The Misery Of Flying

Enjoy commercial air travel? It's astonishing that we've taken an activity that should be wondrous each and every time we get to do it and make it so miserable.

The biggest problem is the asinine security theatre which keeps getting worse with no bottom in sight. Thank the USA for providing thought leadership here on the reactive, ineffective, outright imbecilic fronts. If that's not bad enough, airlines, airports, and passengers are all colluding to make the experience as bad as possible.

I get perverse pleasure now out of the dismay people experience coming into the brand new heathrow terminal 5. A significant percentage of deplaning happens onto buses. The pilots still tend to be apologetic about that. Should be embarrassing for BA. Even those who are spared the tedium of the buses just delay their dismay a few minutes, once it starts to sink in, after getting off the plane into a terminal building, they are still nowhere close to passport control and customs [five escalator rides and a train trip later....]

Do any airlines enforce carryon size regulations? Every flight I'm on there are more than a few people completely taking the piss with respect to "carry on" luggage. I can't fully blame passengers for being rude, as the airlines both tolerate and encourage this behavior. The encouragement comes from increasingly popular baggage fees. How stupid are airline executives? Appallingly so, based on this logic: all evidence is that baggage fees cause airlines to lose business overall, yet airlines that have them won't give them up because "baggage fee" revenue is up! This would be like a restaurant charging a fork-usage fee, losing half its custom, but declaring the policy a success because year-on-year fork-usage revenue increased from zero to positive.

Despite this, I still get a little thrill every time I get to board something as beautiful as a 747. But the glimpses of wonder from the fog of misery are ever briefer. Air travel industry, please wake up.

Ski Louise

Had a fantastic time skiing in Canada. First time with the kids there this year -- one snow-plough turning, the other learning to board. It might not seem to make much sense to go to Canada from the UK for a ski holiday, but at half-term school holidays the alps are absolutely packed, and incredibly expensive. Plus a bad snow year in Canada would be a good year in the alps. The all-around service level is much higher in Canada. And the quality of instruction is just amazing. Every instructor, from the kids to adults, was just great. Canada takes ski instruction very seriously, and it's reasonable to expect consistently high-quality and coherent tutoring anywhere you'll find certified instructors. That said, all of them we've met have been fun, laid-back, and great about tailoring style and pace to the individual, despite (almost secretly) being really rigorous in skill-building.


In previous trips, without the kids, we'd stayed in Banff and at Lake Louise, skiing Mt. Norquay, Sunshine, and Lake Louise, but liking Louise the best. This year, with the kids, we tried the Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise, a ginormahoosive hotel on Lake Louise proper, about a 7-minute drive from the ski area. Character-wise, it's not exactly my ideal place, but it worked out perfectly for the family trip. Within the hotel are a variety of restaurants and shops, including a 24-hr deli that was a real deli, not a convenience store. At 3am we'd bump into other jet-lagged parents getting some bagels & cream cheese. The pool opened at 5am. The buffet breakfast perfectly suited each of us. I skipped the french toast (regular, plus some made with flattened croissants), pancakes, cereals, muesli, pastries, and fruits and went for the variety of egg dishes, ham, tomatoes & cucumbers, smoked salmon, etc. [Smoked salmon with sliced peppers & capers, plus eggs every morning!] The restaurants included a saloon with lots of sports on TV & sofas, which was perfect for olympics-watching. Very nice hotel, all around.


The ski area is not on the same scale as the larger linked european areas, but is quite large and diverse. The "easiest way down" is marked from the top of each lift, plus there are really nice intermediate runs, plus a ton of in-bounds but off-piste bumps and steeps and wooded runs (depending on snow) to satisfy all levels of ability. I personally spent most of my time getting faster on piste.


There are no accomodations at the ski area itself, but there's a large day-lodge with several different dining options, and of course a ski shop, service place, rentals shop, ski school, and such. The only on-mountain dining is the Temple Lodge behind the main mountain, at the bottom of the "larch" area which was originally the only ski hill. It includes cafeteria-style, table-service, and outdoor grill areas. The food was all pretty good. Not like the best on-mountain alpine food, but not bad. I usually skipped lunch and just went with a great breakfast, skiing all day, then a hearty early dinner at the hotel.

Overall, wonderful time. Can't wait to go back.

Bad Government in Action: Grants for Electric Cars

London wants to reduce vehicle emissions. Fair enough. They've got a plan to install a large number of charging stations, which I'm all for. They've also got a plan to hand out grants to motorists to buy specific types of vehicles, which is idiotic. If they want to subsidize low emissions, regardless of whether I think that's a good use of public funds, they should do it solely based on the desired result. Instead they are dictating criteria for the cars: "Only battery electric, plug-in hybrids with emissions of less than 75 g/km, or hydrogen fuel cell cars will be eligible."

Why not just say any car with less than 75 g/km CO2 emissions qualifies? If that's your goal, why does it also have to be a specific type of car? [Don't dictate solutions!] Are they worried someone will build a car that runs on compressed carbon monoxide? A fabulous unintended side effect is that the public will end up subsidizing £87,000 pound electric roadsters. Another example: the guy who trades in his ancient transit van spewing out 350g/km of CO2 for a 91g VW Polo BlueMotion TDi gets nothing, whereas the guy who trades in his 91g VW PoloBlueMotion TDi for a 75g hybrid gets £5000.

Even with the grant, it will be much cheaper to buy a dirtier car than a pricier iMiev or other eligible electric vehicle. This is public grant money funnelled to, well, people like me, who already can afford £25,000 cars. It's idiotic and unconscionable.

Back to Blogging

Been slack! content on the way....

Here's something for which I have no explanation. Yes, Kirsten Dunst.

Nonstop Financial Shenanigans

Since so many clever people on wall street have yet retained their jobs, there will be no end of phenomenally bad ideas. You might assume they would be joking about this.

I Impress The Waiter

When a friend of mine moved here many years ago, a clerk at a bank asked him to spell his last name as she was filling out a form for him. Upon completion, she said, "brilliant." Which left him thinking that brits are easily impressed if being able to spell your own name is regarded as a brilliant achievement.

I thought of that Saturday night when, after placing my order, the waiter congratulated me with a "well done". Blimey, this meal negotiation process must be more difficult than I thought.

Does This Absolve Shoeless Joe?

Who's laughing at my smurfy hobbit footwear now? (Ok, everyone, but still....)

Business Travel

When I order crappy room service from the hotel I'm in, the bill to sign does not make a big deal of it, but upon careful review, I notice they charge 20% for "service" and a $3 "delivery" charge. I'm not sure what service is happening aside from the delivery. Even worse, they then leave a blank line for "tip" and total.

I really miss my family, my butcher, and double cream. Usually in that order.

HDTV? Looks really, really good. When I get home, I'll wonder what's wrong with my TV for a week, before I forget what HD looked like.

Likewise with shower pressure. I always think our shower is broken when I first get home.

The hotel laundry service charges more to wash my t-shirts than I paid for them.

I really miss the per diem model, as opposed to expense limits. The daily limit expense policy doesn't work well for me if I eat a lot one day, over the expense limit, and very little the next day, well under the expense limit. It would be easier to administer if the company could simply figure the average daily spend for the past year's worth of business trips, and specify a per diem slightly lower than that. This would keep spending in check and make everyone happier (and be easier to administer).

"returning no value to the world"

Uh-oh, more people are catching on. Wall Street might want to drop the righteous indignation and just lay low for a while. Don't worry, the jig is not up yet.

Carbs Getting Mention On Room Service Menu

Staying at a Marriott and I've noticed the room service menu is flagging various items as meeting some dietary criteria or other. The designations include "low carb", "high protein", "carb conscious", "low fat", and "low cholesterol", plus various combinations of those. It's actually good to see indications that low-carb is going mainstream. I'm not fully clear what these designations are supposed to mean. I like the sound of "carb conscious", but I can't figure out how it's different than "low carb". Grilled fish gets the "carb conscious" label, while grilled steak gets upgraded to "high protein - carb conscious". Steak & eggs gets only "high protein", not sure why it doesn't also qualify either for low carbness or carb consciousness, and I feel a bit bad for it, whereas a shrimp cocktail gets "low carb, low fat", which means it must also be high protein (unless it pulls off the trick usually reserved only for acaloric items of being low-everything). And some things -- e.g. some of the salads -- have no labels, despite surely being carb contentious or low protein or something.

I wish they'd define the terms then apply them to everything that fits each term, but it's still good to see.


P.S. The only term I find objectionable is "low cholesterol". It's been about 25 years since even one of the most fervent anti-cholesterol crusaders admitted that dietary cholesterol has nothing to do with serum cholesterol. Even if you believe that high serum cholesterol is bad for you, you should know that dietary cholesterol has SFA to do with serum cholesterol. Why do egg beaters still exist? Why are egg-white omelets legal? It seems to me the anti-fat brigade who have known that the cholesterol you eat has nothing to do with anything have not done anything to correct the common belief that it does matter, because they secretly wish it really did.

P.P.S. I had the steak & eggs for breakfast, and it was surprisingly good. It came with mushrooms cooked with tomatoes & bacon. After that, I went 12 hours without eating. The only objection to it was that I found the canary-yellow egg yolks a bit shocking & disconcerting.

"the Americans"

Flying out of Heathrow earlier today, to New York. Our departure was delayed by about 90 minutes because every single passenger was getting frisked before boarding, and every carryon was getting opened and searched. I asked why they were doing this and what all the fuss was about. To his credit, the frisker was very polite and apologetic when I asked (in the US you tend to get nothing but attitude and aggressive posturing if you ask questions like that). His response? "The Americans". He kind of sighed and looked truly regretful as he explained since the underpants bomber, the US is demanding that all passengers and carryons be searched prior to boarding. We are a very, very difficult country to like sometimes.

ATM Card Skimming

Looking at an example such as this, I wonder if a simple measure to make this more difficult would be to have each ATM show a photograph of itself, as it was installed/meant to be, on the display prior to card insertion, so you can compare vs. what you are actually looking at.