Events

As I mentioned Thursday, I'm on a mileage run. But because I'm an aviation geek, not only am I trying to hold onto elite status for 2016, but also I'm trying out American Airlines' newest airplanes. Yesterday's flight from JFK to LAX got me on the A321 Transcontinental (along with, no kidding, both Laura Linney and Natalie Dormer). Today's gets me from LAX to DFW on this gorgeous thing: They're seamless, you know. If you look at the fuselage of any other passenger airplane, you see rivets, welds, all...

...not everywabone would look like these guys, getting in a few waves just past 9 in the morning today: These are just some quick edits on my Surface. When I get home I'll spend some more time with the few hundred photos I've taken today and yesterday.

Two from last night, near the Hermosa Beach Pier:

The Boston Globe thinks it's time to do away with the TSA: Let’s face it: The Transportation Security Administration, which annually costs taxpayers more than $7 billion, should never have been created. The responsibility for airport security should never have been federalized, let alone entrusted to a bloated, inflexible workforce. Former TSA administrator Kip Hawley calls it “a national embarrassment that our airport security system remains so hopelessly bureaucratic” and warns that “the relationship...

Cooling my heels (just what does that cliche mean, anyway?) at JFK. I miss New York. I don't want to live here again, but I do like visiting. I mean, look: That might look a little better if I could get Lightroom to work on my Surface Pro. Time to reinstall it, again.

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...

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...

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...

Via James Fallows, the story of a marine hit by an IED; something to think about on this anniversary of another war's end: Some now call it the Forever War, and every day that name grows more appropriate. Soldiers are dying again in Iraq. President Obama extended the mission in Afghanistan through 2017 after the city of Kunduz fell to the Taliban in October. Leaked classified documents reveal a barely acknowledged drone war in Somalia and East Africa. Plus strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, direct action...