Category: Uncategorized

When I travel, it is usually (90%) due to work-related events. For a long time, my preferred airline was United Airlines, as I lived within 7 miles of SFO (Ya know, the place with the huge aircraft that takes off like clockwork at 23:00 Pacific Time every night).

In fact, I was on a United 777 on Tuesday, September 11, 2001 when it got turned around. After that, United seems to have been turned around.

Now I live in the Boston area. When I tried to fly to London on United, I got a rude shock — all London flights go via Dulles or JFK. Flew British Airways instead.

I have a United Credit Card to collect Mileage Plus Points. I have lots of points. It is my primary form of payment for most things. I also have a Delta Credit Card to collect their points. And with Logan now opening the mysterious Terminal A (I have tried to start the rumour that it has been a secret NSA listening post due to its length construction) for Delta, I will likely start to rely on Delta more exclusively.

But it’s not just because Delta is here. It is because United isn’t the kind of airline that made me an enthusiast in the past. It was a joy to get on a United flight…now it is a chore.

A couple of comments on this. [here and here]

United, I want to be a customer. I want to be happy to fly on your planes again.

How are you going to make me a happy customer? How is United going to make me an evangelist?

I doubt that an organization as narrowly focused as United can even begin to address these questions.

Must be the post-weekend need for all interested parties to fulfill their addiction needs.

As soon as you see "This article contains information about modifying the registry", you know that it is likely to cause chaos.

How to Repair MSIE.

Go on. I dare you.

Henrik has found more evidence that good design pays! [here]

Over the last few days, I have read a couple of tales of woe and misery surrounding the FeedBurner service [here and here]. I am not sure what has happened, as a lot of the blogging community does use this technology.

Perhaps it falls back to my new philosophy: Free is Worth Less.

I submitted a presentation proposal for OSCON 2005 just now. The abstract is below.

The Open Source community has driven the online world for the last decade. PHP, PERL, Apache, Java, and MySQL are all major components of large online enterprises.

However, putting an application online and ensuring that it satisfies the performance, availability and reliability demands of the increasingly knowledgeable online consumer are often two separate concerns.

Performance should not be an afterthought; performance should be a leading force in creating a Web application.

Using simple Open Source Tools, Web performance measurement solutions can be built that rival commercial solutions. But what does this data tell you? And how do you turn this into useful business information?

This discussion will expose the participants to key Web performance metrics that make sense to both technology and business leaders in your organization.

I have a snowball’s chance in hell of having it accepted, as it is not hip, technical or trendy, and I am not an Open Source Guru, but if you design stuff for the Web, then you better be ready to have your site examined in detail, because if you don’t do it, your customers will.

Because when I read technology blogs, I stagger across elitist comments like this.

I happen to need abstractions, because I do not plan to re-write the MySQL connector for every app I build.

This blog has had the shortest stay on my watchlist — about 3 minutes.

Got Flamed in the trackbacks to this post, but my opinion still stands. I am one of the PHP Web Grunts mentioned in some of the previous posts. I write PHP for my purposes, not for the ages. I do what I have to to get it done, with some eye to making sure that it is still functional and useful.

Apologies to the author of the post that started this post if this was taken as a personal attack: I don’t know the history that lead to the breakdown of your project. I was simply commenting on what I saw as a stright down the nose look at those of us who just need to get stuff done.

If you want some very cool dance tunes with a 60’s Bond-ish theme, get DecksAndDrumsAndRockAndRoll by the Propellerheads. Someone at my former company lent this CD to me 3 years ago, and I still fire up BIGGER whenever I need to escape from the evil uber-villian.

Heh.

Ok, History Repeating with Dame Shirley Bassey rocks too.

This is a good read. And most of the salespeople I have encountered would fail the test.

1. WGBH is the richest PBS station in the nation.
2. WGBH produces some of the finest Public Television in the United States
3. When they have pledge breaks, they show programs that make commercial TV look amazing and spontaneous.

I am tired of Muzak, hits of the 50’s, 60’s and Disco, another tenor super-group, and self-help gurus who make me want to revoke my membership in WGBH.
Do people really watch this crap? Or do you put it on to show us how bad it could be if we don’t give you money?
File Under: WGBH, Public Television, PBS