Hand Coding

One of my coworkers, T.Scott, had his pen start leaking on him after a recent flight. And, in case it might help anyone else, I thought I’d write a short post about a strategy that has worked pretty well for me. In short, you can generally prevent pens from leaking if you keep them upright (tip pointed-up) during flight.

That way, if the air expands within the chamber (due to a change in air pressure), the air can harmlessly escape through the tip (rather than pushing the ink through it). Typically, I’ll use the pen’s clip to attach it to one of the in-flight safety cards in the seatback in front of me just before takeoff (while keeping the tip pointed up, of course).

PS Some pages that address this topic also recommend removing the cap during flight (while keeping them pen upright) to allow further airflow through the tip of the pen. I’ve had good results without having to remove the cap, myself, but that option is there if you had wanted to take extra precautions.

My Discover card is expiring soon and so I’m thinking about trying another card. Discover has been fine and, of course, they’ll automatically mail me a new one before this one expires; but, this is the card that I have setup to auto-pay many of my monthly expenses and I’ll have to contact each of those companies which are setup for auto-pay anyway (since they’ll need the new expiration date). So, it would be just as easy to tell them a new credit card number if I found one which I liked more than the Discover.

I’ve given some thought to getting an airline miles card since that would give me something back for my purchases. Of course, I already get 1% back with Discover, but I’m curious whether I might be able to get a bit more from another card. It seems that each airline has its own card and there are also some any-airline cards; and, I’m currently leaning towards a non airline-specific card since I rarely use the same airline from one trip to the next.

I thought there might just be a handful of cards from which to choose, but there seem to be several dozen :-/. I picked out a few of them to compare:

• Discover Miles Card — little did I know that Discover has its own airline miles card. It has a $29 yearly fee and offers airline tickets at 25,000 miles (up to $500) and 30,000 miles (up to $650).

• TravelerMiles is a card from Travelers Bank. In addition to tickets at 25,000 miles (up to $500) and 32,000 miles (up to $600), this one also offers discounted tickets at 8,000 miles ($100 off) and 28,000 miles ($400 off). However, I’m couldn’t find a yearly fee listed anywhere (or even a link to apply for the card).

• CapitalOne has two airline cards — their Go Miles and their Go Miles Ultra cards (the difference is that the Go Miles Ultra card doubles miles on the first year). And, their maximum ticket values are calculated on a multiple of 90; so, for example, 9,000 miles are needed to get a $100 ticket. Calculating for some of the more common mile-amounts, 25,000 miles would work out to a $278 ticket and 30,000 miles would be about $333. Hmm, come to think of it, this card is starting to look kinda lame.

After looking over those, I then found this article at Kiplinger from last August about airline mile cards. The article is fairly general but they also suggest a couple cards for those who are undecided (like me, natch). From Kiplinger:

• Quicken offers a MasterCard which, contrary to the Kiplinger article, apparently has no annual fee. Interestingly enough, their rewards program is called TravelerMiles and it links to the travelermiles.com site as well — it looks like this is the card that’s tied to the TravelerMiles program. As before, this has tickets at 25,000 miles (up to $500) and 32,000 miles (up to $600.

• The WorldPoints Visa from MBNA is the other card mentioned. This one has no annual fee, which is a plus, but the lesser maximum ticket values aren’t as high as some of the others — 25,000 miles gets a $400 ticket while 35,000 miles gets a $600 ticket.

Looking over them, I’m still not entirely decided. But, considering that it would probably take me a few years to rack up enough miles to get a free flight, those annual fees may more than offset the higher ticket amounts. So far, the Quicken Mastercard looks tempting — it has no annual fee and its maximum ticket values are on par some of the annual-fee cards. I’m open to any suggestions here.

I first heard about A&E’s new reality show Airline from, of all places, NPR’s Marketplace (RealAudio article). Airline is a reality show based around Southwest Airlines:

A camera crew has spent the last six months at Los Angeles International Airport filming the work of Southwest Airlines employees. Is this an employee training video? No, it’s the latest in reality TV. The weekly half-hour show called “Airline” is devoted to the drama that goes on behind the scenes at a big-time carrier. […]

Interestingly enough, even though Southwest granted A&E permission for the initial filming, the producers still had the final say on which segments made it into the show. And, Southwest wasn’t paid for this, though they hope that the show will act as positive advertising for the brand.

They seem to be airing two 1/2 hour episodes back-to-back each week and I recorded last week’s episodes on TiVo just to see what it was like. And I rather enjoy the show — there were no spiteful fights or gossip (unlike some reality shows) but it was surprisingly interesting. And, the Southwest employees generally acted like real people rather than zombie marketdroids.

Airline airs Mondays on A&E at 10/9c and 10:30/9:30c.

I heard about SeatGuru from this thread at MetaFilter: “Seatguru has not only seat maps, but reviews of most seats on the big 6 US airlines.”

Of course, I’ve already booked (and arrived) in Pittsburgh for Christmas, but this could be handy for future travel bookings.

From Fred Langa’s LangaList — a weekly newsletter on upcoming technology and software — is this InformationWeek article on traveling with electronics. One suggestion there is to buy neon luggage tags for sensitive items (so that they’re less appetizing to thieves).

It can be smart to use a generic, nondescript carry-on that doesn’t scream “electronics inside!” And no matter what case you use, make your bag stand out in some way so it can be identified even across a crowded concourse, so a thief will think twice about trying to lift it. Luggage stores and online travel sites carry personalization/identification straps, handle wraps, and (my favorite) oversized, high-visibility fluorescent luggage tags that can help you spot your stuff in a crowd and also make thieves seek less-conspicuous stuff to steal. […]

It sounds like a simple idea, but it makes sense to me.

I had quite an adventure with airlines over the past few days. The result: Airtran considered harmful. It all started a few days ago...

I had flights for Sunday through Saturday with Vanguard Airlines. But, of course, Vanguard went bankrupt on me. To make things more interesting, I had already used one leg of my trip at the time of the bankruptcy.

At the time of the bankruptcy, Vanguard had arranged special deals for stranded-travellers with Frontier and National airlines. However, I quickly found out that neither Frontier nor National flew to both Pittsburgh and Dallas :-/. So, that’s where Airtran comes in.

I had checked the usual sites, but Airtran consistently had the best fares for one-way trips from Pittsburgh to Dallas. Of course, “best” is all relative, as the one-way flight that I ended up booking with Airtran cost only $10 less than the two-way flight that I had booked with Vanguard.

The flight with Airtran was for Saturday evening, via Atlanta (so far, so good). The flight to Atlanta was scheduled to leave Pittsburgh at 8:05pm EST, but it only ended up leaving at 9:30pm. So, even though the Atlanta-to-Dallas flight was running an hour late, that didn’t cover the difference — I missed my connecting flight from Atlanta to Dallas.

Of course, Airtran arranged for hotels for us. But, because virtually everyone on the Pittsburgh-to-Atlanta flight had a connecting flight (that he or she ended up missing), there were a couple hundred people in the line for the Airtran customer service counter. So, two hours of standing-in-line later, I had a voucher for the local Crown Plaza. The customer service agents were handing out vouchers for various local hotels, and the Crown-Plaza-bound bunch of us boarded the shuttle to the hotel.

Upon arriving at the Crown Plaza, however, they informed us that they had no vacancies (“The airlines don’t always keep track of how many vouchers they hand out&rdquo, we were told). Luckily, the Crown Plaza was able to arrange for rooms for us at a nearby Holiday Inn. Frickin Airtran.

The morning flights were mostly uneventful. I had asked for a later flight (around lunchtime), as I wanted more sleep than a first-thing-in-the-morning flight would have afforded me. The flight was scheduled to leave at 12:05pm. And, we boarded the plane about 20 minutes before scheduled takeoff (fairly normal).

After boarding, though, we sat on the runway for about an hour. At that point, one of the crew members came over the intercom to let us know that “We’re just waiting on one more crew member. Once he gets here, we can head off.”, to which he added sarcastically “Welcome to the airline industry”. So, it wasn’t even weather-related or even mechanical — they just couldn’t keep their appointments. The AWOL crewmember did eventually arrive, about 20 minutes after that announcement.

As such, I will hesitate in flying Airtran ever again.

Samidh Chakrabarti and Aaron Strauss have written a paper “Carnival Booth: An Algorithm for Defeating the Computer-Assisted Passenger Screening System”. As with any paper, it can be a bit wordy at times, but the majority of it is quite readable. And, with any luck, Declan McCullagh will write-up a summary article in the next few days.

This transparency is the Achilles’ Heel of CAPS; the fact that individuals know their CAPS status enables the system to be reverse engineered. You, like Simonyi, know if you’re carryons have been manually inspected. You know if you’ve been questioned. You know if you’re asked to stand in a special line. You know if you’ve been frisked. All of this open scrutiny makes it possible to learn an anti-profile to defeat CAPS, even if the profile itself is always kept secret. We call this the “Carnival Booth Effect” since, like a carnie, it entices terrorists to “Step Right Up! See if you’re a winner!” In this case, the terrorist can step right up and see if he�s been flagged. […]

Rock.