JL's Blog | JLsBlog.com

Tonight I visited one of my favorite airfare sites, airfarewatchdog.com to see what deals there are to be snagged from my home airport, MCI.  To my amazement there were dozens of $200 or less round trip fares.  

I have a few confessions to make... You see, I'm a planespotter.  Not only that but I'm addicted to finding and taking advantage of airfare steals. 

Rather than pick my next destination on my own I thought it might be fun to open it up to a vote. Below is a list of the 38 destinations as pulled from AFWD.

Which one would you choose for a planespotting trip in January, and why? My primary reason for this trip will be for plane photography although I suppose a bit of traditional tourism would do me good. I’m a bit leery of the cold, or having to stand outside all day in the snow. It’s "do-able" if you’ve got a great spot in mind but in January I’m thinking south is a plus. In any case please choose wisely.

Leave your vote in the comments with justification.  If I get, say, 50 *unique* replies by late evening November 16 I'll book the travel provided it's still available.

Our options are as follows:

Buffalo, NY (BUF)
Charlotte, NC (CLT)
Chicago, IL (MDW)
Chicago, IL (ORD)
Columbus, OH (CMH)
Dallas, TX (DFW)
|Daytona Beach, FL (DAB)
Denver, CO (DEN)
Detroit, MI (DTW)
Ft. Lauderdale, FL (FLL)
Greensboro, NC (GSO)
Harrisburg, PA (MDT)
Houston, TX (HOU)
Houston, TX (IAH)
Indianapolis, IN (IND)
Jacksonville, NC (OAJ)
Little Rock, AR (LIT)
Los Angeles, CA (LAX)
Louisville, KY (SDF)
Milwaukee, WI (MKE)
Nashville, TN (BNA)
New Orleans, LA (MSY)
Oklahoma City, OK (OKC)
Orlando, FL (MCO)
Panama City Beach, FL (ECP)
Phoenix, AZ (PHX)
Pittsburgh, PA (PIT)
Raleigh, NC (RDU)
Rochester, NY (ROC)
San Francisco, CA (SFO)
Sarasota, FL (SRQ)
Seattle, WA (SEA)
South Bend, IN (SBN)
St. Louis, MO (STL)
Tampa, FL (TPA)
Tulsa, OK (TUL)
Washington, D.C. (DCA)
Wilmington, NC (ILM)

I'm in no way associated with airfarewatchdog,com, although I really do love their service.

Say, while you are here, do you follow me on twitter? What about flickr?

JLJ

On September 3, 2010 Airbus opened a Twitter account, @AirbusInTheUS, targeted at Americans.  From a business perspective it makes perfect sense for a foreign-owned and operated company to establish a social presence in the world’s largest economy. Such an account is a great opportunity to tout the value that they add to the American economy which, in looking at their Twitter bio is exactly what they had planned to do.  For that I applaud them. 

When I first heard about the Twitter account I was quick to follow and I can proudly say I was their 210^th follower.  Still, I felt a bit off for following the account.  You see, I’m a HUGE fan of Boeing and I also have strong opinions about products sourced domestically and/or from domestic companies wherever possible.  None-the-less, I expected the “off-ness” of it all would quickly fade once they started with the typical sterilized “feel-good” corporate tweets that one can come to expect from a large company.  And that is likely what would have happened, had Airbus chosen an appropriate individual to man their Twitter account. That however was not the case.

The eighth tweet from the @AirbusInTheUS account read:

“On day WorldTradeOrg. reports on billions of $ in Boeing subsidies, Boeing tries 2 divert attn. 2 Airbus case. Nice try. http://ow.ly/2EzfY”.

Wow! I thought to myself.  It didn’t take long for them to go negative.  The post came off to me as flippant and overly aggressive.  A lapse in better judgment, I assumed.  After all, we all make mistakes.  Yet to my amazement, later that day they tweeted another, then retweeted another.  All three were direct attacks on their largest competitor, US-based Boeing.

I cannot speak to or comment on the validity of the articles linked, and whether or not they are valid really is not the point.  My point is simply this: It is unwise to open a “feel-good” account directed at the citizens of the US and attack one of its largest and most respected companies.  Furthermore, corporate accounts should sparsely be used for negative attacks on the competition. Prudence dictates public-facing corporate communications should generally be positive, that goes double for social media.

Perhaps someone should send the person behind @AirbusInTheUS back to Social Media 101.  As a matter of fact, I believe it would be in their best interests.  Or, even better, maybe they can take a page from @boeingcorporate or @fly_cessna and stick to news, product updates and other non-aggressive content.   We have enough negativity without a foreign company partaking in the vilification of their largest competitor, an employer of 158,000 Americans and major contributor to our economy.

One might assume that such a poorly managed twitter account would be satirical in nature, or perhaps manned by a rogue employee.  After all, the account isn’t verified.  Sadly, there is a link to the twitter account from the Airbus in the U.S. website.  Twitter users have a hashtag for occurrences like this… #FAIL!

Shout-out to @sporkening and @supertoy for lending their eyes on my initial drafts. 

-- JL Johnson @user47

With my return to school just around the corner I started to dread the thought of lugging around multiple thick, heavy textbooks. “I need a kindle”, I thought to myself, “e-Books will soon take over”.  With the proliferation of e-readers and the pending demise of print media it seemed to me that indeed, we finally were at a turning point, and why not? Print books had changed little since their modernization with the invention of the printing press nearly 600 years ago. 

So, I set out to do my research, something I always do before buying whatever new gadget or gizmo has my eye.  Since I was nearly positive that I wanted a Kindle DX I didn’t anticipate spending much time looking at the competition.  Yet, for some reason I felt obligated to at least consider the shiny new iPad, which by the way was on my “I want but don’t need” list.

My first observation was that while I wanted a Kindle DX, I was having a hard time finding Amazon promotional and demo material on it.  Sure, I could visit YouTube for a review and demo, but why wouldn’t Amazon have this sort of documentation on their own site? Common sense would dictate that if you are selling an expensive product which is only available online, you ought to have plenty of videos showing everything the product is capable of doing.  Apple on the other hand has dozens of demonstration videos, walk-throughs and even B&M stores where you can experience the product firsthand and chat with an expert.

A major selling point for Kindle over iBooks is that you can take your books, notes and highlights with you from one device to another while syncing all of your data in the Amazon cloud.  Additionally, Amazon has Kindle applications for PC, Mac, Android, BlackBerry and even iPhone and iPad, but more on that in just a moment…

With iBooks on iPad your books, notes and highlights are essentially stuck on an Apple product.  That is, unless you are willing to download messy third party converters, and potentially find yourself on the wrong end of the DMCA, your books and your work are trapped in iBooks.  As a student having the ability to quickly access, edit and copy my notes and highlights from my desktop, notebook or even the web is crucial when studying or writing papers. 

As I plunged deeper in my Kindle DX vs. iPad research I realized that I had a hard decision on my hands, one which would warrant notes to keep track of the positives and negatives of each candidate. Below is a crude chart I made to help guide my decision.  Bolded items were of particular importance to me.

Conclusion:

I chose both.  Apple’s iPad paired with the Kindle App truly is the best of both worlds. The iPad has an intuitive interface that just feels natural. Amazon did an excellent job of incorporating iPad’s touch capabilities in the Kindle app while managing to preserve all the positives of the Kindle experience.  The iPad battery life of around a day cannot begin to compete with Kindle’s battery life which is measured in weeks.  But still, the iPad battery will outlast even the most dedicated studier.

Not only did I get the best possible e-reader through combining two great technologies but I now have a “magic” product to play with when not preoccupied with academics.  The only negative here is I now have to practice self-restraint and moderation when playing with the myriad time-sink apps.

Link: List of free Amazon kindle reading apps.

I welcome your thoughts and comments.

We all know that mortgage backed securities and the resulting demand for mortgages, good, and bad, were at least partially to blame for the “Great Recession”.  However, through your enlightenment we also understand what an important role they play in the present day economy.  Because of this, I would like to offer a challenge… a daunting challenge only worthy of the Planet Money team and the potpourri of experts you have access to.

I believe most folks are strongly against earmarks, those nasty little spending additions slipped into legislation at the last minute.  All I know about earmarks is what I hear from the mainstream media.  I’ll admit that I have done very little research into the topic on my own. Not long ago, in 2008, I believe, I remember reading that President George W Bush signed an executive order in an attempt to limit Congressional earmarks but as far as I can tell his executive order failed or was ignored.