Frequent Traveller Nightmare Part 2: Traveller heal thyself

As I wrote, some people are not in a position to slow their travel. Sales people need to see customers, and indeed there is a different social dynamic that occurs in person versus remote. However.

If one visits a site like flyertalk.com, where one sees the sheer mountain of complaints against the airlines, there must clearly be a better way for many people. There was a person at my company, for instance, who would commute to his customer in New York from the middle of England – on a weekly basis. Apart from what that costs in terms of dollars to our company and greenhouse gas emissions, it costs the individual too. Why didn’t the management hire someone in the New York area to do the job? Why didn’t they insist that he use TelePresence?

Well, watch this space: video is really coming into its own. Cisco has led the way with TelePresence, and is doing its level best to bring people closer together through introduction of new products and services like ūmi. If video can be made cheap enough, it hopefully means an end to at least some routine business travel. Better placement of resources would mean an end to much more.

But beyond that, all of these people who complain about business travel on that web site look at it as if there is nothing they can do about it. Really- to read someone who travels over 100,000 miles a year and took the time to complain leads me to ask the question I asked myself when I found myself miserably traveling: why travel if it is so miserable? How about not traveling? Or at least not flying? Or at least reducing the amount you fly? You’ll make yourself happier, spend less money, and reduce carbon emissions.

Here’s one reason not to stop flying: sending a message to the airlines. They don’t care. Not only don’t they care, but they’ve learned how to make money no matter what passenger demand they have, through the ability to easily adjust their fleet size, furlough employees, and cancel flights. Load factor is the only thing they care about. You can’t affect it.

By the way, people might think I find the airline industry uninteresting. I don’t. I think it’s fascinating, how planes are designed, how they’ve learned to make money in the worst of times, and how they’ve consolidated themselves into an oligopoly. But I’ll watch from a distance as best I can, thank you very much.

Frequent Traveller Nightmare Part 1: Why I don’t travel (that much)

I used to love to take a trip on an airplane. And my airline of choice was United. I flew on them because their planes were clean, they got me to where I wanted to go most of the time without a plane change (particularly when I lived in San Francisco), and I could follow all of the air traffic fun on my headset, giving me something the remote possibility of learning something, while mindlessly staring out the window.

Almost a decade ago my love affair with flying ended, sometime after the love affair with my (now) wife began. We were often separated by hours of overnight flights and thousands of miles. It was also a time when United went bankrupt while their planes were over capacity. Since then, the Towers fell on 9/11 (I was in the UK at the time), and we’ve become so paranoid about our personal safety thanks to the Bush Era approach of leading from a position of fear that air travel has become a flying prison experience. And so I have largely stopped.

My own personal travel has dropped from a peek of 120,000 miles per year down to roughly 30,000. Yes, I still travel, but considerably less, and not often to America. There are more than a few reasons for this:

Flying is expensive, especially for families. I now have one.
Fuel surcharges that can be over 200% of the cost of the ticket (something that Continental misleads customers to believe it is entirely beyond their control).
Distance- this cuts both ways: I don’t need a plane (or even clothing) to see my wife and daughter, while my parents and American friends are much farther away, making the trip both more expensive and difficult.
Convenience- who wants to deal with the TSA? To be fair, here in Switzerland they really do make it as painless as possible. I have only ever once missed a flight here in Switzerland, when a train broke down, and the SBB actually rebooked me on the next flight before I arrived at the airport!
A long flight is hard on a child– any child. Parents need to think long and hard before putting their children– and other passengers– through that. We made that mistake by bringing our daughter on a long haul at the age of 4 months. When she was sick. Big mistake. Even though the doctor told us it was okay for her to fly (he was wrong) in order to get to Florida.
But beyond that, anyone in the back of a long haul has a miserable experience ahead of them from the moment they board. You can be assured that drinks on American airlines won’t be free, the movies will be lousy, and the food will be, if anything, worse than you remember.
Families have very few options to upgrade. When I’ve done so, it hasn’t been worth it. After all, what’s a comfortable chair if you can’t sleep because you need to attend to a child?

All of this boils down to the fact that the average flight to the U.S. costs us around $3,100. It’s about 1/3 that to elsewhere within Europe. Compare that with the $388 it used to cost me to go from San Francisco to the East Coast.

This leaves business travel. I have reduced that as well. A lot. Some people aren’t in a position to do so, I am, and I have. It has helped that my company now discourages travel where four years ago people would just as soon hop an airplane than pick up a phone. Now we have TelePresence, WebEx, and all sorts of other collaboration tools at our disposal. I applaud the change.

But even when I do travel, within Europe I prefer the train when it is feasible. I recently chose the train over the plane to get from Zürich to Maastricht. That turned out to take only about an hour longer without a plane than it would have taken with. But it cost quite a bit more. Within Switzerland I always use the train to Geneva. No reservations required, and it just works.

How to get a Time Capsule to actually work in IPv6 without wireless

I have an unusual home configuration, in that I have a routed network. If you don’t know what this means, stop reading now as you are wasting your time. While the Apple Time Capsule advertises IPv6 capability, getting it working is rather difficult. To start with, if you do not use the wireless capability of the device, the controls are really non-obvious. For another, the Time Capsule appears to ignore the default route capability in routing advertisements. Hence a manual configuration is required:

Time Capsule Configuration

Looking to the left, one must select “Router” from the IPv6 mode and not “Host” as one might logically expect. Then, because RAs are not being handled properly, one must manually enter the default route (the long way).

Finally, because you are supposed to be routing, you need to enter some address for the “LAN” side. My prefix is 2001:8a8:1006::/48. Note I’ve dedicated a bogus network ::8/64 to the effort. All of this allows me to do what should have happened automatically; not your typical Apple Plug-N-Play style, is it? For a company that claims to be IPv6 Ready, I’d say Apple still has a ways to go. Sadly, they’re better than most.

Pumpkin Pie: I’m a bit screwed

Thanksgiving is coming, and so here in Switzerland I felt like making a pumpkin pie today. Yes, it’s not actually Thanksgiving, but I could either celebrate it before or after, so I’m doing both. Here’s the thing about pumpkin pie: because it really is an American dish, some of the ingredients are really American. My favorite recipe is Libby’s, but my wife and daughter both were not thrilled. But it also has two other problems, one of which is difficult to avoid. Libby’s calls for condensed milk and canned pumpkin. There is absolutely nothing to be done about the canned pumpkin part. Anyone who knows anything knows that you just get a can of pumpkin for pumpkin pie, because quite frankly, we all have better things to do than to chop, bake, skin and mash a pumpkin, and probably the wrong pumpkin at that. The catch is that here in Switzerland, apparently they don’t, or they simply don’t eat pumpkin.

So that leaves the condensed milk. Some recipes call for it, and some call for cream cheese. This year I tried a recipe from the Joy of Baking, which merely calls for cream. It makes a very light pie, but the spice doesn’t bowl you over. Quite frankly I found it a bit meek. But this is precisely what, I think my wife and daughter liked. Also, this pie isn’t too sweet, which is something I like. This is a Martha Stewart recipe. Are they all so middle-of-the-road?

Anyway, Happy (early) Thanksgiving, America!

Microsoft Does Something Right?!?!

You know how when you install software, usually there’s a lengthy license that nobody ever reads? Don’t lie- you don’t read it either. Apple and iPhones are the worst, where they suggest that you read something like 56 pages of license on your iPhone. YEAH RIGHT.

Well, I just installed an update for Mac Office 2011 and here is the entire license:

MICROSOFT OFFICE FOR MAC 2011
PLEASE NOTE: Microsoft Corporation (or based on where you live, one of its affiliates) licenses this supplement to you. You may use it with each validly licensed copy of Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 software (for which this supplement is applicable) (the “software”). You may not use the supplement if you do not have a license for the software. The license terms for the software apply to your use of this supplement. Microsoft provides support services for the supplement as described at www.support.microsoft.com/common/international.aspx.

That’s it. And it’s simple to read, and its meaning is clear. Nice, eh? Of course I’m sure the main agreement is still very long (I don’t know– I didn’t have to agree to that since this is a corporate copy, lawyers probably did).