Blog*Spot Plus?

I'm considering upgrading to Blog*Spot Plus. Anyone out there who has done so, would you care to share your experiences with me? Thx.

Can you believe it? I miss Qantas!

My big trip to New York and the rest of the world is on a OneWorld Four Continents 'round-the-world' fare issued by Qantas back in Melbourne. It's amazing value: For $2600 Aussies (+ taxes), I got my stopover in New Zealand, my flight to New York, a sidetrip to San Francisco (next week! woo hoo!), and stopovers in London, Singapore, and Bali on the way home. I get to use any of the airlines in the OneWorld alliance, and I can change my ticket after it's been issued for only US$75.

When I originally bought the ticket, I was a little annoyed about the US$75 ticket re-issue fee, but I thought "fair enough, they like to make a little profit out of you if you change your mind later on". Well, after going through the process of changing my itinerary, I've decided to re-label that US$75 as an incompetence tax. I believe most of the incompetence tax should be attributable to American Airlines, although the evidence would suggest that a small portion may indeed need to be allocated to our beloved national airline, Qantas.

The facts:

• The American Airlines web site lists two ticket offices in Manhattan. One of them is a construction site (which I discovered yesterday) and the other is a ticket office for all the major airlines located on Park Ave (next to Grand Central Station) - hint to other travellers: this is the place to go for anything travel related.
  
• It appears that Qantas did not originally charge me for my U.S. departure tax or my Canadian departure tax. American Airlines discovered this today, so on top of the US$75 'incompetence tax', I had to pay US$55 in other airline/airport taxes.
  
• Presumably because they involve a variety of airlines, RTW tickets are still 20th century paper-based tickets. On a paper-based ticket there is a space labelled 'Fare Calculation' which shows all the routings, airlines, and taxes that are included in the price. Apparently, my ticket was so complicated, that they had trouble fitting the details of the fare calculation into the field. How much trouble? Well, for something that should have been as simple as hand over some money and press print, the whole process took 2 3/4 hours!!
  

Now this would have been fine if I was dealing with a pleasant Australian travel consultant, but here in the USA, airline employees seem to have been to anti customer service school or something. They're a whinging bunch, generally from the 'older generation', who never smile, and never show any care for the customer (even if it's an act). It was a painful experience.

But I have my ticket now - ten coupons in total, for flights taking me through to the end of January. Five more flights on American Airlines, and then I'm in the hands of British Airways, for a couple of sectors, before getting on a Qantas 737 in Singapore.

Damn it! I'm a Qantas Gold Frequent Flyer. I expect equivalent service from your so-called 'alliance' partners!!

Geek Review - Iomega ZIP 250 USB Powered drive

While living my nomadic MBA existence here in New York, I am running on a limited feature set of technology. No ADSL connection. No 2nd PC. No CD Burner. And no subwoofer ;-( In fact, all I have is my trusty IBM Thinkpad with DVD drive and my old Palm III (which I'm not actually using).

Realising that I would need a backup solution while 'on-the-road' I brought a few blank ZIP disks with me from Melbourne, and planned to buy a new external ZIP drive when I arrived in New York. (I still have one of the original 100Mb parallel port ZIP drives from around 1996 - it's really really slow, and the transformer is almost as big as the drive itself) So, during the first week or so I ventured into Staples (U.S. equivalent of Officeworks) looking for a ZIP drive that I could plug into my USB port.

The sales assistant convinced me to try the new 750Mb external ZIP drive which available for a promotional price of US$179 (included 3 blank 750Mb disks). (Technology is so cheap these days. I remember when it used to cost.....)

Alas, this device came with an American power adapter (not good for a nomadic Aussie) and could not write to 100Mb Zip disks (important for me as I have about 20 of them back home).

Back at Staples again the following week, I decided to read the fine print on the box, rather than trust the word of the sales assistent, and I picked up the Iomega ZIP 250 USB Powered drive for $129 (no free disks this time).

I have to tell you - if this product were an employee at a consulting firm, it would receive a rating of 'exceeded expectations'. No installation required. Plugged it into the USB port and XP recognised it straight away. No need to reboot my PC for it to work. Complete plug and play. It's sleek, yet funky at the same time. Powered via the USB port. It even works when the laptop itself is running on battery. And it came with some very handy backup/syncing software that runs quietly in the background.

Rating: 9.5 out of 10.

Oh the pain, the trauma, the challenge...

   Britney Spears Aims for a Second Act, as an Adult

[New York Times, 06 Oct 2002]

According to the editor-in-chief of Elle Girl magazine, American teenagers "are very anti-midriff right now". What will Britney do?

Certified MBA

What a scam! After spending US$60,000 on your MBA tuition, why not throw in another $450 and sit the Certified MBA test?

It's bad enough the GMAC have a monopoly on the standard MBA entrance exam, the GMAT, for which they charge around US$200. If the International Certification Institute succeed in convincing major MBA employers to require candidates to have this certification, I'll be really pissed.

FFS

I signed up for one of the many 'events in New York' email lists when I arrived here a few weeks ago. Yesterday, someone sent out a message to the list containing a virus. It happens occassionally, SpamCop picked it up an quarantined it on my machine, so that doesn't bother me too much. What really annoys me though is that the reply-to address for the email list is not an admin account, but is actually the list itself. Added to which, it let's anyone mail to the list.

So, after the virus was detected by various mail servers and clients around the world, several of them sent an autoreply to the reply-to address 'warning' the sender that there was a virus. Of course, all these warning messages were sent out to the entire list as well! Then, some of these list members start getting pissed off because not only have they received a virus, but they're also getting all of these warning messages. So what do they do? They reply to the original message asking to be removed from the list!! ... so now I'm receiving messages every couple of minutes or so from people requesting to be taken off the list.

Of course, no other options are provided for how to get off the list. There's no tagline on the messages, no link to a website to unsubscribe, nothing. Eventually, they (the list administrators) will figure it out, but as one of the list members said, they probably don't even know yet - they're probably lazing around reading the Sunday New York Times.

Week 5 Wrap-up

After an absolutely insane week of study last week culminating in four assignments due in two days, I've actually managed to take a step back from the rigours of the MBA and enjoy myself over the last couple of days. In the spirit of High Fidelity, one of the best movies of all time, here's this week's top five:

Top Five Memorable Moments of Week Five at Columbia:

1. Seeing a girl at the business school cafeteria with a 'number one' haircut and a headpiece made out of circuit boards - fantastic example of a way to deal with the excess capacity in the technology industry. (alas, I do not have a photo to share with you ;-(
   
2. Presenting a proposal (in jest) for Columbia Scholarships for Australian MBA students at a Presentation Skills Workshop on Friday. The theme of my presentation for closing the 'MBA Feasibility Gap.'
   
3. Enjoying all the free food and drink at the all-day inauguration celebration for Columbia University's new president on Thursday.
   
4. Despite number 3, realising the benefit of all the running I've been doing in New York, when I finally fitted into a pair of cool black jeans that I bought a couple of years ago (in anticipation that I'd fit into them ... one day).
   
5. Spending Friday night out in 'the Village' catching up with some friends, going to a comedy club, and enjoying a Sam Adams or three at the local watering holes.

Of course, it's back to the study today. I have to go to the library for a few hours and get up to speed on Black-Scholes and other aspects of the world of Options, Futures, and Warrants.

What is the deal with car hire rates in Manhattan?

It seems to cost about three times as much to hire a car in Manhattan as it does anywhere else in America. I know it's all about supply and demand, but this is ridiculous.

My solution: catch a train to Newark International Airport and hire a car from there.

One Hour Photo

It's been a while since I posted a movie review, and there's a few good reasons for that: (1) Columbia MBA students are very busy people; (2) most cinemas in New York do not offer a student concession; and (3) the typical price for seeing a movie in New York is roughly equivalent to $19 Australian (US$10). However, I recently discovered that Columbia Business School have a special deal with a local cinema chain which brings the price down to US$7, so on Saturday night I ventured out to Lincoln Square to see the movie One Hour Photo.

One Hour Photo is one of those movies that truly separates the cinema going public. It is R-rated, yet contains no sex, violence, or drug use. It is intended to be thought provoking - something the average cinema go-er is not usually up for on a Saturday night. If you look through the reviews on the IMDB site you'll find that most people have trouble "getting" this film. The whole point is that it's supposed to be creepy, not sensationalist. I don't want to give the plot away, but I will say that I think Robin Williams is absolutely brilliant in a completely non-comical role, and that I'll think twice about using the same photo shop for any extending period of time.

I give it an 8 out of 10, but it's highly likely you won't agree with me.

Hint to the outside world

When Adrian doesn't post to his blog for a few days he's either (a) really upset about something, or (b) so incredibly busy that the blog has to take a back foot. In this case, it was (b).