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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
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
Tomorrow I will be at this conference joining the team of Yahoo! developers to talk about Yahoo! Not sure what driving to the city for an 8am breakfast will do to my internal clock. Will post minutes from the first half of Day 1 later.
September 13th, 2006
Time magazine has put out a list of what they deems are the 50 coolest websites. I’ve decided to do my own review of them and see how they stack up in my world. I’ll be posting reviews in blocks of 5 in the next few weeks. In the meantime you can take a look at the list for yourself.
Time Magazine Article
August 21st, 2006
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