BA Stupidity

I'm upset today that airlines still refuse to correct customer's honest mistakes. I posted the message below here on the rather fantastic Get Satisfaction. I'll post the follow-up I receive.

No way to correct booking mistakes

I made a mistake yesterday, booking a codeshare flight operated by Iberia, rather than a British Airways-operated sector. With all the fluff about travel insurance upsells and carbon offsetting it was a fairly easy mistake to make, but it was my mistake.

I called BA back less than 24 hours later, hoping to change to an earlier or later BA-operated flight, but was told this would cost £40 per passenger - no exceptions. Apparently the carrier operating the flight is immaterial. This seems a bit hypocritical when they spend money on stuff like this.

I'm a loyal BA customer. I choose them over budget carriers despite a considerable price difference because I value the in-flight service. I don't take that view about many full-fat carriers, and certainly not about Iberia.

Countries in drop down lists

Many websites need to ask users which country they come from, and use a drop-down list of countries to collect the information. If, like me, you come from the "United Kingdom", these forms are often a pain to fill in. The process should be easy, because there is a standard list of countries called ISO 3166. This list contains official names (notified by the country to the UN Secretary General, no less), and is ordered alphabetically.

With the standard list I can hit "U" 4 times to get "United Kingdom". "Uganda , "Ukraine" and "United Arab Emirates" skip right by. This short-cut needs to be learned, but it will work internationally. Those who have not learned the short-cut can find their country in the place they expect it.

The problem: Websites often mess with the country list.

For example:

• By changing the name of my country. I have to find "Great Britain", or even England. Time-consuming and not helpful. Did the site owner think I was going to read the full list to pick the best option?
• By sticking United States at the top. In some software (particularly mobile device browsers) this means I can't just hit "U" to scan through the countries. The non-alphabetical order confuses things.
• By also sticking "United Kingdom" at the top. If the "U" key still works, I often spin right past United Kingdom and have to go round again.

A simple request: If you want an international audience stick to the standard list.

No changes, please. Unless you're the UN Secretary General.

A perspective on my writing

A little something for a Friday afternoon. With thanks to Ashok and wordle.net

Searching for interesting cities

I'm a city person. I can appreciate countryside, but I love exploring urban life. I'm not a typical tourist. I'll skip the museums and the 'typical' dishes. I'll certainly minimise the time I spend with international brands and shopping malls. Instead, I'll search for the stuff that the city does well today. Sometimes it will be food that is grown and cooked well there now, often it will involve a local art or bar scene. Interesting cultures can grow slowly or quickly, but the spirit (for want of a better word) of the residents is always important.

My favourite cities are always large, but fortunately there are a surprising number of large cities in the world. At the weekend I took a look at the largest urban areas by population. Of the 178 listed, I have spent more than a weekend in only 34. I love some of these cities (e.g., Istanbul, San Francisco, Paris, Tel Aviv, Lisbon, Hanoi[1], Cape Town, Beijing, Berlin, Bucharest[1]), but could easily live without others (e.g., Moscow, Casablanca, Frankfurt, Singapore, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Changsha)

I want to find the other interesting cities, and I'm taking the search pretty seriously. There are 144 cities still on the list. So far I've loved about 30% of the large cities I visited, but not really enjoyed another 20% or so. If the statistics are applicable to the remaining cities (I've no reason to believe otherwise), that suggests there are around 45 amazing cities left to discover, but also 30 places I would not enjoy. Random visits are unlikely to work out well.

I'm struggling to see any pattern in my preferences, either by eye, or when I draw scatter plots by GDP, area, population, population density etc (I told you I was serious about this…). Recommendations from others don't help much, either. I've heard great things about many of the cities I did not enjoy, and vice versa. I'm sure there is an element of subjectivity in my choices. Perhaps even the circumstances of my visit made a difference. Yet, the cities I feel strongly about are typically places that I've visited several times, or spent more than a week in.

I've got some ideas, which I'm going to follow up when I have some time. I expect a good prediction formula might involve:

• Recent GDP growth rate (or maybe property value growth rate) (a sensible medium level would be good)
• Length of time as an international trading hub
• Diversity of industries employing residents
• Size relative to other cities that the population can easily reach
• Landscape (a city on the sea, and a city broken up by mountains can help)

If you spot the missing pattern in my list, or have ideas on what makes an interesting city, please let me know. I'll update here when I work out more patterns.

[1] Bucharest is not part of the Wikipedia list because statistics are based on a citizen's official registered home. Re-registering involves up to a full day in a police station. Migration to the Romanian capital is not accurately measured, and likely to be greater than migration in the other direction. A corrected list would have Bucharest at around the same size as Milan or Madrid. I'm sure many other cities also suffer from the same problem. I'm pretty sure Hanoi is one of them.

The new iPhone - good, not great

I'll be buying an iPhone on July 11th. With 3G, GPS and lower pricing this is now a very attractive product. Apple's ability to make browsing and maps work smoothly on a mobile device is unrivalled now, and I expect I'll still own a leading product at the end of the 18-month contract.

However, there are two significant annoyances that temper my enthusiasm for the iPhone.

Mobile Me, a new data silo

Push updates to mail, calender and address book are helpful, but the world has moved on from desktop apps. It is not very helpful to sync with the data that sits on my computer, because that is going to be more out of date than the stuff on my iPhone. And no, a new set of web apps from Apple does not help, however nice they are. Like many people, I've already chosen apps on the web that look after my data. I use Gmail/Google calendar, Remember the Milk and occasionally Flickr. So do lots of other people, and I share stuff with them. When the iPhone was originally announced, Google and Yahoo were a big part of the party, but there has been no mention of integrating their products with Mobile Me.

I live in hope that Apple will offer great integration with a wide range of web applications. That way they could extend the Mobile Me market to people like me, and probably even bring onboard some new iPhone users.

No background tasks = much worse device for media

3G is of limited use for watching video. A decent iPhone video is at 512kbits - a rate not reliably available over 3G. The EDGE terms and conditions (at least in the U.K.) explicitly forbid audio and video use, so I would not be surprised if some kind of contractual limit was applied to audio or video unlimited 3G bundles too. Therefore, the iPhone should be downloading media in the background via WiFi (and 3g if possible) whenever it has coverage. This would allow me to leave home with a device synced from home WiFi with the audio and video content I might want to consume today. If I pass WiFi at lunchtime I can top up, maybe just with a few news clips that are integrated into the news application, or maybe with a show that has just been released.

I am enthusiastic about the new notification services that Apple announced. They are a hepful extra feature for many applications, but are not enough for audi and video. Notifications allow a developer to push a message to an iPhone, essentially "new stuff available" in various forms, but the user will have to open the application and wait while the 'stuff' downloads. That is fine for an instant messenger client that is downloading text, but useless for audio and video. Webware also pointed out that Apple could do worrying things with the notification data that flows through them.

The announcement was pretty misleading on this point. They explained the perils of allowing applications to run in the background - essentially that they can eat resource that could be needed to complete the current task. That is an important consideration if the current task is an incoming call. During the announcement, the assembled Mac developers had a good laugh at the Windows Mobile solution. It seems that Microsoft allows the mobile user to control resource usage via a series of geeky charts and tables. Of course this won't be included on the iPhone any time soon, but it's not the only way to run background tasks either. For example, Google Android allows background tasks, and has a sophisticated system to ensure that the phone call app can always take the lead when required. It is complex for the developer, but simple for the user. I have heard it works well.

The logic for including proper background process handling seems strong. I hope Apple are working on it.