Are You Hip to Hipmunk?
15th September 2010
Pogue is. Of course, he’s paid to be.
Hipmunk is a flight-search site, a rival to Travelocity, Kayak, Expedia or Orbitz. But it’s far less cluttered. Its main screen has only 14 buttons and controls (From, To, Depart and various corporate links). Travelocity and Expedia each have over 40—not including ads, which don’t appear on Hipmunk.
So you type in JFK, SFO, 9/30 or whatever, and hit Search. Then, instead of an all-text table, the flights are laid out, color-coded by airline, as bars on a timeline of the day. You see exactly when they leave and land, and how many hours you’re traveling, based on the lengths of the bars.
Sounds like a winner. If I traveled by air — which thank God I don’t — I would love it.
September 15th, 2010 at 12:05
New corp. memo today telling us that effective Nov. 1, TSA’s Security Theater will be requiring your 1. Full name (as appears on your ID), 2. DOB, 3. Gender (I think they mean ‘sex’ but that probably gets blocked out by some of the IT ‘Big Brother’ software), and 4. your “Redress Number” If you’ve had some issue with TSA in the past which would now require you to have what they call ‘secondary screening’. In my experience, it means you’re the nearest white male so you get patted down while all the minorities and foreigners watch. Or, you might have to explain, “No, I’m not THAT Tim of Angle…”
i.e., More good reasons not to fly.
But I feel safer. Do you feel safer?
September 15th, 2010 at 13:23
I feel really safe — by keeping far away from government bureaucrats.