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Today is a historic moment. One of my goals in life was to achieve life time Gold Status on American Airlines. If they have not already secretly done away with the program, then as of today I will retain my Gold Elite status on American for the lifetime of the Frequent Flyer Program. This is a rather discrete program that they do not document anywhere. My father reached lifetime Gold a few years ago. Once you reach this you no longer have to re-qualify for elite status (Gold is 25,000 miles flown a year).

I joined the program in 1998 and since then have racked up 50,000 miles each year in air miles, and the rest has been bonus miles, credit card, etc. Basically I got miles any way I could. I have been AA Platinum (50,000 miles flown a year) since 1998, which translates to about 10 transcontinental flights a year, or in my case usually 5 trancon, 1 trip to Europe/Asia/South America and a boat load of short hops form SFO to SEA on Alaska.

Anyway, the reason I care... if you are Gold/Plat etc on AA you can reserve exit row seats ahead of time (great for me since I am 6'3"), board early and checkin at biz/first. Even better is that you get stickers for upgrades (and can purchase upgrades in 500 mile blocks). I would say that I typically get upgraded on most flights via miles or stickers, and while AA Biz/First is nothing compared to international carriers, it still beats coach. Airline seats were not designed for people my height. Needless to say, you get addicted to getting cheap upgrades and it's hard to switch to any other airline where you don't get these perks (the genius of these elite programs).

Anyway, if all goes well I should be getting my new membership cards reflecting my lifetime status in a few weeks (or lets hope I do, cause if I don't that means American went and cancelled the program w/o telling anyone, which of course you don't have to do with a secret program).

I have the wonderful forum at FlyerTalk to thank for much of this. Over the years I have learned most of the frequent flyer tricks, promotions and the very existence of this program over there.

It's funny. It's been a few months since I wrote about the iRiver H320. If you all recall, I've been reviewing devices as I buy them and seeing how they stack up against the iPod. I reviewed the H320, the Rio Carbon, and this week will publish a review of the Creative Zen Micro (sorry it's taking me so long, but it takes me forever to get to these things).

Anyway, I couple of blogs have recently picked up on the review (Michael Gartenberg, Digital Media Thoughts). For the past few months I've been getting a steady stream of traffic from the MysticRiver forums. I had to shut down comments on the post because I was getting some really nasty comments from folks who really hate the iPod and thought that I was just out to slander the H320. Now I developed some tough skin from working Macworld shows over 5 years where you are facing quite a sensitive and critical group of mostly avid Mac users, but some of the feedback I just don't understand. A lot of the folks in that forum are hard core iPod haters. What is there to hate? It's a great device and it works. I had to delete a bunch of rather tasteless ones as well as shut off comments for that post. The only post I have ever done that for. I even got a rather long but pleasant multi page email from an H320 fan that extolled the virtues of the H320.

Michael sums it up nicely in his post:

"It's amazing that vendors STILL don't realize why the iPod is a success and how to compete against it. Even with a compelling feature set like support for the Janus DRM, if you screw up the basics, there's no way that users will ever even see the advanced stuff."

And that is the crux of it. I DON'T CARE if you device has a million buttons, can be hacked with some non supported firmware so I can plug my digital camera into it, or that it supports photos and video. If the thing can't play music better than an iPod, if it cannot build a catalog of music based on artist/genre/album, if the ONLY user interface to browse the collection of music is a freaking File Browser, then NO SOUP FOR YOU! Back to the store you go. Better luck next time.

Now I hear that the iRiver H10 (Walt Mossberg gave it a great review) is a far better product, has a decent user interface etc. However, I'm staying away from the iRiver products for a while. I think their current customer base is way too far on the techy side, and I'm not sure they "get it" when it comes to building the basics. Meanwhile I think Creative Gets it and love my Zen Micro.

Mike ditched Napster To Go for the same reasons I did. However, I ditched them a few months ago when they were still in beta and I was beta testing the Creative Portable Media Center. I found lots of problems with Napster's implementation and as such figured they would probably not fix them any time soon. Looks like their 1.0 of Napster To Go doesn't fix them.

Lets hope that MSN Music offers the subscription all you can eat service with a software user experience that does not suck.

MSN just keeps on cranking out goodness. Along with the Media Center folks, the Information Services folks collaborated to produce MSN Remote Record for Media Center 2005. It took my 5 min to download, install, add my wife's passport as an additional account, and record my first show. Simply awesome!!! [via Sean Alexander]

Now this was a really welcome development to read this morning. This is freaking awesome.

It's amazing that software viruses basically mimic the behavior of real medical viruses and our leanings and attempts to fight software spam etc can be used to help doctors and researches fight HIV.

I wonder if this kind of work will start to change public perception among those that think we are evil. I wonder if the pundits will have a way to spin this negatively. I hope people start to understand and appreciate the contributions of our Research Group.

I’m sitting on an Alaska Airlines flight up to Seattle right now and figure it’s a good time to put my two headphones to the test. I’ve owned both the QuietComfort I and II headphones for the past few years. Recently I purchased the Etymotic ER6’s and love them but I have not had a chance to test out Etymotic’s claims that they perform better than active noise canceling headphones (like the Bose). In short, they are right. The ER6’s kicked Bose but.

Even though the ER6’s do not produce any kind of active noise canceling I found them to reduce the airplane noise more than the Bose QuietComfort IIs when no music was playing. However, where they really excelled is when I turned on my tunes. The ER6’s produced a much cleaner sounds that was not distorted, amplified, or distracted from anything else. In fact with the volume set appropriately I completely forgot about the cabin noise. With the Bose I have always felt that there was some sort of background noise that I could hear.

The trick for me was really spending a few extra seconds to make sure that my ER6’s had a good snug fit in my ear. In the Etymotic manual they recommend yawning while inserting the earplugs. This actually works fairly well as it expands the ear canal enough to allow the earplugs to get a good tight fit. Additionally, after a few minutes of being in your ear, the snug fit seems to improve a bit.

The best part about all this? Well the ER6’s weigh 1 oz and fit in my pocket. The Bose headphones are huge, require batteries, and are very difficult to sleep with (which is what I tend to do on long flights).

Ever since I started using noise canceling headphones I’ve found that they SIGNIFICANTLY reduce the amount of stress on the body when flying. This is especially true for flights over 4 hours. When you arrive at your destination you don’t feel the wear from the drone of the engines.

Now, here is the thing. Bose has sold thousands of these headsets to people like myself because they flew on an American Airlines flight where they give out the headsets to Business and First Class passengers on International flights. I purchased my first headset when I returned from a 1999 trip to Japan. I was upgraded to first class and they gave me these headsets. Having used them the entire 9 hour flight, I almost cried when I had to return them. Since then I purchased the QuietComfort IIs and gave my wife the Is. You see a lot of frequent flyers bring on their own pairs of these headsets, and since I only fly American/Alaska I see them everywhere. Furthermore, Bose does a lot of advertising in all the in-seat magazines like Alaska’s and American’s. They even price the $300 headsets in installments of $30 a month with zero interest. I bet that they sell like hotcakes to frequent travelers.

The Etymotics earplugs are a better product. I wish they sold to more folks. The problem is: 1) it’s hard to notice people have them, so they aren’t going to sell themselves, 2) since they are earplugs, you can’t really hand them to a friend to try them out. That makes it rather difficult. I think they could improve their “reach” by:

1. Partnering with an OEM to include their headsets. Figure out a clever name and brand them as such. Call them noise canceling or whatever.
2. Give your users lots of extra earplugs. This will allow them to let their friends try them out.
3. Give you users little information cards to hand to their friends like Bose does. My QuietComfort II case includes 15 pre-printed information cards to hand to people who ask about the headphones. Clever.
4. Make your headphones look different. Put some bling bling on them or something. Get people to notice that they are not your normal headphones. Sony does a decent job of this. How about making the cable metal? What about a cool case for them? I notice Apple's White headphones, all they did was change the color.

Anyway, if you fly at all, spend the dough and get these puppies. If you were thinking about getting the QuietComfort or other kinds of Active Noise Canceling headphones think twice and try the ER6 or ER6i. However, if you are one of those people that does't like putting things in your ear, then maybe these aren't for you.

Since getting my Nikon D70 I have struggled with different image editing applications to process the RAW images. For a while I was using Nikon Capture 4.1, but was never satisfied with the application due to it's many bugs, quirks, and horrible user interface. While I owned Adobe Photoshop CS, I didn't use it much for RAW editing cause I wasn't really sure about what I was doing. A few weeks ago I picked up Real World Camera Raw by Bruce Fraser. I finally finished reading it this past weekend and learned a lot. Enough to ditch Nikon Capture for Photoshop to do all my RAW editing. I also started to use the File Browser in Photoshop CS to manage my "workflow" which the book touches on. Up till now my workflow was very ad-hoc. The book is definitely a must read if you deal with RAW images. If you don't own Photoshop, all the material is directly applicable to Photoshop Elements 3 which has the same RAW support as Photoshop CS.

note: if you happen to edit any Nikon RAW images using Nikon Capture (which will save any changes to the original RAW file), and that image is in portrait mode, you will suffer an unfortunate fate. It seems that Nikon capture really mucks with the Camera EXIF data, resetting the Exif Orientation values for the data and embedded images. As such when you view the images in the Photoshop File Browser they will not be rotated and you will need to manually rotate the images. The sad side affect of this is that the rotation setting is persisted only in the Browser Cache, and not in the image itself. As of yet I have not found any work around for this issue. I consider it a bug in Nikon Capture (and I doubt they will fix). Lesson learned. Editing the original images in Nikon Capture was a bad idea.

Thanks to David Allen, I just discovered The Week (amazon). This looks perfect for me. I don't have the time (nor do I care) to read Newsweek, Time, etc. Well actually I am too lazy. I get all my news from NPR every morning, but sometimes I would like a magazine to flip through. I'm looking forward to reading it.

We've released dasBlog 1.7.5016.2. This is a release to address almost every bug that was reported since releasing 1.7.5016.1. There is an important Cross Site Security Vulnerability fix in this release and it's recommended that everyone upgrade.

• Release Notes
• Version History
• Download

If you are running 1.7 already, the upgrade is a good old xcopy. It's important to note that there is a potential breaking change. If your homeTemplate.blogtemplate file contains the macro <%titleList%> you need to rename it to <%titleList()%>.

Enjoy! Thanks to all the folks that helped make this release happen (including everyone that tool the time to report bugs/problems).

I just got a notice today that my CitiBank Credit Card is going to start charging me a 3% fee for purchases made in foreign countries. Super Lamo. Guess I won't be using your services overseas. It's expensive enough going overseas, especially Europe, now that the dollar is worthless. I don't need even more money taken out of my pocket.

This week at work we had a small change to our cups. For the last 6 years I have been drinking from an orange cup. This week they were green .

 

I have to say, I've been incredibly impressed with the level of support and professionalism at SourceForge (where dasBlog is hosted). For the past few weeks I've been unable to send mail to any of our hosted mailing lists from my Hotmail account. I filed a support ticket and after some back and forth, Ari Gordon-Schlosberg, just sent me mail letting me know they implemented a work around on their end to fix the problem (and provided me with a great analysis of why this happened). This was really excellent and professional on their part.

SourceForge is really great.

The folks at ClearContext have posted a survey about e-mail usage. As you probably know, at this point I rely on ClearContext to help me with my email. When I returned to work from my excellent snowboarding trip I was greeted with > 300 unread messages in my inbox. This is for 2.5 business days. ClearContext allowed me to work through my messages from most important to least important. When all were unread I was able to focus on what I needed to. I'm down to 28 items right now.

They have also laid out their product plan. I'm really looking forward to some of the enhancements. It's not often I get excited about productivity software, and when Outlook upgrades come every 2-3 years, it's nice to have some innovation in how I deal with my email every so often . Anyway, filling out the survey will get you $5 off a license of the product as well as a chance to win a free copy. Seems win win to me!

I am off to Squaw Valley for 5 days of blissful boarding. If all goes well, Lora won't break her arm this year (ick!) and it won't dump 13 feet in two days rendering most of the mountain unusable. I've got a kewl new toy to try out. The Giro Nine.9 Helmet has a built in headphone system that can plug into a mobile phone and an MP3 device allowing you to listen to tunes, and answer phone calls w/o having to take off your gloves and fiddle with those device. Sweet.

I am not bringing my laptop, so there.

Like Josh, I was at Windows Anywhere for a day this week, and of course attended a great little Microsoft MVP Party where I got to finally meet Josh Einstein, and ran into Scoble, Buzz, Julia, Andy, and I met Jim Louderback! Of course I had to much to drink and paid for it the next day, er, make that the rest of the week. Buzz showed off his iPod Shuffle. I didn't realize how small those things are.