are no more seats available.”

I understand that airlines overbook some flights, but I was still confused. “You mean the entire plane full of passengers checked in before me, more than two hours before the flight?”

“Well, I guess so, sir,” she said with a shrug. “After all, they can check in from home, up to 24 hours in advance.”

And did the system bother to tell me, when I showed up in person to get my boarding pass? Nope. Did it beep, or honk, or flash a yellow warning light, to warn me that I was a seatless passenger? Nope.

So I became the desperate applicant for one of those “oversold” messages you sometimes hear at the airline gate: “Folks, if there’s anyone who wouldn’t mind getting a free ticket to wherever US Air happens to fly, plus a free meal here at the airport, we’d really appreciate it if you would volunteer to give up your seat on this flight. There’s another flight later this evening, leaving at 8:30.”

Fortunately for me, someone was kind enough, hungry enough, or greedy enough, to do just that. I got my seat after all, but my 5:45 PM departure time was delayed until roughly 7:30 PM. The person who ended up on my 8:30 PM flight probably suffered a long delay, too; I hope the airline paid for a nice dinner.

Oh, and one more thing, while I’m on a road-warrior rant: why can’t the people who design airports figure out that we business travelers need to plug in our laptops every once in a while? Sitting at the Pittsburgh airport, I looked around and spotted roughly 10 other people like me, typing frantically on their laptops while watching their batteries slowly drain away. Two of those ten people had found an electrical outlet at some random location along the floorboard, and they were squatted on the floor, like desperate Neanderthal cavemen huddling around a fire, their laptops connected to the airport’s power supply. The rest of us, alas, were out in the (electrical) cold.