While surfing around using Amazon’s new A9 site, I found this great quote from Burt Rutan:

The general rule here is that you don’t get the privilege of designing something unless you have the capability of building it with your own hands. And that’s a rule that I think is extremely important.

This should also apply to software.

After an uneventful Alaska Air flight from Reno to Seattle (and a nice Mount St. Helens flyby), we landed early only to learn that the jetway was broken and could not be brought out to the plane. With this message we embarked on a tedious and somewhat scary journey to nowhere.

At various times we were told that the jetway was broken, that we would be using stairs from the front, stairs from the back, that management was on their way to move the jetway (what did the plan to do, order it to move?), that a breaker in the jetway would be reset, and so forth. The plane was pushed back twice, 10 or 12 feet each time.

People were beginning to freak out as they realized that we were basically trapped inside and that they couldn’t get us out even though the plane was intact and we were at the gate. They could have moved us to another gate 5 minutes into the affair. How hard would it be to figure this out? I am sure that the average gorilla could have figured this out without too much difficulty.

Don’t they have a contingency plan for something as simple as this? What would these buffoons do if there was a real emergency?

I have to question the competency of all involved in this debacle; I will be sending a detailed rant to the Seattle Port Authority in the near future. As far as I can tell, Alaska Air is blameless here.

Overall, management of all types at Sea-Tac is in disarray. Incompetence at the local TSA office means that we have the nation’s longest average waiting times for the security screening. With this event, I see that these people are actively preventing us from getting on to or getting off planes! I guess they think that the airport is there to sell us overpriced food and drink, not to help us to actually go somewhere.

I spent most of the weekend at Chris Pirillo‘s Gnomedex conference; I met a lot of great people, put some faces behind the names, and had a really good time. I also brought back a lot of SWAG. Chris was nice enough to put together some great SWAG-bags for the panelists — a very thoughtful touch.

Doug Kaye of IT Conversations recorded and will post the entire conference here.

I spoke on a panel centered around the future of online advertising. Dave Taylor posted a complete set of reference links (nice domain name, Dave).

Net-net from the conference — RSS is about to hit the big-time, in a really big way. Essentially every session revolved around RSS, syndication, and feeds. I think the real power here is the separation, de-aggregation (e.g. items instead of sites), and exposure of plain, unadulterated content. People are just now starting to grasp the power of taking this raw info and using it as they please, rather than in the way that it was intended to be used. As William Gibson said, “the street finds its own use for things.”

My list of cool URLs to visit is now pretty long. I’ll scavenge these from my notes and post the most interesting stuff as soon as I have some time.