I was about to head to bed tonight when I looked out the window and saw 90/94 Westbound jammed. Jammed so bad that people were exiting off the entrance ramp…which made for a fun time when they turned the wrong way onto a one-way street. But I digress. So I hopped online to see if I could figure out what was going on. And checked a few traffic sites: CBS Chicago Traffic, Yahoo! Traffic, GCM Travel (an old favorite of mine), and finally, Traffic.com ...
I’ve had the unfortunate need to fly on United quite a bit in the past few months. And it seems with every flight I take, my hatred of that airline grows. There are several reasons that I harbor this hate toward that particular airline. Allow me to expand. Economy Plus - This is quite the amazing scam. When checking in, United gives you the option to upgrade to Economy Plus (some 5 inches of additional legroom) for a given fee. Now should you choose to accept that, you will be guaranteed a nice roomy seat as requested. However, should you choose to bypass the offer there is another means of obtaining an upgrade to economy plus...simply by asking the gate staff! Now that doesn't necessarily guarantee you'll be able to do that, but it's still frustrating that they're trying to scam the money out of you up front, when a polite inquiry can get you the same. Which leads directly into my next point, Customer Service - I can count on one hand the number of times I've been greeted with a smile at the gate, or even acknowledged at all when walking up to the counter at the gate. Wait, let me rephrase that. When I haven't had the fortune to be a first-class customer, United's customer service is abhorrent. I understand treating first class customers a little bit better, but this is beyond that. Those in coach are simply treated as stains on the bottom of the plane that they would rather be rid of that get a blanket for. Perhaps it's just my personal experience, but I'd like to think that I'm a fairly nice and engaging guy and do my best to be polite and friendly to the flight attendants. If only they would give me the same in return. However, the level of disparity between the customer service in first and coach is sickening. Everything is based on miles - When you have enough miles to reach a certain "status", they treat you like gold. Until then, well...they treat you like another lump but it's certainly not gold. This was made even more apparent to me last week as I was going stand-by for a flight that, oddly enough, was supposed to leave later than my original one (more on that later). As people's names were getting called from the standby list, one poor passenger complained that several people ahead of him had already been called. What was the explanation? Because they had more miles. There is no first come, first serve on United...it's $$ paid, best served. No wonder Southwest has been making such a bundle. Now, as I mentioned I had a slight delay (2.5 hours) last week on United due to “Aircraft Availability”…whatever that means. Unfortunately, I had a delay of similar length today when traveling on Southwest Airlines. For some reason, I didn’t feel nearly as slighted as I did when traveling with United. ...
XML can be a wonderful thing, and XSL (eXtensible Stylesheet Language) can be even more wonderful in formatting XML output to do darn near anything you want it to. Basic usage of XSL isn’t too difficult to get a grasp on, but the more advanced features such as keys, generate-id, preceding-sibling and others are not as easy to understand as I’ve found the available documentation and samples lacking. My problem, specifically, was dealing with duplicate id’s within for-each loops, for example: ...
Well Google has done it again… I got a text message from Google this evening (which somewhat surprised me, but I guess I’m not surprised they’re keeping tabs on who’s been texting GOOGL) pointing me to their new Google Local for mobile site. Basically…Google maps for your phone. And let me tell you, it rocks… I really could have used it a couple days ago when all I had was the non-descript Hertz map. It’s fast…it’s accurate…and it’s my phone’s new best friend. ...
…but I am such a sucker for Mexican food! ;) As you may know, I’m in the Santa Monica area this week for work. My co-worker has a friend here and he suggested a place for dinner tonight called La Cabana - they even have an official website. This place was amazing. It was such authentic Mexican that it had me answering the waiter in Spanish. And the waiter wasted no time. He’d come over, ask if you were ready or if you wanted a minute. If you didn’t answer right away…he’d pause long enough to tap his pencil on his notepad twice and then say “ok, another minute” in a thick Mexican accent and then move on. It wasn’t offensive, though…he was just being efficient. ...
aka…when things just work. For whatever reason, I set up AFP (Apple File Protocol) on my Linux box at home just to play with it and how it interacted with my mactop. Well, I’m on the road this week and brought my Powerbook with me. Wondering if AFP would be any more flexible than other networking filesystems, I googled around for AFP over SSH solutions. Before looking at the results, I tried tunneling TCP port 548, but received an error about not being able to access localhost. Eventually I came across this Mac OS X Security guide. Right on page 29, it mentions you can easily tunnel AFP over SSH on any arbitrary port! ...
My new favorite application…Salling Clicker. Salling Clicker is our award-winning software utility that turns a mobile phone or PDA into an advanced wireless two-way remote control for your computer. This thing is amazing! I set it up with my cell phone (Audiovox SMT5600) and have it configured to automatically pause iTunes when I receive or make a call. This feature alone is immensely useful now that I work from home. I usually have my Powerbook on my kitchen table while I’m in my office working, which is the perfect distance to give me some good background music to code or work too. But it wasn’t very efficient when somebody would call and I’d have to dash out to the kitchen to turn off my tunes. Now however, when somebody calls my cellphone, it just automatically pauses…and then resumes when I hang up! Color me impressed. And if somebody calls on my office phone, I can use my cell phone to pause iTunes, as well as an infinite number of other functions. ...
Well I was browsing for furniture the other day, as I frequently do, and finally found a media stand and bookcases that looked good and were cheap enough for me to get for my living room. This has been a work in progress for about the past 6 months. I have been a regular “browser” at Ikea, Cost Plus World Market, Crate & Barrel, and any other furniture store I could find, but could never settle on or find the right piece. ...
We got all dolled up and went to see Wicked last night. We went to Ballo for dinner first, which is a great place to relax and enjoy some good Italian food while watching old 70’s movies. Wicked was great - the music was pretty good and the effects were very impressive, particularly at the end of the first act…it gave me chills it was so effective. On a side note, Happy Birthday to one cool dude - sorry I couldn’t make it last night. ...
Wow, this is pretty nasty. There is a new phishing/trojan email that modifies your dns server so all subsequent queries for PayPal go too a fake website. The trojan probably isn’t detectable by today’s anti-virus settings and the fake paypal website looks very well done and it’s particularly bad because it will look like you’re actually going to www.paypal.com. This is pretty scary. Be careful out there and be wary of emails that are asking for your personal information or ask you to run an executable. No company in their right mind should be asking for that information via email.