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When I was planning this trip, 5 days (ok, 4.5) in LA seemed like a lot. I thought I could enjoy myself, see a few friends, get some work done, relax. I think that relax part just went the way of the Dodo. I already feel guilty and slightly overwhelmed by how many people there are to see, but such is life. Someone always feels left out, but there just aren’t enough hours in the day to see everyone I know that lives here. Plus, I have actual paying work to do. That said, the climate is beautiful, and I have been working with the door open to perfect weather most of the day. I arrived around 10am and had a lovely lunch with my friend Jose who picked me up from the airport, then came to Dallas’ house (in WeHo where I am staying) to get settled in and down to some work. I have a few client meetings while I am here, but I am determined to have some fun along with. La la la….
I am a technology professional who has never flown with Virgin America before, but my brand associations (due to your marketing) were of a hip, modern airline with up to date conveniences. And so when I was planning on booking my current travel to LA, SF, and back to New York, I decided to try out Virgin America. Your website and system have made me never want to fly with you again, and I haven’t even boarded the first plane. Here is a brief list of the problems I have encountered:
1. Unable to book multi part itinerary on your site and had to call in to book travel
2. When logging into my account (anytime over the past several days), site is slow and unresponsive
3. After logging in, I am often logged out mysteriously while trying to make changes
4. Unable to make changes to itinerary using your site
5. Trying to get to seat mapping/changes results in wrong or no information showing, or a wiped out seat selection
6. Once checked in, no option for paperless boarding pass
7. On my iPhone, no app available for Virgin America (for check in, travel alerts, boarding pass, info)
In short, using your company has been a royal pain before even boarding my first flight with you. Congrats to your marketing guys anyway for duping me into believing you had a handle on the modern, internet-connected world when clearly you do not.
Most sincerely,
Stephen
Satori, Stephen on January 7, 2012 @ 12:12 pm — 1 comment
I have a veritable explosion of work at the moment. Trying to wrap up a few things before Monday, because I am heading to LA and SF for about 10 days, and while I will be working mobile, it is always less productive than when at my larger monitor at home. The new year has started off well with regard to work, that is for sure. I am really looking forward to going back to California, which will always feel a bit of a homecoming. After all, I lived there for about 13 years, and it is true to say I would not be doing what I am doing now if I hadn’t. It is really funny to think how small events can completely reshape your life over the long haul. It was early 1995, and having returned from living in France 18 months earlier, I was working in a planning office in SOMA doing things as various as model building, light graphic design work, and mac support. I was invited to a dinner party and struck up a conversation with the woman sitting next to me. After explaining to her the type of work that I did, she told me that she thought I would be great in the field of “Quality Assurance“. I asked her to explain what the hell that was and she told me it was basically testing out new software for bugs and quirks. Further, she told me that her boyfriend, who worked at Apple, was trying to hire a few QA engineers, and that I should send her my resume to forward to him. I told her, right, pull the other one, but she assured me she was serious and I promised to send her my resume. I went home thinking that I was not even sure what she was talking about, and as excited as I was by the prospect of working for Apple, I really felt that I had no relevant experience — so I didn’t send the resume.
As fate would have it, I ran into her on the street a few days later. She asked why I hadn’t sent my resume and I admitted to her that I didn’t have one with the appropriate experience, and surmised that it was probably a waste of time anyway. She told me to just put one together, listing exactly the type of work that I had told her about, and she would forward it, what could it hurt? Reluctantly, I pulled one together and sent it off to her, expecting that to be the end of it.
One week later, I had a job at Apple Computer.
I worked there for a couple of years, and learned a ton about QA, the software-making process, Apple, and the industry. This led me to many other technology driven jobs and pursuits, in companies large and small and places far and wide. It is amazing to look back on the last 17 years and see where it has all led. And all from a simple conversation one evening with a stranger at a dinner party.
Satori, Stephen on January 4, 2012 @ 9:17 am — 0 comments
I have been getting a lot of great feedback on and contacts from my new site, and I am thrilled. It has been picked up by a few design sites, and this has resulted in a fairly large traffic spike. One of the gratifying things in building it is seeing how far I’ve come in the last 3 years. There are all kinds of programming and design skills I have acquired in that time. And with the experience, the time necessary for me to complete projects has likewise gone down, making me a better bargain for my clients (since at least for now, my rates haven’t moved). When one is going about one’s daily business, these things can be somewhat invisible, as they are incremental. But building my new site and portfolio have made them come into focus, and while pleased with what I have learned, can see how very much more there is to learn. There are a host of truly amazing designers and programmers out there that inspire me daily. What I love about the web so much is how open it is to sharing. There are thousands of places to learn from and borrow from and get direct help with problems. It is obvious that this spirit of sharing results in an explosion of creativity and progress (much of which would be undone by hateful laws like SOPA).
This morning I had an appointment with the Apple geniuses to deal with an overheating problem on my laptop (when connected to my new monitor anyway). I went in and dropped it off with them to be picked up later today (hopefully fixed, but I have my doubts). Being without my laptop for a few hours was, I have to admit, a slightly bewildering concept at first, not least of which because I am unable to do any work without it. My entire livelihood is bound up in it, and it gave me pause. Fortunately, it is a fairly easy thing to replace, but it is obvious that in the absence of fairly advanced technology, I would have no job. My personality is such a fit with this kind of work, that I wonder what type of thing I would have done with my life 50 years ago, or 100, or 500 even? Would there have even been an opportunity for me to exercise that part of my brain in the absence of fast-changing technology? How bored would I have been, how underutilized would my native abilites have been? How much of what we are good at is merely an adaptation to the culture and the time? Maybe in fact, I was born too early. Perhaps the best realization of my skill set is at some far flung distant future.
Apple just called (as fate would have it) a minute ago. It is time to pick up my laptop.
Satori, Stephen on January 1, 2012 @ 11:37 am — 0 comments
Months spent out of the country: 2.5
Emails received: 14572
Emails sent: 5138
Number of broadway shows seen: 4
Number of movies seen: 26
Percent viewed in a theater (vs at home): 46
Number of times someone indicated they liked my profile on OK Cupid: 147
Number of first dates: 57
Number of boyfriends: 0
Number of times groceries were delivered: 34
Number of new facebook friends: 83
Number known before: 20
Percent of new ones actually corresponded with: 6.3
Number of separate occasions on which I saw family members: 6
Average yearly number before moving to New York: 1
Number of times lunch appointments appear in my calendar: 36
Friends from LA who visited this year: 3
Other US states I visited this year: 2
Number of websites worked on: 24
We all have mild annoyances in our lives that we don’t respond to with changes or a fix. Sometimes they stay in the background and we just live with them, and sometimes after a long period we snap and decide to change something. Such was the case with my shower curtain. Since moving into my new apartment almost two years ago, I have had a problem with the shower curtain often being sucked inward and sticking to me (a mild annoyance). It was due to the differential pressure generated by the hot water on the inside versus the colder air outside, or something like that. I finally got so fed up with it, that I ordered a heavy duty and stiffer shower curtain, hoping that would curtail the movement. It helped a little, but failed to sufficiently stop the inward movement. I was really getting fed up now, and searched high and low on the internet for some sort of attachable weight one could affix to the bottom which would hold it more in place. I did my internet research and found none that fit the bill and for a brief moment considered designing and manufacturing them, and how I would become rich filling this unmet need. And then I read a blog post from someone with a similar problem that pointed to a very simple solution: don’t close the curtain all the way. Miraculously (or not, when you stop to think about it) this worked. By leaving about a foot or two of space at the far end of the shower, the air was able to move freely around and voila, problem solved. The curtain stays put. For someone as science smart as I (like to imagine I) am, I have to admit some embarrassment for not figuring this out sooner.
I love it when one’s lack of any particular expectations about something result in a wonderful surprise. I just had the pleasure of watching a delightful film (streaming on Netflix) recommended to me by friends. It is a French film called “Les Noms des Gens” that they have badly translated as “The Names of Love“. It is more appropriate to call it by it’s original title (which means “People’s Names”) as the movie has a lot to do with naming, and how we see ourselves through the lenses of our names. It is also about how society views us by our names, how we look, and our perceived cultures. In a nutshell, the film tells the story of a politically left wing woman who sleeps around with as many very conservative men as she can find, in order to convert them from their right wing beliefs. The film is a farce, a smart screwball political comedy, and a love story all rolled into one. It was a total treat and I highly recommend it. The only caveat I have is that some of the humor plays off of the specifics of French political culture, so some things may have less than their full punch or meaning to someone not familiar with French politics.
Satori, dreams — Stephen on December 28, 2011 @ 8:59 am — 0 comments
I awoke with a start this morning (my alarm always startles, that is its purpose after all), with the barest remnants of a strange dream. Here they are. I was with my ex, Brian, and we were driving (in separate cars) to the outskirts of San Francisco, but it didn’t look like San Francisco. It looked like a cross between Los Angeles and Indianapolis, and the traffic was terrible. We kept driving around, desperately trying to find a place to stop. Then I was in a body shop / garage with my car, waiting to pick it up while Brian went to park his somewhere close by. Their system for finding the cars they were working on was byzantine, with rotating racks of numbers not unlike the ones that clothes go round on at the cleaners. Finally they got me my car back and I parked it right outside, wondering where Brian was after all this time. I called him and he was in a fit about finding parking but finally had. I told him we would walk into town and he freaked out. He absolutely hated walking and wondered why I couldn’t just drive us to where we were going despite the traffic. I couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about, but he was screaming mad about it. Other than that, I remember watching some crazy live fashion show/ advertising campaign in the lobby of some building while waiting for him to join me and thinking, I could do better than that….