Among other (many) problems I had with United on this trip, the first leg of our flight was canceled the night before the flight. It wasn’t due to current/impending weather conditions since the weather was normal and all their other flights (read: every hour) to our connection airport (O’Hare) were on time. Their solution was to book us on a flight the following day as “all” other flights that day were already booked. Now had I have gone along with this, there would have been  few consequences. First, we would have lost one day of our vacation, I would have paid for an unused hotel room and car rental, and lastly, I/we might have wasted a vacation day (depending on the stringency of our workplaces).

When I called customer service they made no effort to compensate us in any way for losing a day of our trip (partial/full refund, upgraded seats, free snack-packs) or even to explain why the flight was canceled. If they had I might have be satiated or at least understood; but instead I got zilch. Rather than raising a fuss (or rather before) I made the customer service representative check all nearby airports and see if any other airport had flights with open seats. Luckily they were able to accommodate us. (Now not to interrupt myself, but I think “good customer” service would have been to have done this before bumping our flight to the next day and calling to ask if we’d be able to fly out of the alternate airport).

The alternate flight was out of Newark airport instead of La Guardia and at 6 AM instead of 9:30 AM. Herein lies my biggest problem with this situation. When I originally booked the tickets, I intentionally paid more to book a 9:30 AM flight instead of an earlier one, and out of La Guardia over the usually cheaper but less convenient Newark. Shouldn’t I be compensated for the fare difference?

If I had booked a suite in a hotel or a luxury rental car and been downgraded, I would have been refunded the difference. There wouldn’t have even been a question of it. So why is that not the case with airlines? If I call and berate someone at United Airlines I might be able to get some miles or a voucher or something out of it, but that really isn’t the point. I shouldn’t have to do anything. Their systems should look at the flight I booked and the flight I took, calculate the price difference based on when I purchased my ticket, and automatically credit me the difference. Instead, somehow at flight time all flights are considered equal. Why is this the case? In any other business this practice would be considered bait and switch.

To my dismay, when i finally installed it on my computer i wasn’t greeted with a drastically new OS that was going to change the way I interacted with my computer. It seemed to be pretty much the same. A transparency here, a shadow there, new icons, but more or less the same. Additionally, I was faced with compatibility issues with some of my most used apps (KeepPassX, Adium, and VMWare). This was definitely not what I had envisioned. Luckily a few Google searches and downloads fixed all my issues. Still, issues resolved, this was not the experience I had signed up for.

Fast forwarding 3 days, and having read more blog posts, played around with the functionality, my opinion has changed a bit. While this release isn’t the most amazing thing ever, it’s pretty solid in very subtle ways.

First and most importantly I think that the file-sharing/browsing interface is 1000 times better than before. Second, spotlight seems to be a lot faster than it used to be. Third, I like cover flow; I’m not sure how useful it really is, but I like it.

Here’s in my opinion the best (and most concise) blog posting talking about the noteworthy features of Leopard. And below the link, are my personal favorites:

Engadget: All about Leopard: gallery, apps, impressions

• Launching apps with Spotlight is tremendously easy, they come up instantly, and separately from the rest of the search results. It’ll still try searching the index for matching files, though.
• Use command + y (or just hit space) to Quick Look things. It’s like command + o (which simply opens files) except way faster.
• iChat: Screen sharing works really well. Fighting for the mouse is always fun, too.
• Network settings are much more simply laid out, especially when it comes to managing multiple connections and their settings. Looks like Apple realized that a lot of people have more than two network connections.
• ZOMG: the keyboard manager differentiates between different keyboards’ modifier keys. No longer do you need to swap the option and command keys every time you use an external PC keyboard. This alone is reason enough for us to switch.

In the previous ten minutes we had witnessed at least thirty cop cars – both marked and unmarked (not exaggerating), a mobile command center, three news vans, and four paramedics blaze by on Bleeker street behind us. We could see/hear two helicopters flying around above us as well. The lady made her proclamation just as a police van stopped at the intersection and closed off Bleeker street to all non-emergency vehicles.

For the rest of the meal (another forty minutes or so) at least one emergency vehicle of some sort would pass by every two or three minutes. One helicopter would complete it’s rotation about every five minutes while the other stayed hovering in one place.

I’m sure in the back of the minds of all of us sitting there at that restaurant (except perhaps that lady) was… “Was there a terrorist attack or something?”. I’ve never seen anywhere near that many emergency vehicles go by at the same time and direction like that. I kept refreshing the news sites on my phone in hopes to find out what was going on.

I was also text messaging with Son during all this and he too saw a swarm of cop cars going towards the village from where he was hanging out in the lower east side.

We later found out that one civilian and two auxiliary (volunteer/unarmed) police officers had been shot and killed by a guy with a semi-automatic handgun three blocks from where my mom and I were eating.

[...I remember being handed recruitment flyer's by the auxiliary police department when I first moved here. I would joke around with Angela about how "...even I could do it". Now I wonder... The point however is that these two auxiliary officers who died were just ordinary folks with regular day jobs trying to be involved in protecting their communities. (Not that it's any more okay for a real police officer to die either)... But they went into the situation without even having guns to protect themselves with...]

What I still can’t comprehend, and pisses me off to no avail is (I’m gonna rant now): Who the fuck gets pissed off at cops for responding to an emergency?! I mean it’s not even like a police van just pulled up and blocked an intersection for no reason (and they still have the right to do that!). The only thing you could hear and see were the sirens and their flashing red lights… Obviously something was going down. Just cuz her skank ass wasn’t affected by it – she somehow found it her right to be annoyed. Three blocks west and it coulda been her bitch-ass who got shot.

Here’s a link to the full article:

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/03/15/nyc.shootout/index.html
http://www.ny1.com/ny1/content/index.jsp?stid=1&aid=67691
http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/story?section=local&id=5123346#