The new twist in delayed flights

I haven't flown in several years, and I have never been a frequent flyer. It seems like airlines are doing everything they can to keep it that way.

From long lines to check in, to delays and cancellations, to lost luggage, flying has never struck me as an attractive way to travel. If it didn't have the virtue of being far faster than any alternative, would anyone ever fly?

Things have apparently gotten much worse. Not only are flights being delayed, seemingly in record numbers, but there is apparently a new trend of people being forced to wait on the plane for hours. Consider this story of 180 people trapped on a 757 for 10 hours.

Passengers on the flight say they will always remember the pizza. After about five hours, a flight attendant announced that “an American executive” had ordered pizzas to be delivered from the airport. Five boxes arrived.

Flight attendants, who, according to one passenger, had been “missing in action most of the time,” cut the slices into tiny pieces — 70 in all. Flight attendants said that only those who “really needed it” should take one, a passenger said.

Via This Is Broken

I'm back!

After a hiatus of more than a year, I am back and ready to blog!

I am setting a goal for myself of at least one blog post every week through the end of 2007.

Great blonde joke

Thanks to Deane at Gadgetopia, here is the best blonde joke ever!

Tags: blogs, jokes, funny

Request for help

It has recently come to my attention that my blogs (this one and also The Book Report are displaying correctly in Opera and Mozilla, but not Internet Explorer. If you can help me with this, please contact me at C M A D L E R at G M A I L dot C O M. Thank you in advance!

Tags: blogs, help, HTML

Squidoo's success and failure

Seth Godin has come up with an interesting idea with Squidoo.

The company, whose slogan is "Everyone's an expert on something," allows users to view and create 'lenses', each a single page devoted to a single topic. For example, Seth created What you need (okay, want) to know about Seth Godin. The second concept behind Squidoo, is chunking. "The best lenses divide the world into tiny bite-sized chunks. A long long list of links (which is what most web pages that fashion themselves as lenses contain) is completely useless to the average human. The goal here, remember, is not completeness, it’s to give me a toehold."

As much as I wanted to like Squidoo, I think it has some fundamental design flaws.

One of the argued advantages of Squidoo over a topical blog is that blogs put the most recent posts front and center. This is great if you are a recurring reader (though in that case you are probably getting the blog on RSS anyway), but may not be such a hot thing for readers who are new to the site. First because you may be expanding on a previously introduced idea, and secondly because your most recent post may not be your best post. To solve this problem, Squidoo offers a design which is fundamentally static; there is no expectation of new material except perhaps as information changes or becomes out of date. This solution creates a new problem, however; there is no new information, and therefore less tendency for readers to return!

A better solution is to offer links to featured posts either at the top of the page or in a sidebar. This offers a combination of the newness of blogs with the introduction of a static page like Squidoo.

If Blogger ever improves their service, you may be certain to find "featured posts" here.

Tags: Squidoo, blogs, Seth Godin, content management

100 posts!

The previous post was my 100th post on this blog! It took me 14 months, averaging approximately 1 post every 4.2 days, but that statistic is deceptive; several times I have gone almost a month with no posts, and I have written as many as 5 posts in a single day. Hopefully I can get to 200 posts a little more quickly; my goal is to write post #200 by next summer.

Priceless

The first comment on http://www.gadgetopia.com/post/4181 is priceless.

Apropos of nothing, but priceless.

Tags: Blog, comment, funny

Good is the enemy of great

Seth Godin posted this outstanding diatribe on the conflict between "good enough" and "great". He has an illustrative follow-up about Robertson screws, in which he talks about how "good enough" can defeat "great" in the marketplace. Read it!

Is Business Week reading me?

When I opened my email this morning what did I find, but a link to a Business Week story ("The World Has Changed, Not the Dems: Another Presidential election has been lost, and more could be on the way unless the Democrats shake up the party").

This is basically what I've spent the last two days saying here (see "Democrats in Denial" and "The Day After")

Is someone at Business Week reading this blog? Or am I just so good that I know what the days' headline will be before its written?!

Experiment in capitalism

I found a website today about a fellow who, as an experiment, was trying to turn $14 into $1000 in a year. He had a job, and plenty of money, but was just doing this as an experiment in capitalism. The goal was to do this without gambling (or otherwise incurring extremely high levels of risk), and with minimal work (since he already had a job).

I certainly find this intriguing. While it sounds impossible - a 7142% annual return - when you start considering the ways in which one might do this it really may be quite doable! What do you think?

Funfurde

Funfurde

I just found this outstanding blog; I think their name says it all: Fun. Furniture. Design. They review some outstanding (and funky!) furniture designs.

Check it out.

20. June 2004 (Fathers' Day) 2:55pm

Since everyone is talking about how great/revolutionary blogs are (or at least the media are raving about them) I thought I would try one out. (For once I'm not an early adopter.) Here we go!