Sadly, my enthusiasm faded really quickly once we began our trip.

First, the “first class” cabin was really crappy. It was dirty, small, and not really well-appointed with niceties. Things that we’ve grown used to on other first class cabins (like Hawaiian Airlines): footrests, personal portable entertainment centers, LCD TVs. What United gave us: A somewhat larger seat and some footroom. That’s it.

So on the way to Kaua’i we were disappointed but figured “oh well”. At least we were on vacation and how we got there didn’t really matter too much.

On the way back though…. that’s how United really lost our business.

First off, in Kaua’i, there was no one at the United check-in counter. There was a line forming, but no one behind the counter. We waited about 20 minutes and then figured out we had to check-in at Aloha Airlines because the first part of our trip was run by Aloha (to Honolulu). This should’ve tipped us off that United was going to do their best to screw up our trip.

When we arrived in Honolulu (6:30PM), it took forever to find a flight board telling us where to go. We finally found one and our flight had the comment “See Agent”. We walked all the way across the airport to the designated gate and, of course, there wasn’t an agent at the gate. We waited there a while, an agent didn’t show up. There were other travelers waiting for an agent, but it seemed like they were waiting for information on another flight.

So I called United’s 800# and, I’m not kidding, I spent two hours on the phone. About one hour forty-five minutes of that time was on hold. They had no idea what was going on. First they tried to tell us to talk to the person at the gate – who didn’t exist. So they had us go to another gate. We were turned away by that agent, who said they couldn’t help us because we weren’t on their flight, and that we should go to another gate. We were bounced to four gates (three different gates) and all of them told us they couldn’t help us. Meanwhile I hadn’t hung up the phone because I couldn’t get any answers. In the end the person put me on hold for over 25 minutes and I just hung up. When I called back and realized I was talked to “Sandy” in India, I knew the 800# was a waste of time.

We finally did find out what happened to our flight. I was delayed >3 hours to 12:50AM. We were supposed to land around 9:18AM, San Diego time. I was pissed. My original plan had us back at 6AM, with plenty of time to pick up Toby at 10AM (Markim Pet Resort’s only Sunday morning pickup time). Even though it was close to midnight, I was able to get my dad to agree to go pick up Toby since we had little to no chance of getting there on time.

So we were stuck in a completely closed airport from 6:30PM to 1AM, when they started boarding. We actually didn’t land until 10AM. And the crappy first class cabin and the delays solidified our resolve to never fly United Airlines again.

United Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

Technorati Tags: airline review, flight delays, United Airlines

What is it?

Amazon S3 (Super Simple Storage) is basically a pretty cheap ($0.15/GB at the time of this writing) storage cloud that anyone can use. Well, anyone with an Amazon account. So, basically everyone.

How do I work with S3?
You have a lot of options of how to interact with S3:

• You can mount it as a disk on a Mac, Linux, or Windows machine, which I found to be unreliable.
• Use s3fox in Firefox (or Flock) to transfer to/from S3, which also provided me mixed results, at best.
• Use jets3t, which includes a GUI, across any Java-capable platform to transfer files, which worked the best for me. The only downside of this Java application is that it doesn’t integrate with any OS well, so drag and drop won’t work.

Update!! Oops, I was wrong! JetS3t does allow for drag-and-drop on my Mac. Even cooler!

• There’s also the command line s3cmd, which works pretty well, but there’s no progress indicator during file transfers.
• Some file transfer applications (like Panic’s Transmit) will let you transfer directly to S3, though I found them to be unreliable, too.

What can I do with it?

Store files, duh! Seriously, though, you can do a lot. You can share files with specific people, groups, or the public using normal URLs. You can create Torrents of your files to share on BitTorrent. jets3t helps you do all these functions in the UI.

Why I like it!

Well, I host quite a few files (many offsite backups), and when looking for a webhost, I’m always looking for lots of storage, which is generally expensive. The beauty of S3 is that I can store a lot of data up there, and I’m only charged for the storage ($0.15/GB) and transfer ($0.18/GB download, $0.10/GB upload) monthly.

So let’s suppose I upload 20GB my first month ( (20GB x $.15) + (20GB x $.1810) = $6.60$5.00 ).

Then the next month I update a few files, let’s say 1GB’s worth. And let’s say I also pull some files down, let’s say 5GB. So, ( (21GB x $.15) + (5GB x $.18) + (1GB x $.10) = $4.05$4.15 ). And all my files are still available.

Best of all, S3 provides a pretty damn fast connection. And since you can share files privately or publicly using standard URLs, you can link to them directly from webpages or use S3 for fast image hosting.

Bonus! S3 Mac App!

So, as I mentioned above, I like jets3t. However, launching it from within a Terminal window is tedious. So I used Platypus to create a Mac app file, which you can run from anywhere on your Mac.

jets3t.app.zip

Amazon S3 Initial Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

jets3t Initial Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Update: I discovered the upload pricing for Amazon S3 is only $0.10/GB.  I also discovered an error in my math above.

Technorati Tags: Amazon S3, Cloud Computing, Cloud Storage, Remote Storage

I tried to watch a couple of shows, but I have to admit that I’m incredibly underwhelmed by the video quality. The stream is maybe 320×240, and even at that its blocky.

When I tried full screen, it looked horrible.

The video selection is pretty good. I just can’t bring myself to watch any of the shows, the quality is so bad.

On top of it all, of course you’re relegated to watching the shows on your monitor. There’s no way (yet) to stream the shows to your TV.

For now, stick to joox and The Pirate Bay. At least you’ll get decent video quality.

Initial Hulu Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

Technorati Tags: Hulu, streaming video, video on demand

It seems to offer many of the same features as Pageflakes that I mentioned previously.

Other first impressions: I like the tabbed Search widget on Netvibes. The email widget is nice. Pages within the widgets for feeds is a nice touch. The RSS reader is pleasant.

I can’t seem to share my portal (aka Pageflakes’ Pagecast), but I’m not sure I will be using that feature anyways.

Initial Netvibes Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

Technorati Tags: Netvibes, Pageflakes, portal, web clips

I sent over a MS Word doc and got back a perfect PDF representation within a few minutes. Not too shabby.

I realize there are a lot of free PDF conversion print drivers and applications out there. But why muck up my system when someone else can do it and I don’t have to worry about settings, system resources, all that stuff?

Cool.

FYI: It looks like there is an option to upload files larger than 10MB to have them converted, also. I didn’t try that option.

Koolwire Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

Technorati Tags: PDF, PDF Conversion

I ran across Pageflakes about a month ago and spent a few minutes playing with back then. As I started to think about it more, Yahoo!’s page isn’t really giving me that much, and its a bit of a pain to use. So I went back to Pageflakes today, and created my self a new portal.

There’s some cool stuff available on Pageflakes. Such as being able to Pagecast (basically, publicly post) your portal: I create my portal and I can share it so you can see what I’ve done, what I’m tracking, etc. And if I include a personalized application, such as Facebook, it’ll show you my profile info, as I choose to customize it. You get the stocks I’m tracking, the RSSs I’m watching, everything.

You can also create your own theme, modifying colors, background images, etc. You can also modify the CSS, which I haven’t played with much, yet.

The downside? It seems a little slow in Flock/Firefox. However, it was pretty snappy in Safari. I’ve noticed Mozilla-based browsers are memory hogs, and its probably related.

Have I found a new homepage? Maybe. This also has to compete with Flock‘s My World page, which is pretty neat-o, but not nearly as comprehensive.

More to come, I guess.

Link

Inital Pageflakes Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

Update 02/18/2008: I’ve abandoned Pageflakes for Netvibes. Read more here.

Updated Pageflakes Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Technorati Tags: Pageflakes, portal, Review, rss, Yahoo

• You change your mailing address for your bills to PayTrust’s secure processing address
• You can add your expected bills to PayTrust, or just wait for them to start telling you they received bills.
• If you haven’t pre-configured your bill to arrive at PayTrust, they will alert you of an unanticpated bill, and you can go in and setup a biller for the bill.
• If the bill is expected, they email you who the bill is from, how much it is, and when its due.
• You can pay the bill via PayTrust (direct debit from your bank account) or via another mechanism (I use Quicken‘s Bill Pay integration with Bank of America).
• If you want to see the bill, you can login to PayTrust and via your bill online. You can even download a PDF of the bill.

So far this has worked pretty well. I haven’t had any issues, and I haven’t lost any bills (that I know of).

What would I change?

• Its a bit disappointing that even though Intuit owns PayTrust and Quicken, there’s not any integration between them. I would love to see my PayTrust bills show up in Quicken and I could just pay them from my Quicken interface.
• The direct debit to make a payment gets taken out ~5 business days prior to when you want it to arrive at the biller. Bank of America doesn’t charge me till the date I want it to arrive there – even though they probably did send the money earlier. Bank of America treats it more like writing a check: it’s not really “arrived” until the other party has actually received the payment.
• The quality of the scan is somewhat poor. At home I was scanning ~600 dpi, it looks like the scans PayTrust makes are around 75-100 dpi. Its generally legible, but c’mon, space is cheap!

PayTrust Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Technorati Tags: Bill Pay, PayTrust, Quicken

As I was out there looking once again for the latest offerings of uPnP servers, I came across nullriver’s MediaLink (for PS3) and Connect360 (for the, well… you can guess).

I installed both on my mac (yeah, native apps!). They both quickly dipped into my iTunes and offered iPhoto integration (no integration offered for Aperture). They even let me pick which folders to share, presumably for videos.

I got them both configured, thinking I would give them both a go and see which worked best for me.

Well, as you can guess from the title, Connect360 is the clear winner, for many reasons:

• The PS3 interface sucks ass. There’s very little anyone can do about that, so there’s that.
• MediaLink let me traverse the shared folders on my mac, but none of the files actually showed up.
• Connect360 showed all my files, let me quickly sort through them, and let me fast forward, rewind, and pause my videos without an issue.
• While the XBox 360 UI is no gem, it’s usable – there I said it again. The PS3 really blows.
• It all worked with Connect360 on the first try.

Now, how much will I use this capability? I dunno. Now that I can play DivX files, maybe more often than previously expected. But it’s nice to know it’s there – and it’s easy enough to use.

I wonder if I’ll still need to get an Apple TV (take 2). Hmmmm…. probably… but for all the wrong reasons

I know it sounds trivial, but it’s huge.  Entering contacts in by hand pretty much limited me to the few critical contacts that I needed in the car.  Now they’re all there and I can pick and choose who to call.  (At least when I’m stopped, due to the stupid speed lock-out, which I have yet to disable)

• My Treo 750 actually synchronized with Exchange. The Blackberry doesn’t really synchronize… deleting an email on the desktop does not delete it on the phone. It’s not a true two-way sync. You have to Reconcile to get the server and phone in sync.
• It’s very easy to type on; easier than the Treo 650/750 or the Samsung Blackjack.
• The screen is extremely clear and crisp, pictures look great.
• Navigation is a pain for me – I’m used to a touch screen, not scrolling around to get to something.
• Even though it’s only EDGE and my Treo 750 and Blackjack were 3G, it doesn’t feel too slow (haven’t tried downloading media, though).

That’s all for now.

• Pros
  • I like that all the functionality is available online, anywhere you have access to a Flash 9 plugin.
  • It seems to be very well connected to banks, all of my banks and credit cards were easily found and it started getting transactions without any fuss.
  • I like the drag & drop of transactions to categories mvelopes.
  • Mobile access? Good idea!
• Cons
  • Though they claim to import Quicken data, they actually don’t. I tried to upload my file and it said the file was too large. I’ve been using Quicken for 5 years. My .QIF file is ~2MB. That’s not a very big file these days when Google gives away 3GB of space.
  • Even if I could’ve uploaded the file, it says the data won’t be used because Mvelopes “works differently”. You know how many categories I already want to use to track expenses??
  • Categorization is only two deep. So I can’t have ‘Pets – Medical – <Pet Name>’ as a hierarchy. Instead I have to create ‘Pets’, then ‘Cali – Medical’, ‘Toby – Medical’, ‘Jade – Medical’, ‘Sammy – Medical’, ‘Leo – Medical’.
  • Roll up expenses isn’t very easy, intuitive, or possible as far as I can tell.
  • No capability to keep track of your stock portfolio, stock options, or ESPP.
  • Any transfers, or payments, that end up with two actual transactions leave me with two transactions that I have no idea what to do with. I can’t classify the payment as a transfer to the credit card account, and I can’t classify the payment on my card as a payment from the bank. I wish I could explain this.
  • Can’t use Mvelopes to track tax data to import to TurboTax.
  • Can’t track assets, like our house.

Look, overall, Mvelopes it’s probably OK for the first time budgeter. But after using Quicken for so long, I can’t go back to this kind of basic functionality. I’m within my 30 day trial period, so I’ll be canceling my account. Oh, it sucks that you have to call to cancel your account – it’s an online application! Where’s the online account maintenance?