Monthly Archives: May 2010

Thank You, Emirates Airlines

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… you correctly notified the authorities that someone had purchased a one-way ticket to Dubai, in cash at the last moment.

Did Times Square Bomb Suspect Almost Get Away? | TPMMuckraker

CBS News adds that it was only thanks to a tip from Emirates Airlines that Shahzad, 30, was nabbed. Emirates notified the Department of Homeland Security that it had received a last-minute request for an all-cash purpose of a one-way ticket to Dubai — all of which are red flags. Before the arrest was made, law enforcement authorities had already notified authorities that the plane was not to take off, CBS added.

From Dubai, it appears that Shahzad intended to continue to Pakistan, from where he had recently returned. Pakistani authorities today arrested several men in connection with the alleged plot.

Had Shahzad made it out of the country — even only to be arrested and returned here after the plane landed in Dubai — it likely would have caused severe embarrassment and second-guessing in law enforcement and government circles.

It seems unlikely — though possible — that authorities deliberately allowed Shahzad to get on the plane, perhaps in order to gather further intelligence. Typically, law enforcement agencies prefer to arrest a suspect before he gets on a plane, for obvious safety reasons.

Umar Abdulmutallab, who is accused of plotting to detonate a bomb on a Christmas Day flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, was reportedly on a terrorist watch-list maintained by the National Counterterrorism Center, but not on a no-fly list.

Late Update: DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano confirmed today that Shahzad was put on the no-fly list yesterday, ABC News reports. She added that the government only became aware of his presence on the flight — presumably after being tipped off by the airline — after the manifest was completed.

ABC offers a potential reason why Shahzad was able to get on the plane: the government only checks people’s documents as they enter the U.S., not as they exit. A former Bush administration official told ABC that when counter-terrorism experts recently proposed that we also check people as they’re leaving — as many other countries do — “the airlines went ballistic,” arguing that such step would be expensive and cause delays. So the idea was dropped.

I’ve always liked booking Emirates; they take good care of business travelers. Now I’ll have even more reason to like booking them.

United and Continental Sitting in a Tree, M-E-R-G-I-N-G

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… and as a business travel arranger, I’m curious to know how this is going to effect me in the months to come, too. Some of my business travelers may benefit, but many of my guys are based in Houston (CO’s southern hub) and other Midwestern cities – NOT Chicago or Denver (UA’s main hubs). They don’t fly United much except for some of the ones that like the early morning ‘daylighter’ flights to Britain from Washington or Chicago.

How the Continental-United merger will affect business travelers – USATODAY.com

Now that United Airlines and Continental Airlines have tied the knot, business travelers will be wondering how this latest merger will affect them, and if additional airline consolidation is likely in the near term. Assuming the deal clears all hurdles, just four network airlines will remain, down from six two years ago before the merger of Delta Air Lines and Northwest Airlines.

For most travelers, the impact of the Continental-United merger depends most on where they live and where they fly most often. The combined route network of the two airlines may benefit those who live near a large hub operated by one of the airlines or those who fly to one of those hubs frequently. The addition of United’s route network gives Continental fliers a combined airline that is very strong in the North Central U.S., with hubs in Chicago and Denver, as well as a major presence along the West Coast and across the Pacific.

I will say that I hope, hope, hope that the merged airline will DUMP UNITED’S MANILA-BASED CUSTOMER SERVICE reps, and keep Continental’s Executive Desk folks. Whenever I have a customer service issue, ticket waiver, or hairy international recalculation to get fixed and the traveler is on United, I groan. Why? Because I hate, hate, hate the voice activated phone menu system on United’s toll-free number, and the chances that I’ll get somebody that can actually help me are about 15%, since the Manila agents are not empowered to do much beyond the level of a routine question like a name change exchange.

Agents on other accounts may disagree, but my experiences with United since coming on my current team has been consistently bad. They used to be a LOT better when I was on a different account that had a higher tier service level agreement with them, but then that account switched favorites to American, and that’s when we were introduced to the folks in Manila, who try hard but rarely meet my expectations.

When I have a situation on Continental, however, I breathe a sigh of relief, because I know that I’ll soon be talking to an expert who offers real support.

I sure hope those people keep their jobs.

In slightly related, travel agenty detail, I suppose the CO (005) code will go away, and UA (016) will remain. Pity, that, because the lower number is just cooler. Interesting that they’re going to merge logos, though.

Common Sense For British Voters

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Stephen Fry lays it out. Ultimately, vote how you like, but VOTE!

How I will vote… « Stephen Fry.

More important than my own political views or my own voting intentions are my hopes that nothing I say will stop you from choosing Conservative if you consider it the right way to cast your vote. It may be you will be voting Tory through dyed-in-the-wool instinct and loyalty or it may be that you are someone who once voted Labour or Lib Dem but who has decided that Cameron and the Conservatives will be best for Britain. It’s none of my business, but do vote just as you want and be proud to do so.

An American Brand Name Heads to Mexico – After Taking Economic Recovery Funds | Crooks and Liars

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Need to edit my “How old is your Whirlpool?” post to point to this… insult to American working people and consumers.

An American Brand Name Heads to Mexico – After Taking Economic Recovery Funds | Crooks and Liars.

Guess how Whirlpool is repaying American taxpayers for their support:

Whirlpool Corporation is shutting down a refrigerator plant in Evansville, Indiana that will put 1100 people out of work. Are they having trouble selling refrigerators in these bad economic times? No. Whirlpool is profitable and still selling plenty of refrigerators here. But they want to ship these jobs to Mexico where they can produce them cheaper and without having to respect U.S. labor and environmental regulations.

Yet Another App

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image1138203989.jpgThis one’s based on good old ecto, testing to see if it works better than the official WordPress app.

Still no way to grab a link and start a post, the way Press It is supposed to work.

No TinyMCE or Quicktags.

Supposed to be image CSS possible.

No landscape keyboard.

Dumb “edit” button must be pressed to, you know, edit.


[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Mission Accomplished

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It’s a funny old Sunday for me; had to get up and out the door this morning by 4: 30am to get my husband David off to O’Hare for his flight to Orlando for a technical conference. He’s there, he’s run into some of his list members, he’s That Mailing List Guy.  He runs a lot of mailing lists that cover areas of expertise that are mostly to do with the AS/400 iSeries Systemi whatever IBM calls their midrange computing platform this week.

He got all packed last night, including the traditional “I can’t find my pants” crisis which fortunately was solved easily. Last time this happened, he had packed a brand new dress suit carefully in his suit bag, got to the conference, crashed in a friend’s room before his room was ready, then could not find his pants about an hour before the very important presentation.

He called me demanding to know if I had packed his dress pants. “Where are my PANTS?!? Did you pack them?”

It was the stress, really. He was nervous about the possibility of picking up a very prestigious award, and about maybe having to make an acceptance speech.

I reminded him that he’d packed up his suit bag very methodically with the brand new suit, and while I was checking the closet here just in case, he remembered the part about the friend’s room, tracked him down, and found his pants hanging in the closet.

Pants crisis: resolved.

Last night, it was more of a laundry/underwear crisis, much more easily fixed. There was clean laundry in baskets, but none of them seemed to contain socks and underwear. Keep in mind that we just got moved back into the master bedroom after more than 3 weeks, camping out in the guest room while we worked on our “3 day flooring project.” Our first night back in our own bed was Saturday, and the drawers which had been stacked up in the middle of the room had all be replaced in the dressers, thank GAWD, but there were still several laundry baskets that needed to be folded and put away.

There always are, I think they breed.

Anyway, David had clearly been searching frantically for his oddments of male netherwear when he shouted down from above “I can’t find any UNDERPANTS! ARRRGH!”

Stress, again: this time, it’s the plain old “early flight tomorrow, don’t want to forget anything, meanwhile I’m giving a presentation before the opening session” variety.

Soon enough, after we went through some baskets and checked the dresser drawers (which may have had stuff misfiled in them during the time they were stacked in the middle of the room), the Great Underpants Crisis of Nought ’10 was over. It was nervewracking and there was the distinct possibility that one of us would have to run out and get a 3-pack of white knittery, but fortunately it wasn’t necessary.

So David is off in Orlando, and I’m here for the beginning of the work week thinking about tasks and chores that I’d like to do, but that will probably get blown off if I’m not careful.

Believe it or not, blogging is a task AND a chore, because I’ve fallen out of the habit of blogging lately what with how easy it is to just tweet something, and how hard it is to blog something with the iPhone now that both of my little bookmarklets stopped working. Anything seen during the normal workday is either a quick and easy tweet, a moblog picture (another dead easy function set up via Flickr), a del.icio.us link, or not at all, as it’s no longer a simple thing to pick up a link with WordPress’ “Press This” javascript functionality on the iPhone (although it still works perfectly on a desktop machine). I’m not sure why, actually; it may be a security “feature” stemming from some update or other. I didn’t want to bother David with it yesterday since he was trying to get all his stuff ready and packed, and it can certainly wait for his return.

Anyway, there it is; it’s not easy to blog using WordPress’ own iPhone app, as I just commented on Tiny Screenfuls, yet it’s easy to send a post to WordPress via Flickr, del.icio.us, or Google Reader if you set them up with the right permissions (and in Flickr’s case, a template that applies my beloved CSS drop shadows).

Why can’t WordPress’s app grab a link, for gosh sakes? Why did my handy Press This app stop working right? Grr.

Anyway, my hour of blogging is over, but there’s still a bit more to discuss: my accomplishment of mission.

We had a family member’s discarded laptop, which David got several weeks ago at a family gathering, that he was going to “part out.” After some tinkering around, however, he got it working, but we forgot to take it with us a couple of weekends ago when we met up as a family to visit our young nephew in college for lunch. Darn! So after missing another opportunity to get the now-working laptop back to its home, I managed to meet up this morning after church, although it might have worked to drop it off in the down time I had between O’Hare (5:15 AM) and church (8:15 AM). But no, it worked out fine to meet afterwards, although to make it happen I had to navigate to a shopping mall in Vernon Hills… AND deal with an escalator (I have a weird perception problem that makes it hard to use down escalators, and I tend to balk and head for the nearest elevator to avoid it). Found my family members at the designated drop point, exchanged signs and countersigns (“Hi, you guys!” and “Hey, you made it”), and handed over the laptop.

I thought I had a schedule conflict and couldn’t stay for lunch, but the conflict evaporated, drat it. So: Noodles & Company for me. Later tonight, leftovers. And that’s a little over an hour of righteous, linky-loving blogging.

And thus endeth the post, thanks be to Gawd.

Bloghour

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It’s far too long since I blogged… ANYTHING other than links from Google Reader or del.icio.us and so I propose to blog for an hour and then stop. No looking for fixes to something on my iPhone bookmarks, no browsing articles without blogging them at least with a link and a comment, no nothing except, yes, blogging.

Begin.