Month: June 2007

Harry Potter Spoiler Spreads

Gabriel, seeking the title of biggest spoil sport in the history of the world, explains his motivation: Yes, we did it. We did it by following the precious words of the great Pope Benedict XVI when he still was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. He explained why Harry Potter bring the youngs of our earth to Neo Paganism faith. So we make this spoiler to make reading of the upcoming book useless and boring.

this is awesome, including the motivation of the spoiler: “we make this spoiler to make reading of the upcoming book useless and boring.” agreed. “Harry Potter bring the youngs of our earth to Neo Paganism faith.” HUH?

Parochial Innovation

One of the most ridiculous assertions to come from the (angels on the panel) was that the only place in the world where you could innovate and raise capital (for innovation) is Northern California. I’m not even going to bother wasting my breath deconstructing this idiotic and parochial worldview

There is a certain irony in the lack of innovation in the financing of innovation, don’t you think?

Taxi dispatch

Boston cabs recently began sporting oblong boxes with simple LCD screens anchored on the dashboard next to the driver. Always curious, I asked: GPS? No. Instead, it’s something that has anecdotally greatly improved the drivers’ fare intake: A computerized dispatch system to replace the constant stream of radio announcements. Before, every cab could hear the available fares over the radio, so the first one there won and the others had to find someone else.

i bet having this system in nyc could reduce all these empty cabs. but then i am not hopeful. the taxi mafia is getting a free ride from the congestion charge one hears.

Great moments in airline confirmation codes

Back in the day… early 90’s, before the interwebs was really popular, I was a travel agent, using Sabre, which is/was (I’m not sure now) American Airlines’ reservation system. Those confirmation codes are more commonly known, in the industry, as record locators. Pretty much anyone on the system could retrieve anybody’s record by record locator. When I was bored, I would pull up random record locators, by typing in words of the correct length (I believe they were 6 or 8 chars long) Doing this, I found a number of records in which American Airlines employees would chat in the comments fields. I joined them and made some friends that way. The way it works is you would add some comments to the bottom of a record. Then you save the record, and others would add their comments.

bookmarked not for the funny haha, but the awesome story about using sabre as a BBS of sorts for bored travel agents