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Is WolframAlpha going the way of cuil?

billy — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 04:26:45 +0000

I like wolframalpha and have used it several times. They had great buzz going, but it looks like it didn’t stick.

jetBlue’s award system is broken #jetBlows

billy — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 23:15:16 +0000

I think of jetBlue as a company with new comfy planes, no first class, plenty of leg room and nice little TVs. I love flying with them and was excited when they joined with American Express to offer a jetBlue card. I’ve been using the card for the last few years, earning rewards flights.

The only problem is the award system was masterminded by a supervillain. And it’s all in the fine print.

1. Points don’t expire*.

They sure don’t. But your earned rewards do if you don’t book them. They expire after a year. JetBlue’s response to this is simply, “You don’t have to fly within the year, you just have to book the flight”. I wonder how many PR execs it took to come up with that one. That’s a very nice way of saying, “we’ll give you an extra 6 months”.

2. You’re second class on a classless jet.

Unlike most other airline mile programs out there, you can only use your earned rewards for designated seats on each flight. The number of reward seats given to each flight is a mystery. JetBlue only guarantees that there is at least one (and maybe more will open up). However, on popular flights or times, that’s unlikely.

What this means is that a flight that still has open seats cannot be booked with your earned reward (which took you around $20,000 spent to earn). Right now, I am trying to book a flight 6 months in advance and all direct reward seats are taken (see below).

When you earn miles on other airlines, you use them for the same exact seats that other people buy. They are treated like cash and truly make you feel like you earned something.

3. Customer service doesn’t like it either

Customer service with jetBlue didn’t budge for me when I tried to get on a flight with my reward. Instead, they said:

Why don’t you just leave the day before and come back the day after (Work usually doesn’t allow me to leave on a Thursday and come back on a Monday)
You can book it now and pay all types of fees to change the date. My free flight isn’t so free anymore.
And finally, acceptance. They know it sucks and say it’s going to change soon. But my rewards are expiring now and no other information is given.

4. Compromise

You can obviously still use your reward, but it takes compromise. You need to either change your dates, go at weird hours or take unnecessary connections to keep the flight free.

And to think, I get all this by paying an annual fee of $40. Goodbye jetBlue card.

5. Examples

These screenshots taken today are very familiar to any jetBlue’er.

I am trying to book a flight in December (6 months ahead of time and am still facing problems).

Let’s just try a random friday well in the future. Result: Either go early, or do silly connections.

Las Vegas in 2 months (not labor day weekend). Only if you want to arrive at midnight or have a layover in boston.

It’s the same thing over and over again. If the date is within a month, good luck! You usually aren’t offered any flight.

My V Mez-Itz

billy — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 20:53:22 +0000

I was asked to customize a Mez-Itz for Comic-Con and decided to give him a Guy Fawkes mask. Creating the miniaturized mask was a bit more involved than I had anticipated — involving clay, silicone molds, plaster, and paints.

He’s all done now and he decided to show me around New York a bit.

Here we are tresspassing (although the sign isn’t legible)

I told him not to do it, but he had his reasons:

We got a ticket, which he promptly ripped up:

And of course, we needed some cash, so he held up a bank:

Adapters

billy — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 19:13:32 +0000

Phones aren’t the only things getting smaller — here are my adapters from an ipod, original iphone and the new iphone 3GS

Next week on LOST

billy — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 03:49:49 +0000

chartbeat is in beta

billy — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 06:26:57 +0000

I haven’t talked much about my newest website, chartbeat.com

We’ve had around 50 sites helping us with an alpha test the last few months and we’re finally ready to open up the site for anyone to try.

chartbeat is the heartbeat of your website. It shows you real-time analytics of how many people are on your site right now, how they got there, how long they’ve been there, and some interesting metrics like if they’re reading, writing or idle.

On top of that, there’s a beefed up alert system that alerts you on traffic spikes, site downtime, and page load time (both user and server seen).

Go check it out and tell me what you think — chartbeat.com

Organic Fail

billy — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 19:14:53 +0000

Seen at Chipotle. The other 75% are sprayed with radioactive pesticides.

Pigeons stuck in an infinite loop

billy — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 17:19:44 +0000

was watching this weirdness from my window.

Time spent bitching about age

billy — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 01:04:30 +0000

Hack for free Starbucks wi-fi on your laptop (if you have an iPhone)

billy — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 02:58:27 +0000

If you have an iphone, you get complimentary access to any AT&T wi-fi hotspot. These hotspots are in several chains, including Starbucks.

The catch is, you have to browse through your iphone. I personally find this silly. If I have an iphone, and am paying for service, why does AT&T care whether I use my laptop or my iphone?

So I decided to figure out a way to use my laptop. The first idea was to simply fake my browser’s user agent to look like mobile safari. I really thought this would work, but no luck.

It turns out it’s even easier than I thought. You need to change your laptop’s MAC address to the same as your iphone and that’s it. Here’s how to do it (These steps are for OS X (and possibly linux). If you’re on Windows, it should be the same, but you need to find out how to change your MAC address online).

Go to Starbucks or an AT&T wi-fi hotspot

Open up mobile safari on your iphone and try to go to any webpage. You should be redirected to a page that asks for your phone number.

Don’t fill that out yet. You need to get your MAC address on your iphone first. AT&T is nice enough to put it in the URL of the page you’re on. Scroll through the URL until you see something like MacAddr=00%3a2A%3a12%3aA5%3aE2%3a12 (Make sure you grab this one, not NduMacAddr)

Write down that address somewhere, and change the %3a’s to colons. So it should look like: 00:2A:12:A5:E2:12 (6 hex couples)
Go through the AT&T wi-fi activation.

Now put in your phone number. It’ll then send you a free text message. Click the link in the text message and you should be able to connect to the attwifi from your iphone.
Boot up the lappy

First, turn off your Airport.

Now open up Terminal and type:

ifconfig

There should be a group of 6 or so lines that are indented from en0:

If you see this, but it says en1, that’s okay. Just change en0 in the next step to en1.

Copy down the MAC address of your laptop (It’s on the line that starts with ether).

Now type:

sudo ifconfig en0 lladdr 00:2A:12:A5:E2:12

Make sure to change the MAC address to the MAC address of your iphone. You’ll need to authenticate and then verify that your MAC address has changed by typing ifconfig again.
Turn on your Airport

Turn your airport back on and connect to attwifi. If you don’t see it listed, go to “Join Other Network” and type in attwifi.

That’s it! Try to go to a website now on your laptop.

And hey, if it worked — I accept tips :)

Some notes and disclaimers:

Do these steps at your own risk. AT&T most likely doesn’t endorse this and they may get angry. I’m not sure what their reaction will be (but I’ll probably find out soon).

You can reset your laptop MAC address by either restarting your computer or doing the step above with your laptop’s MAC address. There’s no harm, though, in keeping it set to your iphone’s address.