Just my luck… My business travel landed me a BOS-SFO flight on March 19, 2010, the day United Airlines is set to roll out unlimited domestic upgrades. While I suspected that flights on the 19th would be completely messed up, from an IT systems perspective , I had some hope reserved that United might use the time leading up to March 19th to properly prepare their systems for this. Oh silly me! Here’s my timeline…
I booked the ticket a few weeks ago, and I tried to use a confirmed regional upgrade to upgrade it instantly.
A couple days ago, I realized it hadn’t cleared early, so I called and had them remove the confirmed regional upgrade instrument, and instead put me on the UDU waitlist. The agent on the phone was a bit confused about how that would work. She spoke to her manager and then assured me that if she put me on the e-500 list, I would be automatically moved to the UDU list upon check-in. Cool.
I try to check-in online this morning, hoping to either confirm or waitlist my upgrade with UDU. No cigar. It wanted me to buy e-500s. Annoying.
I called UA three times this afternoon, each time speaking to a different agent, and being extremely polite, to try and see if they could figure it out to me.
The third agent didn’t want to talk to me so she quickly transferred me to “Web Support.” This means India. They told me they had “fixed” the problem. I checked my itinerary… Apparently fixing the problem means they pulled me off the upgrade waitlist. FANTASTIC. Now I would have to call again to get re-placed on the list, and my post on the queue would be lost.
I called an agent and had her waitlist me for the ugprade. She did. She advised me to check in after midnight.
Now it’s 12:36AM, officially March 19, and I’m trying to check-in. I get the screenshot I pasted above. How retarded is it that on the day United is phasing out e-500s, they’re actually trying to sell me some? To make matters more / less funny (depending on your perspective), I get the link to buy e-500s when I click on the “Unlimited Domestic Upgrades Now Available to Elite Members” link.
So do I try to call them again? Every agent has been useless thus far. Do I really think I’ll get a helpful one this time around? I guess it can’t hurt… I’ll give a call once more. This has been an awful experience, though, and I really see no excuse for it. They knew this was coming LONG ago.
UPDATE: They almost got it working… I tried again. This time it gave me the screenshot after the break. Read more…
My girlfriend and I did a long weekend in Hawaii: 2 nights at the JW Ihilani and 2 nights at the Marriott Waikiki Beach. On top of it being a great weekend, we were fortunate enough to be there for the tsunami scare. I won’t recap the whole story for you. Check out here, here, and here if you need background. So while the tsunami (or lack thereof) kept us confined to our 24th floor hotel room and resulted in no result whatsoever, we got some pretty cool footage of what Waikiki Beach, one of the ten most popular beaches in the world, looks like without a a single person on the beach. That’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing to see.
I put together some video footage above, and I have a few full-size images below to download or view. Enjoy!
I really like flying Virgin America. I think it’s a great in-flight experience. Frequent fliers can do much better with traditional legacy carriers, but if you don’t fly that often, I think Virgin America is a GREAT way to travel. They had one thing that really annoyed me, though. Elevate (their frequent flier) points would expire 18 months after they were given to you. That means even if you flew Virgin America like a madman for 18 months, you might still not get enough points for a single first class award ticket cross country, and the earlier points you earned would expire the next month. Once I figured that out, I stopped flying them. As of today, they’re changing their ways! I just got an e-mail from Virgin America, letting me know that my points will now expire 18 months after the last activity (just like United’s). So now every time I fly, my expiration date gets pushed out another 18 months. Nice job, Virgin America. This was a much needed change to your frequent flier program.
I recently posted that one of my bigger disappointments of CES 2010 was TiVo’s lack of announcements. It appears that TiVo didn’t want to share the spotlight with other electronics manufacturers, and yesterday they released the TiVo Premiere and TiVo Premiere XL. I won’t go through all the details here, but you can find plenty of info here, here, here, and here. I’m a diehard TiVo snob so I ordered one right away! TiVo offers some great deals for existing users. If you have a lifetime service on one of your DVRs, you can get a $200 discount on the lifetime service from TiVo for the new box. Click “Read More” to see screenshots of what they’re offering. The new DVRs will be shipping in early April, and I’ll be SURE to post my impressions once it arrives!
$15 for WiFI?! Are you kidding me? I thought $12.95 was steep, but $14.95 really stinks! I’m writing this post from UA 14 Premium Service SFO-JFK on March 1, 2010. I think they just raised their rates today, March 1. The funny thing is that I just played the GoGo game to get a free internet session here. It gave me a FREE internet session up to $12.95 value. I wonder if it will work on the $14.95 United P.S. flights. I’ll try it next time. Anyhow, I think $10 is a fair price to pay for cross-country WiFi. $12.95 seemed steep, and 14.95 really seems bad. I hope people use it less. I guess they just count on business users to not care and expense it.
I’ll be the first one to admit it – the reason to jailbreak your iPhone is at an all time low. If we look back a few years, we all had iPhones with no applications except for the default set, no chance of using video streaming or VoIP applications, and we had a 10MB cap for downloading applications over the cell connection. We live in a different world now. Our phones are chock full with 3rd party applications. We can use VoIP applications and Slingplayer over 3G connections. The download cap has been raised up to 20MB for applications. Things are looking rosier and rosier. However, all is not perfect in Apple land. Read on to hear about my top ten favorite jailbroken iPhone utilities and applications. BTW, Big shout out to the iPhone Dev Team for making it all possible.
Do you travel frequently? If you’re answer is no, then you may not be interested in this post. But if you’re answer is yes, then let me rock your world . When bouncing from airport to airport, sometimes on different carriers, it can be tough to keep up to date on flight delays, gate numbers, etc. FlightTrack Pro from Mobiata gives a great interface for tracking ALL of your flight information. Combine it with TripIt and you get all of your flight info automatically entered. Read on to hear how! Read more…
Just a quick post to brag that I beat Geo-Defense! This is a really great game for the iPhone, and I bought it when it went on sale a couple weeks ago. Posted a pic of my scores for the last of the hardest levels to prove it. It was a VERY challenging game. Time to delete it and move onto the next!
After installing Fedora 12 on a new virtual machine with VMware (I use Fusion on the Mac), the first thing you’ll likely want to do is install VMware tools. You need to install a few packages in order to make the installation seamless, however. There are countless postsaround the internetwith people looking for help with this. Here’s a quick 15 step guide to getting up and running.
Download Fedora 12.
Install the OS.
Boot up the virtual machine.
Open up the Terminal.
Run “su” and type your root password to gain administrative control.
Run “yum update” to update all the packages to the newest version.
Reboot.
Open up the Terminal.
Run “yum install kernel-devel kernel-headers gcc mkinitrd”
Reboot.
Click the menu option in your VMware application to install VMware tools. This should put a compressed folder on the desktop.
Expand the zip file and using the terminal, navigate into the newly created directory.
As the root user, type “./vmware-install.pl”
When it asks you questions and prompts you for a response, just hit enter. Everything should be properly configured at this point.
Reboot when the script finishes. That’s it!
Once the machine reboots, you should be able to immediately play with some of the more useful features of vmware-tools. For example, you’ll notice that if you drag the edges of the window to resize it, the resolution of the Guest OS will automatically adjust on the fly. If you drag files from your Host OS into the window of the desktop OS, they will copy over. Additionally, you should be able to copy and paste between the two systems. Enjoy!
CES has come and gone. The two dominating themes of this year’s show appear to be tablets and 3D televisions. I am interested in neither. Unless Steve Jobs shows me something amazing in two weeks, I don’t see the need for a tablet in my life. Not one bit. And I have ZERO desire to put on 3D glasses just to watch Modern Family or the Lakers beating pretty much anyone. However, I DO have the desire to have an updated HD TiVo. I have a TiVo HD with a 1TB hard drive upgrade, and while it works great, I really wish it did a better job of integrating internet media. There were leaks of a TiVo Premiere, and I really thought CES would be the time and place for TiVo to introduce a new line of DVRs. Oh well. I’m a sad Panda. And as for Sling, I would have loved to see some innovation on the consumer end of things. Show us a Slingcatcher that ACTUALLY can sling HD. Show us a better iPhone client. Just give us something cooler than all of the boring OEM crap you released! So anyhow, big lumps of coal for TiVo and Sling Media. I was hoping to see neat products from both!
. When bouncing from airport to airport, sometimes on different carriers, it can be tough to keep up to date on flight delays, gate numbers, etc. FlightTrack Pro from Mobiata gives a great interface for tracking ALL of your flight information. Combine it with TripIt and you get all of your flight info automatically entered. Read on to hear how! 
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