Today I received a posted a response letter to Southwest Airlines’ Customer Relations & Rapid Rewards department in response to a letter I received from them that was sorely disappointing. The letter reads:
“Dear Ms. Carter,
Thank you for your letter on January 22, 2008. I really appreciate your bringing to my attention the dangers to my Southwest Rapid Rewards account. I am concerned about the security breach you wrote about in the letter because I have never let my personal account information be shared with anybody not even my sister.
As you can tell I am a very frequent flyer of Southwest Airlines having flown hundreds of segments on your airline for both work and pleasure. It disturbs greatly that you have written that you will no longer be responsible for the security of my account because you suspect that Awards have been sold, brokered, or bartered.
I did not sell my awards ticket although I often give them away to my sister and relatives for their use as my company always covers any last minute travel I make, and I always book early on Click n’ Save specials for personal travel and find very little use of the Awards for myself. This activity has caused you to flag my account as being suspect, which is understandable, but it is still very disturbing that instead of writing to inquire if such a thing has happened the airline policy is to no longer protect the consumer account and use coercion upon loyal Southwest flyers.
I wanted to write to express my great disappointment in Southwest Airlines and feel that my loyalty to your company is unwarranted and hope that in the future should any Southwest flyer’s account be compromised, that you would stand behind your members and not behind suspicions.
Sincerely yours, a very frequent flyer.”
I started using Southwest over 10 years ago on my first flight to Chicago to visit my future college. I tell my friends how I love it, but today I was sorely disappointed in the thingly veiled threat I got as a letter from them. You’d think that somebody who has flown hundreds, yes hundreds of flights with them would deserve more trust or at least a different form letter? Maybe I’m asking too much of corporate america and all that exists now between a consumer and company is suspicion and blame.
January 29th, 2008
Do you remember the soup nazi from Seinfeld? Well…. Wikipedia is run by Nazis too like the soup nazi. The wikipedia moderators get to decide when or what is deemed to be a contribution. Anybody who has showed up on TV seems to guarantee them a stub, yet film production companies who have won awards or been a selection at film festivals do not count. I am upset at wikipedia because there have been multiple attempts to build a wiki for Wong Fu Productions. Wong Fu Productions is a company formed by three boys in their early twenties, and although I deem them to be boys, it doesn’t make their work less relevant.
Is it the quality of the entry that makes the wikipedia moderators delete it, or is it their lack of knowledge of the world? I know that Marc Levin from Dogballs blog, tried to add a stub for dogballs and it was deleted. It’s a bit harder to argue a term that’s colloquial. BUT if you have a movie screenings tour throughout the United States, were selected for an Asian American film festival, and had a showing at the VC in LA, doesn’t that make you exist? Is all that work not enough to equal some reality tv star from MTV?
I don’t personally serve to profit from the Wong Fu Productions, but I do feel for the Asian American arts and film community. These boys produced a well filmed, edited, and marketed film. The storyline and screenplay was definitely juvenile because it was written by twenty-year-old boys. However even with the plot issues, you cannot fault them for their viewpoint on the world. They were able to tell their story in a cohesive manner, with proper timing and lighting. That is not easily done for a budget under $2000.
The wiki nazis have determined that this film production company is not worthy of a wiki entry, and that is quite unfortunate for the film community.
June 15th, 2007
Yesterday at a closing session of SxSW Bruce Sterling mentioned that Viacom is suing Google. Instead of being interested in the suit I wanted to find out who Viacom owned and if I liked their content.
I stumbled upon the CJR or Columbia Journalism Review. I haven’t really perused this site since the last election where I found them to be a great neutral resource for me to judge if Rupert Murdoch owned organizations were truly being partial and how the press process works.
Columbia Journalism Review article called Before Jon Stewart.
June 12th, 2007
While visiting Trader Joe’s in Santa Barbara for some dinner fixings, Chee and I walked by the sample table. Lo and behold on the sample table is Chee Chee’s very own submitted recipe for Elvis something.. Essentially it was a banana waffle with peanut butter and something else. Good if you like bananas.
June 11th, 2007
It’s been I don’t know how long since the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in New York. For those who don’t know me I grew up in the tri-state area while my father went to school in Brooklyn. New York City was a second home to me with weekend and weekday treks into the city by bus or subway and yearly homages to New York in college.
Today while watching an episode of Brothers and Sisters I realized how life could have been different for me. I have a plane ticket still unused from US Airways from being bumped on a flight to leave SFO at 11pm on September 12, 2001 to La Guardia Airport.
Where would I be if I had enough vacation time to take two days off? Would I have in been in the midst of the chaos that was NYC and scared my family and loved ones? I don’t know, but that isn’t the point. The point is to realize how we’re each meant for a different path in life and we don’t know what that path is. The morning of September 11th, I decided to take the Caltrain to work. Not only did I decide to take the Caltrain, but I decided to take the earliest one that the work shuttle would pick me up from. I was on the train around 6 am pacific time. Of all the days I decide to take public transportation (once in a blue moon), it was that day.
On the train my mom calls me and says turn on the news, I tell her I can’t I’m on the train. My mom then begins to relay to me what has just happened because my uncle who works in downtown NYC just called her to turn on the news. Shortly thereafter the train conductor says that we will not be stopping at San Francisco airport today and I was one of the few people who knew why. I started explaining what happened to the fellow commuters on the train, but people didn’t believe me because it was so incomprehensible.
That day is still a blur to me. I remember watching from the work window as jet fighters flanked that the international flights as they landed at SFO. I recall an eerie calm as we were eating lunch outside on the patio because no planes were landing or taking off.
That night I started looking things up such as family and friends. I was lucky, all my loved ones were safe despite living and working in the city. My friends in ibanking and on wall street were safe too. Today I recall a trip to New York City in early 2000 where I stayed at the Millenium Hilton and watched the Krispy Kreme in the lobby of Tower 1 or 2 and saw the cleaning staff cleaning up through my hotel room window.
To this day I haven’t walked by the site of the World Trade Center because I’m too scared to. I’ve been back to New York City many times since and I’m glad it didn’t lose it’s sparkle and grunge that makes it special to me.
Everybody has their own experiences and thoughts on what happened that day. Some of our lives were impacted more by the events that unfolded afterwards. For me I missed my yearly trip to New York City that year.
May 28th, 2007
NPR calls this summer the “summer of sequels”. I didn’t realize how right they were until Spider-Man started off the last weekend.
Sequels:
-Ocean’s
-Bourne
-Pirates
-Spider-Man
-Fantastic Four
-Rush Hour
-Harry Potter
-28 Days
-Shrek
-Hostel
-Transformers
-Die Hard
-The Simpsons
I’m sure there’s more. This is what I have now.
I’ve already started out my summer of movie watching with a team outing to Spider-Man 3 on the IMAX big screen. Thanks to Matt and John’s wife. I was surprised that the screen and the movie was shot in a way that the large screen and moments did not cause me to become motion sick.
All my friends know better than to watch a movie with lots of movement with me unless we sit in the back row. 9th grade, best friend and I went to see Hook for our English class. (The assignment in English class is to watch a movie and review it for the class in a five minute speech.) We were in different periods so we often chose the same movies so that we could have company as well as a carpool to drop us off. Another time I went babysitting with my best friend at Chuck E. Cheeses. On the way home, I sat in the backseat with the kids and bad pizza in my stomach. The moment the car stopped in front of her house, I wasn’t feeling well.
I was really relieved not to have to relieve the 9th grade during Spider-Man III. Thankfully a seat in the back with Aarthi and no bouncing kids nearby averted any motion sickness. I also have to give credit to the movie director who choses to shoot action scenes with a mounted cam.
Now for Ocean’s Thirteen where Soderbergh’s free hand camera angles are sure to make me ill.
May 14th, 2007
This is a test post from 
, a fancy photo sharing thing.
April 27th, 2007
Today is the last day of SxSW’s Interactive portion of the conference in Austin, TX. This is my last evening in Austin and I’d like to try something other than BBQ or meat, but I digress. Today is the day I finally felt that the conference was worthwhile despite the poor quality panels and presentations with exciting titles.
Maybe the reason the conference is moving me now as a designer is the movie screening of Helvetica. I realized how everybody in the world is now a designer or thinks of themselves as a designer. I used to be offended by this and ask them why would you think you’re a designer? Well today I realize that with digital cameras an amateur phototog can now take the equivalent of 10 rolls of film in one sitting and not have to develop the film. In graduate school my professor would applaud us when we came up with 3-5 printable shots per 27 shot rolls. We would have to buy film, take the time to develop the film, and then print them.
Today with the Canon and Nikon SLRs from the lower end models to the high end ones anybody can take the 27 shots in a minute. The more you shoot the better you get. We are now all photographers. Soon as the tools become easier we will all be filmmakers and sketchers. (e.g. JumpCut or SketchUp) Nobody has a single identity anymore.
I have been hanging on to the idea that people fit in buckets and you have to be a generalist and specialist to do your job and do it well. In this world of SxSW attendees this does not hold true. Everybody is a generalist and yet a specialist at the same time. The goal seems to be talk to everybody like you know what you’re saying, but do what you do very well to make yourself different.
Conclusion: I did not learn anything at the conference about design that I did not already know. I had many good conversations that made me question the way I think about design and how to interact with the interface. There are no answers, but always keep yourself open to new ideas.
March 13th, 2007
I wrote this really comprehensive objective post and WordPress ate it. Now you’re going to be stuck with the non-objective two minute summary.
Problem 1: I ordered a product through buy.com and google checkout on Nov. 7th. I have not received my order and google has already charged me. Today is Nov. 30th.
Problem 2: I can’t check my order status through buy.com, the vendor who is supplying the merchandise, instead I have to go through my sucky gmail account and reply to the email confirmation.
Disclaimer: I am not a google hater or Yahoo! lover, but it’s wrong for a business to take your money, and not give you your order. It is also bad user experience for the vendor, buy.com in this case, to have google checkout ruin the experience of a loyal customer.
Other vendors and buy.com in the past have given refunds or partial refunds for delayed or unfulfillable orders. Instead with google checkout I am stuck viewing and discussing my order issues through my gmail account and then searching on buy.com for the product info and current product availability status. For the less advanced user and loyal customers how is buy.com to know when there is a problem?
December 1st, 2006
Last month a whole 30 days ago I took a vacation with my friend to Hawaii. The most eventful part of the trip was being charged by a bull on a hike to Waimoku Falls. Everybody tells you how beautiful the hike is and how fun the bamboo forest and falls are. NOBODY!!! NOBODY warns you that there is a herd of cattle in the middle of the forest. It’s not just any forest, but a national park approved and maintained by the U.S. government.
We start our hike around three in the afternoon. It is a 4.x mile trip with a few hundred feet elevation change through the guava trees, then the Banyan trees, and then the bamboo forest. We were going on a pretty reasonable hiking pace and stopping to see the views of the falls and the pools below the sections of cascading water every 10 minutes of so. Forty-five minutes into the we come to a gated area that says please close gate behind you. Thought bubble in my head goes: Hmmm…. I wonder if there are animals here…. nah… can’t be we’re in a forest.
After another 10 minutes of hiking we grind to a sudden halt. There in front of us is a fully grown bull, complete with horns and not the sawed down kind. We decide that the best plan of action is to not disturb it and walk around it. We start walking quietly under the Banyan tree and suddenly the bull notices us and turns towards us. My friend jumps into the underbrush hoping to avoid him, but instead the bull starts charging towards him. This whole time I am watching and staring about ten feet lower on the path in the middle of an open area. The bull charges my friend not once but twice. I am totally frozen in place and too afraid to move in case I attract the bull’s attention. The bull loses patience with my friend and turns around.
Now the bull is facing me. I can see its beady eyes. You know how in horror movies they show eyes with no pupils? well… bulls just have a solid glassy brown eye that you can see your reflection in. The bull starts to paw at the ground with his front left hoof and I fear that his is preparing to charge me. There is no cover for me to dive into on the left or right. The only cover is in front of me towards the bull. I scream because I’ve realized that the bag for my SLR is red and bulls are supposedly fixated by red things. I quickly take off my bag and throw it away from me and away from the cover without regard to the thousand dollar equipment inside hoping only for my safety.
Distracted by a red flying bag, the bull turns his attention away from me and watched the bag. As soon as the bag lands on the other side of the path, the bull decides that I am no longer a threat. He walks away while I run for cover.
Nobody believes us when we say we were charged by a cow in National Forest. The moral of the story is never walk in the path of a cow. The amazing thing is a family caught up with us later at the falls and said they allowed their child to pet the bull.
In case you don’t believe us, there really are cows in that forest. Another Blog on this topic.
November 4th, 2006
Previous Posts
