Thursday, August 23, 2007
Sunday, June 17, 2007
HDTV
After stumbling across Pirates of the Caribbean last night on ABC, I realized that ABC is one of the channels I get an over the air HDTV signal from, so I switched from my cable input to that. And I have to say, HDTV looks a lot better.
As an aside, I've also been rather impressed by the side-by-side comparisons of DVD versus BluRay at stores like Best Buy and Circuit City. But I'm planning to wait until there's a clear winner in the BluRay versus HD-DVD format war (or players that can handle both formats become cheap) before moving from DVD to a new format.
As an aside, I've also been rather impressed by the side-by-side comparisons of DVD versus BluRay at stores like Best Buy and Circuit City. But I'm planning to wait until there's a clear winner in the BluRay versus HD-DVD format war (or players that can handle both formats become cheap) before moving from DVD to a new format.
Tuesday, November 07, 2006
Done Voting? Good. Pay More for Gas.
Sigh.
Guess all those conspiracy theorists that were saying gas prices were down just for the elections were true. They're already going up.
Where's my hydrogen-hybrid RX-8?
Guess all those conspiracy theorists that were saying gas prices were down just for the elections were true. They're already going up.
Where's my hydrogen-hybrid RX-8?
Tap, tap, tap...
Yes, I voted today. Yes, we had electronic voting machines. Yes, they were Diebold. Yes, they had voter verified paper trails. Yes, I used it.
Seemed to work pretty well. I didn't have any problems with the machine not registering my vote correctly, so I guess my machine was properly calibrated. I also went after work, so if there had been any issues hopefully they got worked out. They also had paper ballots for those who needed to cast a provisional ballot and I suspect if I asked I could have gone that route. Which I would have if they didn't have the paper trail.
The only potential problem I saw was that the paper trail was pretty narrow, so some of the issue titles were cut off. In particular I think all the judge confirmations looked the same.
Seemed to work pretty well. I didn't have any problems with the machine not registering my vote correctly, so I guess my machine was properly calibrated. I also went after work, so if there had been any issues hopefully they got worked out. They also had paper ballots for those who needed to cast a provisional ballot and I suspect if I asked I could have gone that route. Which I would have if they didn't have the paper trail.
The only potential problem I saw was that the paper trail was pretty narrow, so some of the issue titles were cut off. In particular I think all the judge confirmations looked the same.
Thursday, October 19, 2006
Decisions, Decisions
Well, I was planning to vote to reelect Susan Davis, since she did vote against the Military Commissions Act (you know, the one that lets the President define what torture is), but then she went and supported a bill to prohibit joint-use at Miramar. I'm also not fond of the idea of the Republicans keeping control of the House.
I wonder what Davis' proposal is for an alternative solution to the airport. Does she really want to build an airport in Imperial County? Does she really want to dislocate many people in order to build a second runway at Lindbergh? Or does she prefer to keep the airport as is and watch Lindbergh get busier and busier, and hope that the problem just solves itself.
Which is wishful thinking, because it won't. We can't just demand airlines bring in larger planes, unless we want to alienate San Diego's largest airline, Southwest, which doesn't have anything bigger than it's current 737s. We can't rely on Orange County and LAX to relieve us, as they have their own capacity problems to deal with, and Ontario is no better alternative for us than it is for LAX.
I wonder what Davis' proposal is for an alternative solution to the airport. Does she really want to build an airport in Imperial County? Does she really want to dislocate many people in order to build a second runway at Lindbergh? Or does she prefer to keep the airport as is and watch Lindbergh get busier and busier, and hope that the problem just solves itself.
Which is wishful thinking, because it won't. We can't just demand airlines bring in larger planes, unless we want to alienate San Diego's largest airline, Southwest, which doesn't have anything bigger than it's current 737s. We can't rely on Orange County and LAX to relieve us, as they have their own capacity problems to deal with, and Ontario is no better alternative for us than it is for LAX.
Wednesday, September 20, 2006
Inter-Island Airfares
One cannot deny that the arrival of go! in Hawaii's inter-island market has lowered airfares. What there seems to be a lot of misconceptions about is just how high fares were before Go arrived.
Our tale starts in the good old days. The standard method of purchasing inter-island travel was the coupon. These were pre-paid vouchers that were sold primarily through travel agents. You bought the coupon, and then booked your reservation. Or not. If there was an open seat, you could just show up at the airport, hand the agent a coupon, and get on the plane. You could also book your reservation by calling the airline, then buy the coupon. It didn't matter. Hawaiian had them. Aloha had them. Island Air had them (but they were more expensive). Mahalo had them. Air Molokai had them. Coupon prices fluctuated; when there was more competition (such as Mahalo being in business), prices were down. Then they'd slowly go up. Different agencies sold them at different prices (Bankoh ATMs were usually a bit more expensive, but you couldn't beat the convenience of buying one at the Bankoh ATM in the Honolulu airport on your way from your flight from the mainland to your inter-island flight. I did that once.)
As you can imagine, yield-management, the practice of controlling price and inventory so as flights get fuller, prices go up, was basically impossible.
So what happened?
The same thing that wrecked everything else in the airline industry. 9/11.
Coupons went away. In its place came yield-managed e-tickets. Actually, they had yield-managed fares for inter-island flights before, the difference was that people who knew about them went the coupon route.
For the most part, the fares were a bit higher than what coupons left off at. But not always. But what really matters here is how it forced a changed in the way island residents had to travel. Instead of being able to get on the flight for a relatively fixed price, last minute travelers would generally end up paying more, because the more popular flights would have long sold out their lower fares. To get the lower fares, it became necessary to plan ahead and/or settle for a less desirable flight time. Which is how it works everywhere else in the country. Even on Southwest. People paying $200 or more to fly on a round trip inter-island ticket didn't plan ahead or insisted on taking a more popular flight time.
All the arrival of Go did was cause the bottom end of the fare range to fall back into places it hasn't been... well, since Mahalo was around. Go still has a range of fares, though to be fair their fares top out lower than Hawaiian's or Aloha's. If you pick the more popular flight or don't plan ahead, you'll have to pay more.
If you want the $39 flight, you'll have to plan ahead and be flexible. It doesn't matter whether you're doing Las Vegas to Phoenix with Southwest or US Airways, or Honolulu to Kahului with Hawaiian or Go.
Our tale starts in the good old days. The standard method of purchasing inter-island travel was the coupon. These were pre-paid vouchers that were sold primarily through travel agents. You bought the coupon, and then booked your reservation. Or not. If there was an open seat, you could just show up at the airport, hand the agent a coupon, and get on the plane. You could also book your reservation by calling the airline, then buy the coupon. It didn't matter. Hawaiian had them. Aloha had them. Island Air had them (but they were more expensive). Mahalo had them. Air Molokai had them. Coupon prices fluctuated; when there was more competition (such as Mahalo being in business), prices were down. Then they'd slowly go up. Different agencies sold them at different prices (Bankoh ATMs were usually a bit more expensive, but you couldn't beat the convenience of buying one at the Bankoh ATM in the Honolulu airport on your way from your flight from the mainland to your inter-island flight. I did that once.)
As you can imagine, yield-management, the practice of controlling price and inventory so as flights get fuller, prices go up, was basically impossible.
So what happened?
The same thing that wrecked everything else in the airline industry. 9/11.
Coupons went away. In its place came yield-managed e-tickets. Actually, they had yield-managed fares for inter-island flights before, the difference was that people who knew about them went the coupon route.
For the most part, the fares were a bit higher than what coupons left off at. But not always. But what really matters here is how it forced a changed in the way island residents had to travel. Instead of being able to get on the flight for a relatively fixed price, last minute travelers would generally end up paying more, because the more popular flights would have long sold out their lower fares. To get the lower fares, it became necessary to plan ahead and/or settle for a less desirable flight time. Which is how it works everywhere else in the country. Even on Southwest. People paying $200 or more to fly on a round trip inter-island ticket didn't plan ahead or insisted on taking a more popular flight time.
All the arrival of Go did was cause the bottom end of the fare range to fall back into places it hasn't been... well, since Mahalo was around. Go still has a range of fares, though to be fair their fares top out lower than Hawaiian's or Aloha's. If you pick the more popular flight or don't plan ahead, you'll have to pay more.
If you want the $39 flight, you'll have to plan ahead and be flexible. It doesn't matter whether you're doing Las Vegas to Phoenix with Southwest or US Airways, or Honolulu to Kahului with Hawaiian or Go.
Thursday, August 31, 2006
Star Trek HD!
The rumors have been floating around this week, but you know it's confirmed when it's on StarTrek.com. In mid month, the original Star Trek will return to TV with new digital special effects. I've had thoughts now and then that this might be a neat thing to do, so I'm excited about it. It's going into syndication so I'll have to track down which local station will be airing it.
The TV Guide article has a photo of the new Enterprise.
The TV Guide article has a photo of the new Enterprise.
Friday, June 30, 2006
Intel-Native Office: The Sooner, the Better
Oh, and while I was at Best Buy I also stopped to briefly try out a MacBook. I was particularly interested in checking out the new keyboard, so when I walked up to it (a black one, for the record), I clicked on the first word processing application I saw in the dock: Word. Wow, it was slow to launch. I didn't time it, but I just tried it on my 2001-vintage, 500MHz G3 iBook and it brought up Word a lot quicker. I didn't try doing anything but opening a new document and typing a little, but just the launch time alone would have me wishing daily for an Intel-native version of Office.
And for the record, the MacBook's new keyboard didn't bother me, nor did the shiny screen.
And for the record, the MacBook's new keyboard didn't bother me, nor did the shiny screen.
Vista, First Impressions
Best Buy has a Seagate 120GB hard drive on sale for $50 -- with no rebate nonsense -- so I decided I'd pick one up to throw Vista on. Read on for some of my first impressions.
The installer was a bit lame. I booted off the DVD I'd burned and it installed ok. But when it came to reboot, it booted off the DVD again and wanted to start the install again. I'm not sure if that's just because of my particular PC's BIOS settings, but from when I've done XP installs, I seem to recall it managing to reboot to the hard drive without issues. They could at least add a message saying to remove the DVD before rebooting, since it isn't needed after reboot anyway.
My video card is weak (64MB GeForce4 MX 440) so I can only use the Vista Basic theme. So no Aero for me. Do get at least some of the new effects though. The pulsing blue default button reminds me a lot of Mac OS X. But I do think the new progress bar effect is pretty neat. In programs that support it correctly, anyway. Firefox doesn't. Window borders for non-maximized windows are too big and take up too much space.
The sideways folder icon is silly.
Since I have separate Vista and XP installations, it would be nice if Vista could still recognize and use the apps I have installed in my XP partition, so I don't have to reinstall stuff to use under Vista.
IE7 has tabs. Nice. Firefox was still the first program I downloaded and installed.
The installer was a bit lame. I booted off the DVD I'd burned and it installed ok. But when it came to reboot, it booted off the DVD again and wanted to start the install again. I'm not sure if that's just because of my particular PC's BIOS settings, but from when I've done XP installs, I seem to recall it managing to reboot to the hard drive without issues. They could at least add a message saying to remove the DVD before rebooting, since it isn't needed after reboot anyway.
My video card is weak (64MB GeForce4 MX 440) so I can only use the Vista Basic theme. So no Aero for me. Do get at least some of the new effects though. The pulsing blue default button reminds me a lot of Mac OS X. But I do think the new progress bar effect is pretty neat. In programs that support it correctly, anyway. Firefox doesn't. Window borders for non-maximized windows are too big and take up too much space.
The sideways folder icon is silly.
Since I have separate Vista and XP installations, it would be nice if Vista could still recognize and use the apps I have installed in my XP partition, so I don't have to reinstall stuff to use under Vista.
IE7 has tabs. Nice. Firefox was still the first program I downloaded and installed.
Wednesday, June 14, 2006
Windows Vista Is Too Big
I downloaded Windows Vista Beta 2 to install on the spare 6GB hard drive in my PC in order to check it out. It won't fit. I guess Vista will have to wait until I get around to buying a bigger spare hard drive, assuming it ever gets on the PC at all (it's already iffy with my low-end 64MB GeForce4 MX 440 graphics card).
I didn't figure that part out until I'd already wiped out the Ubuntu install on that disk. But that's not a big loss, since I still have Gentoo as my main Linux install on the machine, and the Ubuntu install had completed its purpose of my testing a Linux distribution to recommend besides Gentoo. I approve of Ubuntu, and the network manager in Dapper Drake looks like the next best thing to Mac OS X I've seen yet.
I didn't figure that part out until I'd already wiped out the Ubuntu install on that disk. But that's not a big loss, since I still have Gentoo as my main Linux install on the machine, and the Ubuntu install had completed its purpose of my testing a Linux distribution to recommend besides Gentoo. I approve of Ubuntu, and the network manager in Dapper Drake looks like the next best thing to Mac OS X I've seen yet.
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