Some rules of flying:
- Schedule your outbound flights so that delays are inconvenient but not fatal to the purpose of your trip.
- Know that the atmosphere is immense, and airplanes are small. Ground holds happen for very good reasons, all of them about you surviving the flight.
- Charge your phone.
So, yeah, we're on a hold pad for another half hour...
For the next 52 hours, I'll be traveling, for a really horrible reason. I'm not traveling for work, nor really for vacation, though I will admit to enjoying it (in a way my friends don't really understand).
No, I'm trying to keep my American Airlines elite status for another year, because so far in 2015 I have traveled less than in any year of the past 10. So tonight I'm flying to New York, tomorrow to Los Angeles, then back to Chicago on Saturday evening, about 5,500 miles total.
The routing provided not only the best ratio of miles to dollars I could find, but also the chance to fly on American's new A321T and B787-8 airplanes. So far it looks like I'll be in coach on both, as AA3 on a Friday may be one of American's most profitable (read: both premium cabins are paid for rather than upgrades) and the 787 is new enough that lots of dweebs like me are flying on it even if it takes us out of the way. (I'll be taking it on a LAX-DFW segment Saturday afternoon.)
I did bring my real camera, and also I scheduled a full 24 hours in L.A., so this won't be a completely intangible trip. I've also got a couple of books with me. And I really do love flying. So it's not torture, and if I can eke out Platinum for one more year, not pointless.
Next report from New York.
Scott Hanselman has a good rant today about how software developers increasingly use their own customers to do quality-assurance (QA) testing:
Technology companies are outsourcing QA to the customer and we're doing it using frequent updates as an excuse.
This statement isn't specific to Apple, Google, Microsoft or any one organization. It's specific to ALL organizations. The App Store make it easy to update apps. Web Sites are even worse. How often have you been told "clear your cache" which is the 2015 equivalent to "did you turn it on and off again?"
I see folks misusing Scrum and using it as an excuse to be sloppy. They'll add lots of telemetry and use it as an excuse to avoid testing. The excitement and momentum around Unit Testing in the early 2000s has largely taken a back seat to renewed enthusiasm around Continuous Deployment.
But it's not just the fault of technology organizations, is it? It's also our fault - the users. We want it now and we like it beta.
It would be nice, of course, if shops made sure show-stopping bugs didn't make it to production. But otherwise I'm OK with the balance of new features and frequent updates. Things evolve.
By "secrets" I mean any data you don't want known to the public. In a recent incident (via Schneier), that should include posting a selfie of yourself holding a winning betting ticket:
A woman has lost $825 she won betting on the 2015 Melbourne Cup after she posted a photo of herself holding the winning ticket on Facebook.
According to The Daily Mail, a woman named Chantelle placed a $20 bet on the 100-to-1 shot Prince of Penzance at this year’s Melbourne Cup, Australia’s most prestigious Thoroughbred horse race.
Chantelle believes that though her fingers were covering up part of the ticket’s barcode in her selfie, a “friend” on her profile might have used her photo and [another photo of the ticket] to piece together the complete barcode, run it through an automated machine, and claim the winnings themselves.
So, kudos to Chantelle for knowing not to post the entire barcode, but, um, maybe she shouldn't have posted any of it?