News and notes from around the interweb:
- 2250 Bonus American Miles from the AAdvantage Shopping Portal
- Well, that’s one way to protest.
- Turkish Tourism Minitry Fires Julianne Moore for Bad Acting
- The government of Sri Lanka is accusing their oneworld member and national airline of corruption. The airline is state-owned, and the accusations stem from aircraft purchases while the government was controlled by a different party which means the airline is a political football in partisan political politics. Which doesn’t mean, of course, that a state owned airline isn’t a politically corrupt plaything, just that the complaints are that the airline used to be someone else’s corrupt plaything.
- Passenger mutiny: police had to be called twice during a 5 hour Qatar Airways tarmac delay in Birmingham.
- The US Airways credit card was supposed to disappear for new customer applications once the Dividend Miles program was folded into AAdvantage. Some links still remained, however and this was expected. Those links however seem to have been shut down. RIP.
You’ve modified the RSS feed and it is no longer pushing the entire article. I’m dropping my subscription. Let me know if you return your blog to its previous, more useful state.
I came here to ask about the same thing. Is the truncated RSS feed a permanent change, or just a transitional speed bump? I really enjoy your blog, but I don’t subscribe to sites without a full feed.
That said, the blog is your baby, so if you feel the change is necessary, I completely understand… and want to thank you for providing the full feed for as long as you have!
Holy stream of consciousness, Batman! I don’t know all the web-designer-y terms for it, but the links and formatting and stuff for this all just read as one big character-only run-on in the main blog until one clicks through to the article. And, believe it or not, this is reading it on a – gasp – computer, by typing in a URL! I’m old fashioned like that.
A noted above, a full RSS feed would be appreciated. I tend to read blogs offline (usually sitting on a plane), so the truncated feed is of no use to me.
This new layout was not ready for prime time. The front page of the blog is gibberish, with all formatting gone and words running together. One must click through to the full article to have any idea what it’s about. This is a mess and frankly should have been tested and fixed before going live.
I’m with Biggles209. The RSS feed is three steps back compared to Friday.
@Gary: Your comments about Sri Lankan Airlines are completely misplaced. The Rajapaksa brothers ran Sri Lanka like their own (intolerant) personal fiefdom and used the airlines (SriLankan and Mihin Lanka) as their playthings. The fact that the new President Sirisena wants to shrink and reform them does not make them his government’s “corrupt plaything[s].” No one has accused Sirisena of trying to install his own cronies or use the airline for his own personal gain or ego. By contrast:
— The Rajapaksa brothers regularly commandeered SriLankan and Mihin planes for frivolous charter travel and used the airlines to further their ambitions to build up the new international airport in Hambantota (named, of course, Rajapaksa International Airport), in the middle of nowhere on Sri Lanka’s southeast coast (where they were also building a massive Chinese-financed port named — wait for it — Mahinda Rajapaksa Port).
— Former President Mahinda Rajapaska installed his brother-in-law, Nishanta Wickramasinghe, as an executive director and later chairman of SriLankan, one of the moves that contributed to Emirates’ decision not to renew its management contract for SriLankan in 2008.
— Mahinda Rajapaksa created Mihin as a vanity project and named after himself (using the Pali name for Mahinda). Mihin loses more money than any other government-owned enterprise. Mihin has been a complete failure and is being folded into Sri Lankan. The country has no need two big stated-owned airlines with unnecessarily large fleets.
The actions of the brothers actions are reminiscent of Zairean dictator Mobutu (who built a massive airport in his remote home village of Gbadolite), Zimbabwean dictator Mugabe (who regularly commandeered Air Zimbabwe planes for his wife’s shopping trips to Paris), and Turkish president and wannabe dictator Erdogan (who is naming Istanbul’s new airport after himself). When the new President Sirisena recently traveled to Britain and India, he took regularly scheduled commercial flights. Sirisena’s government is now faced with two bloated, money-losing carriers stacked with cronies of the old regime. Reforming them to operate as a single profitable airline is not corruption.
@jack corruption charges are the political ploy here, if it wasn’t grandstanding the move would simply be to fix the airline.
Another vote for restoring the full RSS feed
@Gary: Sirisena is expected to get political results, not just run the airline. He was elected because Sri Lankans were fed up with the Rajapaksa’s corruption.
Have you thought about pitching your services to the Maldivian government? I’m sure you could explain away the coup as just a political rivalry. Stick to the travel stuff. And fix the RSS feed, please.
Really enjoyed reading the comments regarding the “Remind later” links, but feel I need to add one more…
Gary, what’s your guess as to the last day I can apply via the “remind later” bookmarks I saved for the Northwest and Continental Airlines credit cards?
If I add my Piedmont Airlines Frequent Flyer Bonus Program number when applying for the USAirways credit card, will I end up getting a Dividend Miles number? Why would I first get an AAdvantage number; are the two airlines merging (or something)?
The Daily email is also broken. Incomplete and run-on sentences. 🙁