BoomFlag

Laralee went to Idaho for the past week to visit her mom. After she bought a ticket through Travelocity (our go-to source for airline tickets), she was surprised to learn at check-in time that she had to pay $25 for her carry-on bag. I know all of the airlines charge for checked bags these days– a jerk move, in my opinion– but I had never heard of carry-on bag fees.

After a bit of research we learned that it wasn’t something we could change. Apparently if we’d bought the ticket through the Frontier site instead of Travelocity, they would have generously waived the fee. But who knew? And why should it matter anyway, since they’re still getting their ticket fare?

Anyway, we coughed up the $25– grumbling the whole time– and she went to Idaho. Now she’s coming back to Denver, and she’s at the airport with a bag to check (something she’s bringing home from mom’s house). She learned that it costs $25 to check the bag at the airport, but if she checks in online it’s only $20. Huh?

So, fine, she called me so I could hop online and pay the stupid fee. I went through the online check-in process but didn’t see a place where I could choose the checked bag and pay for it. I was, however, warned that if I didn’t pay for a carry-on that I would be subject to some penalty if I tried to board the plane with a bag. Nice. I went through the check-in process and wasn’t able to choose a checked bag at all. Now she has to pay the extra five bucks because she’s doing it at the airport.

Yeah, yeah, it’s just five bucks. But I’m more upset about the principle of the thing. This is ridiculous. When I look online for flights, I don’t see the actual price I’ll be paying: now I have to do mental gymnastics to figure out whether it’ll be $50 or $100 more than my ticket price, just to bring a bag with me. It’s not like a lot of people travel with no bags at all. This is just another price-gouging money-making scheme by the airlines.

After this frustrating experience, I decided to look at Frontier’s site to figure out their crazy new fees. They have a page that lists all of the “optional service” fees, including anything to do with bags. There are fees for checked bags, which is pretty much standard now, but in the carry-on fees section it says it should be free. Apparently they don’t even have the right information on their own web site.

Further poking around on the internet found the a “worldwide baggage fee chart” which compares fees on all airlines. It looks like Frontier is the only one who charges for carry-on bags. Nice move, guys.

I used to prefer Frontier to other airlines (especially United!) because they tended to be less expensive, and the trips just seemed nicer. Well, as “nice” as the horror of air travel can be these days.

Frontier, with this latest stunt you just lost my business. I’m not interested in paying $50 for a silly little carry-on bag.

Well, this is very un-Colorado-like:

I feel like I moved to Seattle!

I’m in the market for an old Macbook Air for Kyra (to use for school). I found what seemed to be a pretty good price on eBay, until I looked at the fine print in the description:

Umm… it works “really well” but the screen is broken? Clearly this guy’s definition of “really well” is a little different than mine.

The first computer I bought cost $2,500. It was an Apple IIgs and it was awesome. The year? 1990.

A year later I sold that and bought an Intel-based PC. It screamed along with a 33MHz i386 processor and 4MB of memory. Two thousand clams.

Last night I read about the Cubox. It’s a cube two inches on a side, and it’s a full desktop-capable computer with HD video output, 3D graphics, networking, wireless and Bluetooth connectivity, USB outputs, a SATA connection for an external hard drive, yada yada. In short, it’s probably a thousand times more powerful than my first computer. The cost? $45.

Isn’t technological progress wonderful?

Today I’m getting a bunch of spam messages from someone who’s a very bad spammer. They apparently forgot to set up their “Robomail” software, because all I’m getting in the emails is a list of the variables they could use to construct their spammy goodness.

Come on, man, if you’re going to be a sleazy spammer, at least figure out how to use the dang software.

Ahh, Pandora ads. Check out the fine print for this one, which is apparently some kind of low-testosterone treatment that you apply to your armpit.

My favorite part is the sentence that begins If you expect another person to have direct skin-to-skin contact with your armpits…

Uhh… is that some kind of weird fetish I don’t know about?

Quote by a friend:

Amazon has everything.

Except cool neckties.

As someone who values a really sweet obnoxious necktie to accent an otherwise dull grey suit at church, I’m always looking for the next silk accessory that’s covered in paisley or bright flowers or (my favorite) tie-dye. I enjoy the Jerry Garcia ties that Kohl’s sells, and I wish I could go to Amazon and find something equally awesome. Alas, despite a gazillion ties available in the store, they tend to be pretty dull.

I don’t want to look like a banker.

I’ve always been fascinated by the transcendental number pi, so I thought it was really cool when the first 100,000,000,000 digits of pi were transformed into art via a random walk.

(Click for a larger version)

This image represents pi in base-four notation, and each subsequent digit determines the location of the next pixel. Zero means “move down”, one is right, two is up, and three is left. We start at the point marked start and proceed through a hundred billion digits, eventually coming to finish. Although this is hardly a rigorous mathematic proof of the randomness of pi’s digits, the fact that there’s no discernable pattern here is a pretty strong indicator that the digits are likely random.

Math as art is so cool.

I love lyrics like this on Pandora: