Making Ripples: post-corporate adventures in Floyd County Virginia

Airtran's business model helps their competition

Airtran's no-refund policy may make great business sense to them, but it makes the company seem like money-grubbing opportunists. It also opens the door for other airlines competing for low-fare business.

Air travel has changed drastically from the Seventies and we will never see linen napkins and silverware in Coach again. Today, flight experiences are much closer to the Greyhound Bus model.

In an era when most airlines are struggling to provide less service with fewer employees, it would seem good business to provide an incentives to buy tickets from your airline rather than from the competition.

Airtran competitors could offer more enlightened refund policies and charge more for the tickets. If well publicized by the competing airline, this can become a significant advantage.

Here is the current situation:

Option one: You buy your Airtran tickets months before the trip date and you have to cancel your trip 100 days before the flight. Airtran keeps the money for a year and you lose it if you don't fly with them in that time.

Option two: You buy a higher-priced ticket from a competitor that refunds tickets and you cancel 100 days before the flight. You get a refund.

If the ticket prices are 10% apart, what choices would you make?

For a revealing view of the current state of air travel from the passenger viewpoint, read SKYTRAX or my3cents.com.

Airtran seems to provide good customer flight experiences according to SKYTRAX, but not according to my3cents.com.

Reading the reports from passengers of other airlines seems to indicate that Airtran may be providing better service than some of its competition. This varies depending on what passenger reports you read.

What the passenger reports show is that passengers are increasingly vocal about their airline experiences, so an airline will do well to keep an eye on what is being said and take action to keep the customer experiences favorable.

Non-refundable airline tickets can be a really bad deal

I recently canceled some airline reservations for a trip that was many months away and found to my dismay that the tickets were nonrefundable! Did I ever feel stupid!

I had been holding reservations on American Airlines, which does refunds, and had switched to AirTran Airways to fly with a family group. This was a huge mistake on my part!

AirTran Airways has adopted the wonderfully profitable business strategy of making their coach tickets nonrefundable. Even if you cancel your reservations months before your scheduled flight, your tickets are nonrefundable.

Being the bighearted corporation that they are, the remaining balance will be placed in a credit file, which may be used for future bookings for up to one year from the date of the original booking. If you don't use it by then, you lose it.

They have already sold your original seat to someone else and then they get to keep the money. Doesn't that sound like a business we would all like to run? Getting something for nothing! Wow!

I could see a rationale for a cancellation charge, but this business model frankly smacks of really sharp business practice and let the customer be damned. The only recourse is for consumers to communicate how bad a deal this is and use other airlines whenever possible.

I can see nonrefundable tickets as a viable solution only for trips you are going to take in the next 30 days and you can afford to throw away the money if you change your mind.

When you book a trip many months in the future, there are so many things that can come to pass it makes little sense to buy a nonrefundable ticket.

Incidentally, my refundable tickets on American Airlines were only $60 more than the nonrefundable AirTran tickets. I saved $120 and it only cost me $855! What a "bargain"!

If you are considering flying with Airtran, just be aware that you will not get your money back if your trip is canceled.

You might want to choose a carrier like American that will accommodate you with a refund if you cancel the trip well in advance.

I would not recommend AirTran Airways.

Before you buy your modular home

You might want to read Andrew Gianino's book, The Modular Home. At $19.95 it should be one of the first things you should buy when considering building a new home.

I wish we has known about this book when we were buying our modular home because it provides the answers to so many questions we had. I feel we made the right decisions, but we had to find things out the hard way.

I want you to know I have not read the book. I am recommending that you buy it just from reading the chapter summaries!

Every one of the chapter summaries has data that I still have not learned even though we  built a modular home and I wrote articles about the entire process in this weblog.

This book came out six months before we ordered our modular home, but I just discovered it today through a Google ad on the side of a web page. If you are new to modular homes, the illustrations alone will blow you away.

This is a great read for a rainy day while you are planning your future home.

To get yourself in the mood, read this brief summary of Chapter 1 "Why Build Modular?" in The Modular Home, by Andrew Gianino, President of The Home Store.

Another poignant story from Michael Yon

Desires of the Human Heart

In a Baghdad neighborhood where residents have been subject to methodical slaughter, the 1-4 Cavalry from Fort Riley, Kansas has found an abandoned Christian college to be an island in the storm.

Michael captures the desolation and the toll of human life from the continuing civil war in words and photos that evoke the End of Days.

"Most of the families in the vicinity have fled. People are murdered nearby every day, and during just one of the days I was with 1-4 Cavalry, they reported finding three murder victims. The Iraqi police and our soldiers told me that murders are down since the security plan began, yet our people still found fourteen human bodies over the period of one week. The enemy kills entire families including small children."

"The people who could leave have mostly gone. Many of the wealthy and the educated have abandoned Iraq. The lights rarely come on here."

And yet Michael writes,

"And on these empty streets, a practiced eye regards the slivers of hope that are strewn among all the chards of broken glass."

Whatever the result from this war, we are incredibly indebted to Michael Yon and the others who bring us the ground-level view of soldiers dealing with a disintegrating civilization.

Civilizations have fallen into barbarism in past ages and we have evidently not learned enough to prevent this from happening again.

What will happen when the next shooter arrives?

My take on it is that failing to train students to defend themselves leaves them open to the kind of disaster that occurred at Virginia Tech and elsewhere.

From all the reports I have seen, only an elderly professor and a few students showed any resistance to the murderer. Perhaps the rest were waiting for someone in authority to show up and handle the situation.

Carry permits give trained people the authority to protect themselves, and perhaps you, in situations like Virginia Tech. Those who earn that authority can handle life-threatening situations better than those who wait passively until help arrives.

For those unwilling to get carry permits, a course in self-defense is strongly suggested.

You either become part of the solution or you become a victim. The Nanny State, where all authority and force reside in the government is not a viable solution.

There should be self-defense training for all students if concealed carry is prohibited on campus.

I have received several passionate responses on both sides of the concealed carry issue. I have followed numerous articles and found that both sides are prone to exaggeration and fail to link to authoritative sources.

For every horror story about a defense gone horribly wrong, there are others like this series about mass killers meeting armed resistance.

One of my anti-gun commenters provided this data:

Between 1987 and 1990, David McDowall found that guns were used in defense during a crime incident an average of 64,615 times annually.

I look at that same data and say if those people had not been armed, there would have been more than 258,000 injuries or homicides.

What I found is that anti-gun and pro-gun writers look at the same reports and draw vastly different conclusions.

I have found some unimpeachable sources of information about gun violence trends in England where it has been illegal to own any kind of handgun for several years and homeowners are regularly imprisoned for repelling burglars with violence.

I would like you to review these graphs and decide for yourself whether complete gun control as it is practiced in England and Wales has reduced gun-related crimes.

This first graph comes from a report titled Homicides, Firearm Offences and Intimate Violence 2005/2006 from the Home Office, which is the Government department responsible for internal affairs in England and Wales. (click to enlarge)  To see more, read past the jump:

Blogging at the Floyd Country Store

The Floyd Country Store is now open 2 days a week! Those of you who are still out in the 24/7 world may find that amusing, but our one-stoplight county still has a shortage of places to eat lunch, so an additional restaurant is great news, even if it's only open on Friday and Saturday.

The Floyd Country Store has a menu to die for if you are a connoisseur of simple country snacks and comfort food.  Since I am by nature a grazer rather than a serious trencherman, the food here hits the spot.

There are at least four free Wi-Fi hotspots in town, but I am sitting here blogging because the Country Store has 3 mb/s Wi-Fi and my time is limited.  Other hot spots are at the Cafe Del Sol, the Jacksonville Center, and the Floyd Library. There are probably more.

I am not sure how things are progressing in the wide world outside of Floyd County, VA, but in the year I have been here, I've seen an increasing number of people lugging laptops around and using them while eating breakfast or having coffee.

When I first came here I felt almost like a stranger in a strange land when I carried a laptop. Not so, any more. There are a lot of people doing serious work in every available Internet hotspot.

There are a few students, of course, but most of these mobile warriors wear work clothes and heavy boots rather than urban professional wear. We have a high percentage of self-employed people in this county and they network and do business every day at the restaurants and coffee shops in town.

When a restaurant provides a high speed Internet connection, it is another incentive to eat there and meet there.

What would happen if the entire town of Floyd was one large Wi-Fi hotspot?

Would it would draw more business traffic?

The yaTimer - a very handy utility

If you are a freelance consultant, writer, or designer, this versatile software timer may be what you have been looking for. It makes keeping track of multitasking activities almost painless.

I have been searching for a better way to keep track of how much time I spend on various client projects and in a recent article,  I included a list of the must-have features I was looking for:

Independent software vendor Nir Dobovizki of NBD-Tech read my article and created a software timer he calls yaTimer that met every one of the requirements I listed.

He left a comment on my blog post, so I downloaded the counter and have been using it ever since.

It can be any size I want from a business-card-sized timer in the corner of my computer screen to a full-screen display visible from across the room.

Nir did an excellent job creating this timer and he is very responsive to suggestions and comments.

The only shortcomings in this first version of the yaTimer are my fault. When I wrote the list of must-have features, I didn't consider several necessary features that I really depend on, like counting down as well as up and being able to preset the count to any value I need.

Nir says not to worry, he is already working on this and the next version will have those features.

This timer is head and shoulders over any other timer for my kind of work. I usually have several irons in the fire and this timer lets me switch to a new task  or freeze everything with one click. This comes in very handy when I get a phone call or have to stop and greet the UPS lady.

This timer will pay for itself in less than a week if you are billing on an hourly basis and need to keep accurate records of what time is spent on what projects. It is available as a free download with a 45 day trial period.

I think Nir Dobovizki is the kind of software developer we need to encourage. He also has a blog in which he claims his inspiration for naming this product came from the pen of Scott Adams.

Visit Nir's Software Company and tell him I sent you.

One last thought about JL Kirk...

JL Kirk has still not gotten the message. Instead of actually addressing the issues raised by Katherine Coble, they are now shifting to the time-honored tactic of "discussing the matter privately" with the Cobles.

JL Kirk is still denying the charges made by Coble, so I'm not buying the idea that the private discussion is anything other than a way to keep the pressure on the Cobles without having the blogosphere listening in.

Here is the last report from Katherine Coble:

Attorneys for JL Kirk & Assocs. contacted Media Bloggers Association attorney Ronald Coleman and said that they are interested in discussing this (the cease and desist letter) with my husband and me personally rather than litigating in court.

It will be very interesting to see if the private discussion is attended by the union-busting law firm of King & Ballow, who exacerbated the situation in the first place.

I sincerely hope that Katherine and her husband are accompanied by a Media Bloggers Association attorney during any discussion with JL Kirk. If not in person, at least on a conference call.

If you sincerely believe that JL Kirk has had a change of heart, you are very trusting soul. You might be interested in handling some Nigerian emails which I will be happy to forward to you...

Gun-free zone at Virginia Tech

One of the things that gun control people avoid recognizing is that shooting sprees seem to take place where it is not legal for people with carry permits to carry guns.

A bill that would have given college students and employees the right to carry handguns on campus died last year with nary a shot being fired in the Virginia General Assembly.

House Bill 1572 didn't get through the House Committee on Militia, Police and Public Safety. It died Monday (Jan 30, 2006) in the subcommittee stage, the first of several hurdles bills must overcome before becoming laws.

The bill was proposed by Del. Todd Gilbert, R-Shenandoah County, on behalf of the Virginia Citizens Defense League.

Virginia Tech spokesman Larry Hincker was happy to hear the bill was defeated. "I'm sure the university community is appreciative of the General Assembly's actions because this will help parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus."

Only law-abiding citizens obey gun control laws. This leaves them helpless in the face of insane homicidal behavior.

Concealed carry laws seem to be making a comeback. Perhaps it is a movement toward taking responsibility for one's own security in an increasingly dangerous world.

Crazy weather in Floyd

Yesterday was April 15th and my initial reaction was, "Can we have a little bit of that global warming please?"

The temperature has been in the 30's for several days and we have had high winds and snow. The first two images show our front and back yards late yesterday afternoon.

The temperature was falling and at least 30 birds mobbed our feeders in the gathering darkness. Snow was accumulating and they were acting like this was their last chance to get a meal. That was yesterday.

24 hours later, our power has gone out because of the high winds, but the sun has burned away the snow as you can see in the last photo.

Our emergency generator is rumbling away in the yard and we have all of the comforts of 21st Century life, thanks to the preparations I made a few months ago.

This is the first time I've been able to flip on the generator during daylight and it was a real pleasure. It took only 5 minutes and we will be good for 24 hours.

This is a good thing, as I have work to do online and the power is off until tomorrow sometime, according to neighbor Tom King.

Tom was prepared for the worst this time and I can hear his generator running in the distance right now. Country life is far more comfortable when you can apply a bit of technology in the right places.