Events

The Cranky Flier blog noted American Airlines' changes to its frequent-flier program (which I also noted yesterday) but thinks they dropped the ball on it: Are you as unimpressed as I am? I get that there’s something to be said for conformity. It makes it easier for travelers to compare what they’ll get from each airline, but it also means that nobody’s program stands out. (Well, nobody except for Alaska Airlines, which is keeping its old style of program and will probably win even more fans.) The...

Senior Microsoft programmer Raymond Chen describes a feature in Windows 10 that is unusually useful: Windows 10 brings the Xbox Game DVR feature to the PC. The Game DVR feature lets you record yourself playing a video game, so you can share the recording with your friends. Suppose you have some program that you want to record, say for a bug report or for an instructional video. Just pretend it's a game: Put focus on the program you want to record. Press Win+G to open the Game Bar. If it asks whether you...

There was a bit of Karmic balancing today, if you believe in those things. Even though I got some really good news after lunch, I also experienced something that broke a little piece off my heart before lunch. I've been freelancing from my home office for a while, so Parker has had a lot of walks. And this morning, after my coffee, he got a good 40-minute, 4½ km walk around the neighborhood. No worries there; he loves his walks. Except, just after lunch, I wanted to go outside again, and he didn't. This...

I just got some great news that, unfortunately, is embargoed possibly for a couple of weeks. Stay tuned.

American Airlines is changing the way it apportions miles and awards tickets. As predicted, they're moving to a dollars-per-mile system that rewards travelers for spending more money on the airline. Instead of just needing 50,000 miles to get to Platinum, you also need 6,000 elite qualifying dollars. They're also adding a new level, Platinum Pro, at 75,000 elite-qualifying miles, which would have helped me more than once. In all, the system seems fair, and pretty much everyone new it was coming. I'll be...

Richard North Patterson, writing in Huffington Post, outlines one more time how Donald Trump's obvious personality disorder disqualifies him from political office of any kind: There is only one organizing principle which makes sense of his wildly oscillating utterances and behavior - the clinical definition of narcissistic personality disorder. The Mayo Clinic describes it as “a mental disorder in which people have an inflated sense of their own importance, a deep need for admiration and a lack of...

As the election gets closer, we need to remember that climate change is real and will affect hundreds of millions of people in the next few decades—despite what one of the candidates seems to think. Here's an article from The New Yorker back in December that puts the issue in stark relief: To cope with its recurrent flooding, Miami Beach has already spent something like a hundred million dollars. It is planning on spending several hundred million more. Such efforts are, in [University of Miami's...

Wow. For the first time since August 2014, I just saw the Cubs win a baseball game at Wrigley. Astounding. And with back-to-back home runs in the 5th. I can report they still play "Go Cubs Go!"

Chicago historian John R. Schmidt frequently has "Then and Now" features where he shows a part of the city as it appeared when he was a kid against how it appears now. I just found a trove of historical photos produced by the Illinois Dept. of Transportation, including a few dozen from my neighborhood, so I can play the same game. Here's the intersection of Sheridan, Broadway, and Montrose, looking west down Montrose, from March 1936, more than 80 years ago: Here's this past Tuesday: Though some of the...

Pilot Patrick Smith outlines, one more time, a number of sensible ways to shorten airport security lines while providing better security overall: As I’ve argued for years, there are two fundamental flaws in our approach. First is the idea that every single person who flies, from infant children to elderly folks in wheelchairs, is seen as a potential terrorist of equal threat. Second, and and even more maddening, is the immense amount of time we spend rifling through people’s bags in the hunt for...