I came across a series of videos that are composed from a series of photographs taken using using time-lapse techniques and interesting lenses. I thought my photography nerd friends would especially like them.

Helpless from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

 
Bathtub II from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

I think they look like the models my brother used to make for his train set. Be sure to check out all the other videos by Keith Loutit and note that they’re available in HD for maximum viewing pleasure.

This evening as I was leaving the office I heard the person next door sneeze. I called out “bless you” loud enough that the sneezer should have been able to hear me. A few seconds later I heard a young woman reply “thank you.”

It made me feel good to give some kindness to a stranger, and even nicer to have them acknowledge it.

I upgraded lambie.org to the latest version of Wordpress today, which was 2.7 Release Candidate 2. Basically, that’s the last release before an official 2.7 package is put out to the public.

A few hours later I hear that 2.7 has been released. Ah well. It only took a few minutes to re-upgrade the software, and now I’m using 2.7. The automatic upgrade looks nice, but doesn’t work on our setup because we don’t allow FTP to our main hosting servers.

Personally, I prefer the admin interface to 2.5, but it’s not a bit issue.

Last night I received an automated email from Virgin Blue’s booking system telling me that they had altered our itinerary and we’d now be flying to Melbourne via Adelaide in December. What? No. There’s a reason why I wanted the 6:15AM direct flight - it means we don’t waste the day sitting in airports! Considering we’re only in the Eastern States for a few days, we can’t afford to be getting in at 5PM on our first day.

So I called Virgin Blue’s customer number, and before I could complain about the attempted switcheroo the lady cut me off and said “… and now they’ve got you going via Timbuktu and you want to change it. Let me see what I can do.”

She gave us back our seats on the original flight and made it sound like in the last 24 hours they’d dropped the flight and then reinstated it. Not likely. I checked the availability of flights last night and you could buy an expensive seat still on the flight we wanted. I think they were just trying to free up some seats on the more popular flight by shifting cheaper fares to alternative, less convenient times.

It’s a somewhat sensible plan, when all of your seats are economy class, yet passengers are paying fares ranging from around $250 all the way up to $849. Our flight currently shows that there’s no $579 or $709 seats available on our plane (which together with with $849 seat are the premium economy choices). We paid about $300 a ticket, so if they move us off the flight onto a less popular option then they can sell our seats as $709 options. Bingo, a cool $800, literally for nothing.

Well it’s not really nothing, because they pissed us off. You can’t really afford to do that to customers, if you want them to still be customers. I bet that there’s a lot of people who would feel intimidated to call customer support and demand their seats back. I wonder if you can even do that, or if Virgin Blue are legally entitled to move you around at their whim. If it hadn’t been a 3 minute call with no obstacles I’d have been annoyed, but because I think I understand their motives and intention, and it doesn’t impact me in the end, I’m not bothered. I even respect their cheekyness, just a little.