In one of his latest epic travesties as a columnist, Christopher Elliot (yes the same guy as before) has the nerve to tell me (by definition part of the air travel industry) that I am un-American. I’m glad the first word he wrote, in all caps in red text is OPINION. Well here’s my opinion, Christopher Elliot: You are not a columnist, you are a script kiddie who takes cheap shots at the airline industry because it’s the cool and hip thing to do. Is your next column going to feature “What’s the deal with airline food? Have you heard this one?”. So when you call me a flying traitor, forgive me if I don’t think you have much credibility. Obviously by the points you make, you don’t try to learn any history about air travel; just keep insisting that we should give you royalty status for free and maybe someday it’ll happen.
What’s so fair about flying? EVERYTHING. As you yourself say, “Everyone on a commercial air carrier — from the triple-titanium elite flier to the prisoner shackled to the back row of economy class — shares a plane”. And as you’ve probably pointed out before in another post, all those people have paid a different amount to be there. You can buy a Lexus or a Pinto and both will get you from A to B, but you pay more for the comfort. So if you think it’s not fair that you’re squished in the back, put up the money and you’ll be riding in style up front just like the real media journalists. You say you don’t have a problem with the pay-more-get-more model, but then completely reverse yourself with your next statement, “It’s the idea that the good people sitting in steerage class asked for less — or even deserve less ” Of course you deserve less! You didn’t pay for first class! Your options are: More money for more service, or Less money for less service. And throughout the years customers have always demonstrated that they would rather have less service and pay less. They show this by buying the cheap tickets. It’s why Southwest and RyanAir are doing so well. People ask for that level of service by choosing that airline, by using their dollars. If you want service to change, you’re going to have to ask people to pay for it. But you’re not going to be able to do that, are you?
“This is how I see it: On the one hand, airlines have added perks for their best customers. For example, American Airlines earlier this fall introduced priority check-in, priority screening lanes and special boarding lanes for its best passengers, following the lead of several other big airlines. Maybe you’d expect that from a legacy carrier like American. But when Southwest Airlines followed suit a few days later and added priority security lanes for its frequent fliers, it prompted my colleague Janice Hough to invoke George Orwell’s classic “Animal Farm” and conclude that some passengers were more equal than others on a one-class airline like Southwest. I’m inclined to agree”
Some people are willing to pay more. They get the service they pay for. That is the essence of capitalism, the American Free Market, and you call us traitors and un-American? You’d prefer a system where everyone is treated the same for the same price? COMMUNIST
“Many travelers use highly addictive frequent flier miles to pay for upgrades. Airline loyalty programs, as everyone who reads this column already knows, is the greatest fraud perpetrated on the traveling public. Ever.”
Plz explain. You must have evidence for this claim. Should people not be rewarded for loyalty? They’ve paid more into the airline through their loyalty and I have no problem rewarding those who do.
“There’s good news for these coddled airline passengers who disagree with my perfectly reasonable arguments. There is no shortage of bloggers, journalists and airline experts who sincerely believe it’s your right to be treated like royalty when you fly while the masses behind the curtain suffer unspeakable indignities. Why not read their puff pieces instead of my column?”
Believe me I wish I could. But someone must stand for truth.
Oh Christopher Elliot you should have stopped while you were ahe- well while you were less behind. Let’s take a look at the three “violations” of your rights. First you lead with: “You have the right to sit down and shut up “, explaining that there’s no freedom of press in the air. Well after your article I wish there was no freedom of press down here too! Put you behind bars for your baseless drivel you call an article. Anyways, in many cases it has been shown that while you have rights to assemble, freedom of speech and press, you can’t do it on my property without my permission. That’s right! An airplane isn’t public property! You don’t own it! You don’t pay for it with your taxes! It’s private property and therefore buy purchasing the ticket, by boarding the airplane, you are agreeing to that airline’s contract of carriage which may state that you can’t film on board the plane. If you don’t like it, fly another airline. No one has forced you to fly on this plane! You boarded of your own free will!
Your laptop — and the data on it — is ours
Oh rip on the TSA for bonus points, as much as everyone hates the airlines, we all hate security even more, right? Score some more points with your target audience: idiots. But here’s the kicker: the TSA is a government agency (separate from a commercial airline by the way), which means that you (through your elected officials) made it this way! So if you want something done about it, have your elected officials do something about it. Or vote them out. Also, “Airlines want to block certain Web sites that contain objectionable material.” I assume you’re talking about wireless internet service starting to appear on airlines. Of course they have to put a filter on the internet or people will spend the flight looking at pr0n! So on the one hand the airlines have Christopher Elliot saying “Oh I should be allowed to use your private network as I see fit” and on the other hand they have whiny mothers saying “Wont someone PLEASE think of the children”. As always, no way out for airlines. But the fact that your blog was blocked means something is working right.
“It’s only a matter of time before airports start barring access sites with content they disagree with”
YOU’VE GOT A LOT TO WORRY ABOUT HERE CHRISTOPHER ELLIOT!!! Always fighting against that liberal hippie airport agenda!
And the last abomination you spout out is that “They wouldn’t even treat animals like this” and how “prisoners of war are often treated better than airline passengers.” Yeah right. Give someone who’s been in Guantanamo Bay for 7 years the jump at a commercial flight. Maybe you can take his place in jail without being accused of a crime. You’d both be happy, and I would be happy. Everyone wins! “The Federal Aviation Administration has strict guidelines about the transportation of live animals but is strangely quiet when it comes to the comfort of human passengers.” Christopher Elliot, I’d be happy to let you ride in the cargo compartment if the FAA said I could! I’d even let you smoke back there but don’t set off the fire alarm or I’ll fire those halon bottles and force all the oxygen out! Or maybe you’d like to be crammed under the seat instead of sitting on it. I think you’d be happy for the room coach gives you when that happens.
“But there ought to be minimum standards set by the government that require air carriers to treat their customers better than cargo.”
There were, but then you got rid of them on October 24, 1978, through the Airline Deregulation Act.
Christopher Elliot, I know you think ripping on the airlines is a great way for you to cheat your way into becoming a legitimate columnist. You can spread all the lies and deception you want with no responsibility because you wrote “Opinion” at the top! But I stand for something: The truth! And I won’t let your horrible words go by unnoticed.
Welcome to the 4th edition of my website. This version is based on my twitter page and powered by Expression Engine. EE is the successor to PMachine, which powered my old site. I know I just did an update to my site in August so you’re probably thinking, why another major update so soon? Well, the short answer is that I have plenty of time these days. I’ve been running the same old pmachine website for over 5 years and had the color scheme for a year before that. So sometimes you just feel like a refresh is in order. While the August update was an evolution, this update is a revolution. It is hopefully the answer to many problems I have come across in the last 5 years with the old site. Rick was talking about drupal limitations when I offered up Expression Engine as an alternative CMS to both Drupal and Wordpress. I think at one point EE cost money for all but a demo, but these days you can download the core version of the site for free as long as you don’t use it for commercial use. I had a default installation on my site but hadn’t touched it in months. Well about a week ago I went back and reinstalled with the latest version and set out to see what the successor to pmachine could do for me.
Importing my posts from Pmachine was the most important and also the easiest thing to do. While I’m sure tools exist to import wordpress, moveable type, ets blogs, the pmachine convert utility was built right in and easy. From there I had to modify a template for a good design and usability. Thanks go out to Jo, Rick, and Alison for design feedback, ideas, and tips.
A severe limitation of my pmachine site was that each post could only be put in one category. EE allows me to put posts in multiple categories and is one of the biggest reasons I stuck with the upgrade. EE seems a lot more flexible than pmachine too. On the old site the menu on the left kept getting shorter and shorter. I liked the collapsible sections on the side, but to keep them across all the other pages I had to use a function that prevented me from showing posts by months and other tasty features, so the new install gives me that capability.
Another huge improvement is the URLs. While some people may not care, I like the new readable URLs way more than the old way. An old link to a post I made might show up as: http://www.darkmercury.net/comments.php?id=23_0_1_0_C
I’m pleased with how well my friends and news pages integrated with the new site as well. I stopped using colors for consistency. Each entry on the friends page looks very similar to a post if I made it, except it will have your RSS image in place of my categories, the title is clickable, and a link to your site is at the bottom. Once again if you don’t set your RSS icon, it will default to one I pick for you. If you want help changing it ask me, its quite easy. Last time I’m talking about that.
My pages that load in an iframe, such as my calendar and gallery are a little quirky but usable. There was some sort of permission error with my old gallery so I reinstalled from scratch. Pics will go up as I have time.
If you want, the old site is available at http://www.darkmercury.net/3.0/
I’m looking at getting even older backups of my site archived with the help of Jo sometime. Guess that’s all for now
Lately I've been going to Los Angeles for work, but recently Alison and I decided to go for fun and to visit my grandma on the 11th-14th. We took advantage of benefits from both our jobs, tried to keep the cost down, and still have a lot of fun.
If you have benefits, use them! It's part of your salary and if you are not using them it's almost as if you're agreeing to work for them for less. We started our trip using my travel benefits, of course. Alison and I can travel together almost anywhere in the world for almost free. Starting 2009 I can get other people reduced fares but you will have to travel low-priority standby. Anyways we were lucky enough to score two first class tickets for the 3 hour flight to LAX. This was the first time I had ever gone first class, and it was quite impressive! The seats were very comfortable and reclined fully. We had breakfast served, drinks served in an actual glass, pillows, blankets, great service, etc.. It was amazing. I felt very out of place as the only one there without a Wall Street Journal newspaper.
Once we got to LA, it was Alison's turn. She works here in Dallas at the Hyatt Regency as a cook if you didn't know. She booked the Hyatt Century Plaza using her benefits, and they bumped us up to....the penthouse floor! They were so nice and courteous there, I couldn't believe it. I go to a lot of hotels when flying and this was a super nice place. They gave us free room and 50% off the restaurant. So we enjoyed a very nice fillet dinner there. We are trying to save money for a sofa bed in the living room, but it's been a while since we dressed up and went to a fancy restaurant. And for 50% off you just can't beat it.
The free hotel was great, but it wasn't terribly close to Arcadia, CA; an LA suburb. So we had to take a bus to go to the metro station and ride to the end of the line where we could get picked up by my grandma. All in all the trip to Arcadia took about 2 hours each way. It was great to see my grandma and I know she can't drive all the way out to where we were staying, but 4 hours commuting a day really took it out on us. We tried to take a taxi instead of the bus one way, but it didn't save more than 10 min and cost us three times as much to get there (then having to pay metro fare anyways for the train).
The day before we left, the 13th we had to ourselves. We contemplated going to disneyland and universal studios but they are soo expensive. We ended up sightseeing and visiting a cool farmer's market with some really great food. We got cheesecake and eclairs for treats and it was awesome to have something more homemade and not mass produced. Walked around downtown after that, and we visited Hollywood too. It is not the glamorous place it seems. We spent the last evening in Santa Monica at the beach watching the sunset and just being together. It was the best part of the trip for me.
When travelling standby you need to give yourself as many chances to get home as possible, since you only get a seat if there are any left over. So we got to LAX for the first flight out, at 6:00am. Luckily for us we got on the plane, even first class again for the flight home! Now I'm going to be spoiled forever... All in all, a great time.
Found this on the KSU newspaper website, a nice video about KSU’s first place finish in october. The first guy interviewed was my student for about 6 months who I helped get his commercial certificate. The second is a student I flew some multi time with too. Both great guys and current instructors themselves now.
Okay, I will never pick up on WoW no matter how often everyone else posts about it. But everyone has such a good time playing and talking about Guitar Hero / Rock Band, I figured it was worth a look. After all, I did enjoy DDR a lot, and I was good at it without taking too long to get good at it. With the recent release of Guitar Hero 4, I was able to pick up the game and two Les Paul Controllers for about $75. GH3 is a welcome addition to my PS3 game collection which is growing very slowly on account of available moneys and lack of games.
God what a hopeless idiot I am for not knowing GH3 and Rock Band are not the same companies anymore, right? I guess there is a lot of drama between red octane and harmonix and activision, but oh well. This game was cheap, I have two guitars for it so I can play with Alison, and I'm enjoying the game. A recent update to the PS3 will allow my controllers to work with rock band should I decide to get it anyways. After about a week I am around the hard-medium-to-easy-hard stage. I can beat the normal tracks in medium with about 95% notes hit, and I can play one or two hard songs, but difficult songs mess me up on medium and I'm trying to play the harder songs to get my note recognition faster before really moving on. Overall I like the game and how it is similar to DDR, but what annoyed me is the career mode. I don't really care to battle guitars. I don't care about winning money or custom characters. I don't want to fight to unlock songs. And I want to play co-op with Alison which forced us through another career mode but oh well. I just want to play a guitar, play any of the songs I want to, and be a rock hero wooo! Pretty much immediately I was putting in the cheat code to unlock all songs, and much prefer it this way. I don't know a lot of the songs but they are fun to play. Has anyone played the new one? What tips are there for stepping up from medium to hard?
Doh! Forgot to mention my favorite song: Paint It, Black by The Rolling Stones in 1966. I can't believe it's that old of a song.
I am a professional pilot, tech enthusiast, and avid PC gamer. I post about all sorts of things, but you can click a category above to see what I like the most.
Okay, I will never pick up on WoW no matter how often everyone else posts about it. But everyone has such a good time playing and talking about Guitar Hero / Rock Band, I figured it was worth a look. After all, I did enjoy DDR a lot, and I was good at it without taking too long to get good at it. With the recent release of Guitar Hero 4, I was able to pick up the game and two Les Paul Controllers for about $75. GH3 is a welcome addition to my PS3 game collection which is growing very slowly on account of available moneys and lack of games.