The Real Cost of Cheap Airfare

Gifted? No, not many of us are. But dedicated and focused upon excellence, you bet! I have told my kids one thing many times since they were little children: “I don’t expect perfection, I expect excellence.” I expect 100 percent effort in all you do. This is the creed of every pilot I know.

That is a quote from the Freakonomics blog regarding airline pilots.  They have an excellent article regarding the public perception of airline pilots and how they make the difficult task of flying seem routine.  Unfortunately, economics and competition have forced airline prices down, and airlines (especially smaller regional carriers) have had to "settle" for lower pilot salaries, which means they're getting younger, less experienced pilots at the helm of their jets.  I'm 28 and have been flying for about a year and a half now.  I've flown a variety of aircraft and spent some time in a twin-engine Piper Seneca with my instructor.  That airplane is like a sardine can compared with the large jets flown by the carriers, and I had trouble keeping up with that airplane (that will improve with experience though).  Airline pilots have hundreds of hours or training, thousands of hours of experience, and are subject to an enormous amount of government regulation.  Someday I hope I can gain the experience necessary to join their ranks.  For now, all I can do is sit back and agree that yes, every pilot I know gives 110% to their flying, and that drive tends to carry over into other areas of their lives.  I'd like to think I do the same.

0 comments - Posted by Justin Scott at 11:41 AM - Categories:

The end for SORBS?

Could this be the end for SORBS, the anti-spam DNS black list that everyone loves to hate?  Personally, I hope so.  The clients that I work for are all reputable companies, but on a couple of occasions I've found myself attempting to navigate their removal process due to some well-meaning, but over-zealous, marketing person at one of the client companies getting trigger happy with their mailing list.  Once, a client sent an e-mail newsletter to people who had dropped business cards into a bowl at a networking event.  Someone complained, and POW, listed on SORBS.

Now usually, DNS blacklists have an automated removal system, and it's easy for an unintentional "spammer" to correct the problem and automatically be removed from the list within a day or two.  No problems.  Not so with SORBS.  First, their web site has historically been rather slow and generally unfriendly for anyone trying to check their status and request removal.  It seemed as though the process would never end with several pages of questions about this or that.  The kicker, though, was that in order to get removed you had to make a monetary donation to one of their approved charities (or one of your choice that could certify to them that you had made a donation).  This was their solution to the "spammers will just keep removing themselves from the list" problem.  The idea is to make it more difficult for actual spammers to keep getting off the hook, not to penalize the otherwise innocent small business who just didn't know better and sent a message to a couple hundred people and stopped immediately when they got a clue.  No, that's where they got it wrong.

Frankly, that wouldn't have been so bad if their volunteer administrators weren't so judgemental and inconsiderate (if the experience I've had with them is any indication).  The person I worked with treated us like we were the Spam King and assumed we were trying to find a way to "game" their system.  They operated with a "zero tolerance" attitude, and it really rubbed me the wrong way.

In short, I don't know why their hosting provider is pulling the plug, but I sinserely hope they do not continue to operate with the status quo.  If the owner can find a buyer, I hope the new management will overhaul their policies to find a way to continue to be effective, but also more friendly to those who just happen to find themselves in the line of fire on accident.  If you have had a better experience with SORBS, great, I'd love to hear about it, but if others were like mine, I doubt they will be long missed.  Other DNS black list services (such as the one operated by Spamhaus) do a fine job without the negative attitude that SORBS has brought to the table for so many years.  I think the Internet can do better.  Good luck!

0 comments - Posted by Justin Scott at 10:13 PM - Categories: Networking

Momentum is Building

We're just about completely moved into the new place.  We decided not to renew the lease on our apartment and are renting a house instead.  No more huffing and puffing up and down the stairs or walking half a mile to take the trash out.  The house is bigger, and we're saving about $200 per month in rent.  Granted, the money we spent getting the house ready means that we won't see any savings for about six months, but we're planning to stay here for a few years.  We're both sick of moving.

As we get everything in its place at the house, I actually have some time to sit down and work on projects.  I have four on the board at the moment, but who knows what that list will look like in six months.  First up will be kicking a friend's real estate web site into high gear.  We've been talking about it for what, nine months now?  We're both pretty busy people, but it's time to get focused and get it done.  Hopefully we can both get in gear and make some progress (dude, if you're reading this, please send me the compiled community information file I've asked you for like a dozen times now, thanks!).  Some amazing things are planned for this site, so I can't wait until we get to launch so I can announce it to everyone.

Once we're rocking the real estate community, I have a new side business planned.  In the spirit of DtDNS, it will be a fully automated platform that small businesses can use.  Yeah, that's vague.  Since this one is in the early, early planning stages, I don't want to put any real detail out there just yet because I don't want to get married to any ideas this early.  In any case, it won't be anything groundbreaking, but it will be useful for enough businesses, and cost me almost nothing to operate, that it should provide a nice little side stream of income to help pay for my flying.

After that, NeatFeeder is still on the board.  This is a relatively simple site, essentially an RSS to e-mail forwarding system.  There are other features that I'd like to add to that basic premise, but there is no obvious way to monetize the concept, so it hasn't been a high priority.  Frankly, I want the service for my own use.  My prototype was doing an OK job for a while, but there are a lot of little bugs that need to be worked out (not every RSS feed is created equally, or properly for that matter), but I just haven't had the time to pour into it.  So, for the moment I've migrated all of my feeds over to Google Reader.  It works ok, but I'd really, really much rather just have new entries show up in my e-mail box.  My whole universe pretty much revolves around my e-mail inbox, so that's where I want everything to gravitate to and end up.  I really don't like having to remember to go to a dozen different places every day to check on things.  The more things that I need to do that I can bring into my e-mail the better.  Unfortunately, forwarding entries to e-mail isn't something that Google Reader will do for me.  Drats!  I suppose that would kill their business model, and why other services, such as rssfwd, have come and gone without figuring out how to pay for the operational overhead.  It's still on my list though.  Perhaps as a niche paid service for those that really, really want it (like me, heck, I'd pay for it!).

The last one on the list is actually an open source project in ColdFusion.  I'm not going to reveal details now except to say that it's something that is available in many other programming languages, but a decent one is not available for ColdFusion.  There have been half-assed attempts, and some good efforts, but nothing truly solid.  It's time (well, it will be eventually) to put my skills to use and try my hand at filling a gaping hole in the ColdFusion community, and I'm planning to make it free, open source, and available to anyone who wants to use it.  Curious?  You'll just have to wait and see. :)

Until next time...

0 comments - Posted by Justin Scott at 12:32 AM - Categories: ColdFusion | Business Development

Trapped on the Ramp

0 comments - Posted by Justin Scott at 2:17 PM - Categories: Flight Training |

I'm engaged!

0 comments - Posted by Justin Scott at 8:56 PM - Categories:

Managing Expectations in a Digital Age

0 comments - Posted by Justin Scott at 7:44 PM - Categories:

Much to Celebrate

0 comments - Posted by Justin Scott at 7:19 PM - Categories: Misc. |