Blogging since 1998. By David Wertheimer
My favorite news item in a long time: Shaquille O’Neal, who determinedly received his college degree after leaving Louisiana State University early for a pro basketball career, got his MBA this spring.
O’Neal has long been one of pro sports’ more business-minded players, and seeing him pursue his education is inspiring.
I don’t care what one does for a living—it can’t feel good to have one’s name attributed to a quote like “Ass cleavage is really in right now.”
Once upon a time Blow the Dot Out Your Ass was a wonderfully timely meme. Stickers slapped all over San Francisco decried the endless progression of Internet omniscience and gave most of us in the industry a good laugh.
Fast forward to 2005: the “anti-dot-com” domain blowthedotoutyourass.com has been commandeered by a porn site. Perfect. (And oh, the wordplay.)
This just in: points accumulated in JetBlue’s TrueBlue frequent-flier program expire after one year (see point 4.4 in link). One year!
JetBlue awards up to 12 points per leg of travel and a free trip comes at 100 points. One would therefore have to make a minimum of five round-trip flights between the coasts, or as many as nine short-hop east coast trips, within a 12-month span to achieve a free flight.
Most airlines have expiration dates on their frequent flier miles of two to three years. I have been flying Virgin Atlantic occasionally and accumulating miles in their Flying Club program since 1999; the expiration period renews every time I fly. As a result, I am using a stash of Flying Club miles this summer. For years I’ve called Virgin Atlantic my favorite airline, and the mileage generosity is one small component.
For JetBlue to wipe out my flight history with them smacks of disinterest. Such a short expiration period is a “what have you done for me lately?” stance that doesn’t sit well with me. Mind you, I’m a JetBlue shareholder, and their conservatism (read stinginess) within TrueBlue is likely one of the reasons JBLU is one of the few airlines turning a profit.
But 12 months? On an airline packed with leisure travelers and with a rather truncated route map? Within my spectrum of travel habits, JetBlue may as well not have a program at all.
I’m looking at resumes for web designers today (see also), and on three occasions I’ve had my browser window forced to a “full-screen” size that extends so far that I can’t find the bottom right corner to resize it.
Memo to designers (including, I will admit, my own coworkers in France): resizing browsers to unwieldy screen sizes does nothing to improve the performance or likability of your designs. All it does is aggravate the end user—in this case, the hiring manager—and greatly reduce the probability that the user will ever return to the site.
You’d think that in 2005 we’d all know this.
“I think one of the problems here is that we have let down America,” he said. “The United States Olympic Committee selected us, New York, to represent the country. New York won because people had confidence that New York would be able to do things. And it turned out that we, unfortunately, are not able to do things.”
I very much like Mayor Bloomberg, but if he keeps up this myopic pouting about his lost billion-dollar boondoggle of a stadium, I’m going to be tempted to vote against him this fall.
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