Earn Enough Miles for an Around the World Trip Ticket

My sister once told me that I was extremely well rounded, and no one could take that away from me.  With that, I like to use Second Thoughts to display this wide range of expertise, from the ridiculous to real, from tacos to design, from technical to personal.

In this article, I’m going to outline briefly how I managed to purchase my around the world trip ticket 100% on miles (+ a fee for airport taxes) with Continental Airlines.  It took just over a year and a half, at least two long flights for vacation and multiple cross country flights, but I pulled it off.   Here’s how:

1. Pick an airline alliance and always fly with that alliance. I chose Continental Airlines in the Winter of 2007.  At that time Continental was part of the Sky Team Alliance, but as of October 2009 it is part of the Star Alliance.  It included Delta, Northwest, Air France, Korean Air, and Copa, to name a few. (As a backup to #1, make sure you have an account with each alliance. Continental is now with the Star Alliance.  I opened up a Delta SkyMiles account just in case I continued to fly with Sky Team partners. )
2. With #1, remember to give the airline your account # for every flight. That’s how you collect the miles in the first place!  You only need one account number per alliance.  With the SkyTeam, if I fly Air France, I give them my Delta SkyMiles account, with Star Alliance, if I fly US Airways, I give them my Continental One Pass number.
3. If you forget to give your account # for the flight, keep the boarding pass to redeem the points/miles later. As long as you have your boarding pass, the process to redeem your points/miles is quite simple.  Just send in your boarding pass (make a copy for your records) to your airline (in my case Continental) with a note explaining the situation and including your account information.
4. Apply for  a credit card with the primary airline with whom you are collecting miles. Again, my primary airline was (and still is) Continental Airlines.  I took out my first credit card with them and Chase in December 2007.  You earn bonus miles for opening a credit card, and in some cases, for making your first purchase.  Most airline cards have a yearly fee (ex: $85) and a fairly high APR (ex: 13.89%), so only charge each month what you can pay off by your payment due date.  The point here is to charge as much of your normal expenses as possible, paying off the balance in full each month to avoid fees.  This way you maximize the amount of miles you earn each month.
5. Use your airline credit card to purchase flights for double miles. Very simple rule.
6. Take advantage of opportunities to earn miles from partner programs. My previous employer and client had me stay at Sheraton’s whenever I was on -site and conveniently, Continental had a partnership with Starwood Resorts, whereby my Starwood Points converted to Continental Miles.  I lost out on points with the hotel system, but gained big in airline miles, which was what I wanted.

Most people ask how many miles the flight cost – 140,000 – and how much the flight would have cost in dollars – roughly $3500.  The general rule of thumb is to hack off the last two zeros of miles quote to get an idea of how much the ticket would cost in dollars.  There’s a $1 for every 100 miles.  Not a great ratio, but with that conversion, I was able to travel around the world for $1400 while my traveling partner traveled for ~$3500.

Note:  This is not a sponsored article.

Interested in seeing more of my trip?  Visit www.myfirstretirement.com

Training is Not an Excuse for Poor Design

In my old office I had a sign behind my desk that said “Training is Not an Excuse for Poor Design”.  It was a bold statement to make to my new company that had never had any trained professional mediating between the software developers and the clients.  I had decided one day that it was necessary when I heard on a conference call one of my teammates say “Yes, we can do that.  We’ll plan our training to take this into consideration.”  He said this to one of our clients, and my draw dropped.  Let me explain.

When a client, customer, or user requests a feature, they tell you what they want, thinking this will help them with what they need.  We, as designers, need to know what they need and why they need it in order to provide the best solution to satisfy them.  In Human Computer Interaction, where the user is king, we must always balance “The customer is always right” with “The user never knows what they want”.  More often than not, software developers and salesmen back themselves into a corner because they don’t know how to deal with feedback and this delicate balance.  The developers either give the user exactly what they ask for, or worse, give the user what the developers themselves think makes sense.

For those of us that don’t work on consumer web applications that can interact with their users through tools like UserVoice, usability studies and surveys, we often have to listen to the customer instead of the user.  The customer is the person paying for the development, such as a VP of some division in an organization, and the user are those people working below the VP.  Often we can perform more formal requirements collection with the VP and stakeholders, but with very little access to the actual user.  Without good feedback, we’re left to our expertise and experience to build good usability into our products.

On one project, I was repeatedly denied access to the users, and in an interview with one manager, I asked how we were going to address user adoption if we didn’t know anything about nor did we design for the users’ preferences.  He said to me unequivocally that “They’ll use the application because it is their job, and if they want to keep their job, they will do what I say.”  This was clearly the wrong attitude.  Last I heard (I had been cut from the project because they didn’t want to put more money into user adoption) the roll-out and subsequent use fell flat on its behind.  And we still have the gall to ask “Why Are Enterprise Applications Underused?“

More recently, in conversation with a customer, he suggested a solution based on unfounded assumptions about the user.  When I pointed out that it was unclear how much time would lag between when a user was finished with one step in the business process and would start the next step he said “Oh we can train them to do both sequentially.”  Since we have an ongoing relationship, I paraphrased a line from a recent CIO interview of Harold Hambrose from Electronic Ink:   “Good design means not having to train, and not having to invest in user adoption, so lets figure out the best solution before moving forward.”  I think Cindy Alvarez (Product Manager at Loomia) simplifies this by saying “If something is difficult to do, people will not do it” in her recent article arguing for better usability in business processes.

The solution is very simple.  When the user tells you what they want, ask them first what they are trying to accomplish.  With detailed goals, the designers and architects can propose a solution that will help the user achieve those goals without inconveniencing them.  Then we can extend the statement that “The user never knows what they want until they see something” which is a primary argument for agile development, rapid prototyping, and iterative user-interface design.

Training is not an excuse for poor design.  And poor design is a result of misinterpreting user feedback.

San Francisco’s Random Taco Crawl Generator

For those of you close to me, you have definitely heard about a small side project I started at the end of May called the Random Taco Crawl Generator.  I dreamed up this great idea of being able to query a website for a random sampling of taquerias in San Francisco while I was at the gym over memorial day weekend.  The night before I had been on a Taco Crawl for my friend Kevin’s birthday.  He had held a few before, but this was my first with him, and with almost 20 other people that joined in for the celebration!

While we were sitting stuffed at our 5th taqueria, one of Kevin’s friends pondered aloud “I wonder if tacocrawl.com is taken.”  Everyone in ear shot with an iPhone started scouring the internet to see if the domain had been secured, and then to see if they, themselves, could secure the domain.  As I watched them scramble, I wondered too, “Why don’t you just call GoDaddy?  They have a horrible UI, but great phone service.” (I really am a true believer).  They ignored me!  I speculated, this time silently, it was because they didn’t want to listen to a girl (because guys know so much more about tech then us females, clearly).

Finally, I decided to grab GoDaddy’s phone number (on my blackberry, mind you) and give them a call.  Sure enough the domain was available, they had my account number and credit card on file, and I had the domain signed, sealed, and delivered within 5 minutes.  Everyone was dumbfounded for two reasons:

1. It didn’t occur to anyone (except for me) that you could secure a domain name by phone.
2. No one thought that any two-word combination was still even available in the domain space.

So while I was at the gym the following day, I was thinking about what I could do with my new domain.  Around that same time I decided I wanted to start getting back into more interactive web-development (pages that do things, not just show information).  For the past few years, my day job has confined me to strictly requirements and design, but no development.  Even with a few of my side projects – including this website, The General History Project, and The Bead Store – I hadn’t really written an if() or while() statement, in a while.

What started as a fun challenge to see who could secure the domain www.TacoCrawl.com fastest, turned into a side project using the Yelp API.  I wrote most of the logic in PHP, but sprinkled some jQuery and XML throughout the site.  The basic idea is that I query Yelp for as many taquerias within a 2 mile radius of the neighborhood selected.  I check to see if the data set returned to me is greater or less than the number of taquerias the user requested.  Ideally, the data set is greater, so I can generate a set of random numbers, and select from the full array of taquerias randomly.  If the data set is less than the number of taquerias the user requested, than I return to the user all the taquerias Yelp returned to me.

All in all, once I got back into the swing of things, I found the Yelp API to be really easy to work with, and the google group to be very helpful. I also started using this handy tool for cross-browser design – check out Browser Shots.

In the process, I got a lot of really great feedback through uservoice and email.  Some people want to see the site extend to other food genres, other cities and mobile browsers.  Other food genres are hard because few delicacies are small and edible repeatedly in crawl fashion the way tacos can be consumed.  For other cities, I checked in my own home town, Philadelphia, and only one neighborhood Yelp lists in its API has enough taquerias to make a taco crawl possible.  Finally, there’s no excuses, mobile browsing capability would be great, and so would a google map mash-up.  The truth is, I want to eat tacos, not program tacos; I need a break!  I want to work on other things!

Andale! Go find you some tacos!

PS:  There’s an easter egg in the program.  I’d like to know who finds it!

UPDATE:

Working with Photoshop: Uncheck Embed Color Profile Save for Web & Devices

I’ve been working on my design portfolio this week and was, yet again, playing around in Photoshop. When designing a background image that is not plain white or black in Photoshop for your website, you want to make sure that you also set a background-color to take into account different browsers and sizes. If you set a background color, the image and the background color, no matter what the browser size, will seamlessly blend together. Your CSS should look something like this:

body {
    background: rgb(112, 255, 205) url('../Homepage.jpg') no-repeat;
    color: rgb(102,51,0);
}

The url finds the image, and the rgb or hex code is the background color.

As I was designing oogeeyot,(UPDATE 7/31:  I’ve totally redesigned the site, and it is no longer using these images) I noticed that the color in the image and the color in the background, although set to the same rgb value, were looking differently in Safari. The color discrepancy was not apparent in Firefox. Here’s how it looked before:

After doing a quick google search I found this thread to be really helpful. Basically, the key is when saving your PSD as an image file, uncheck the box that says Embed Color Profile. With an embedded color profile, Safari tries to read the colors from the image, rather than taking the picture at face value.

UPDATE:  Based on Ann’s comments below, and talking to other web designers, the best thing to do is Save for Web & Devices, choosing which GIF, PNG, or JPG fil you need for image quality.

I Killed My Graduate School Personal Website

Every Friday I receive an email from SiteMeter telling me how many visitors have come to the personal website I created as a graduate student.  I haven’t changed that website, let alone SFTP-ed into that server since May or June of 2007.  Sometimes I’m amazed to see that people still visit that site, and sometimes I’m not; when you google search “Lindsay Tabas”, the link shows up on the first page of results.

So this morning I decided to bid farewell to the site by loading an index.php that resets the header to this url:  www.lindsaytabas.com.  I backed up all the original files onto my external hard drive, and anyone can still navigate to the old site by going to this address here.

I’m killing my site, with a short eulogy.  This site was the first place I learned about building HTML, using PHP, CSS, and XML.  I started using SiteMeter instead of Google Analytics (and I cannot really remember why, but I use GA now).  The coolest thing I learned over the past 4 years of getting these updates every Friday was that the world was very small, and people could find me from far off and interesting places.  My tribute to all those 2,214 visitors is this picture, something I found very humbling to look at every Friday morning, but also something that made Friday morning one to look forward to:

My Last Site Meter

Akismet WordPress Plugin is Amazing!

So I wrote about it once or twice before, but WordPress spam is horrible.  Before I added Akismet, I had over 2500 spam comments.  I was deleting batches, maybe 20 at a time.  It was tedious.  With some help from my buddy Ivan, I got my WordPress API key and installed Akismet.  The plugin adds a button to your comments’ options called “Check for Spam”

Once I selected “Check for Spam” all 2000+ comments were absolutely gone!  I felt like a huge load had been lifted off my shoulders.

Note:  Also in this post, I’m testing RealMac Software’s LittleSnapper (its hosting the screenshot) and Twitme (my twitter should update with a link to this blog).

2Pad: Try it!

I’ve been using 2Pad for a little over a month, maybe two, and I have to say that it has a ton of potential. Essentially, you go to their website and enter in your email address to create an account.  Every week you get an email from the website (2Pad Weekly Update) that directs you to your account. There, 2pad collects all of the pictures and videos people have sent you.  Since I use a Mac at work and Ubuntu at home, the service makes my life so much easier.  I don’t have to download personal stuff on my work computer, and I don’t have to figure out which Ubuntu add-on I need to watch a particular video extension type.

This morning I tested their Share feature. When you log in, it asks you if you would like to share with other people that have sent you media.  The interaction was not entirely clear, and I felt that the “next steps” should have been more visible to me, as the user.  I wasn’t sure what type of email 2pad was going to send.  But, I found out shortly after, from my friend Jess, what the email looked like.  Essentially, 2Pad sends an email saying “here are all the pictures you have shared with me in the past” with a link for Jess to see what pictures I have in my account that she has sent me.  Looking at the set they sent, I know that there are more pictures than 2Pad was showing.

The other feature I played around with, which took some searching to find, was the “Link” feature.  I actually thought of the idea, contacted support, and then realized the feature was already available.  I definitely think this feature should be available when viewing individual items, not just from the gallery.  I had some problems when I created a link for a picture, and then a link for a video.  The video would play for 3 seconds and then show the picture.  I’m not sure why. Bug?  Keep testing guys, this feature has a lot of potential.

There are some things that I would like it to be doing that it’s not doing yet, but the developers behind 2pad are terribly responsive when I tweet to them on twitter.  They’ve let me know that soon you can take your pictures and upload them straight to Flickr.  This would be an amazing feature as well for me right now because I’m currently putting together my 2008 photo album.  I broke my camera this year so I’m relying on people to send me their pictures soon.  I suggest you follow them on twitter if you would like!

Here’s the video I was trying to share. My Dad sent this to me last week:

Click here…

MapMyRun.com

I’m playing with MapMyRun.com this morning because I need a better way of tracking my progress as I train for this fall’s half marathons. Here’s my route from this morning:

<a href=”http://www.mapmyrun.com/run/united-states/ca/san-francisco/961155606651″ mce_href=”http://www.mapmyrun.com/run/united-states/ca/san-francisco/961155606651″>JCC</a><br/><a href=”http://www.mapmyrun.com/find-run/united-states/ca/san-francisco” mce_href=”http://www.mapmyrun.com/find-run/united-states/ca/san-francisco”>Find more Runs in San Francisco, California</a>

I call it the JCC run because I literally run to the JCC at Presdio and California and then run back home.  I did this run with my roommate Megan and it felt pretty good to get it done and overwith this morning.