Blessed by the Potato

Westjet says in a Globe & Mail article that it’s considering moving away from Air Miles and starting its own reward program. This seems to me to be a pretty rough move from the customer’s point of view. Air Miles is handy because it can be collected from so many places and redeemed for so many things. Air Canada’s Aeroplan has sucked monkey balls for years, and while recently it’s become possible to collect Aeroplan points in other stores (such as Futureshop, some gas stations, etc), there’s no reason to think that WestJet’s own plan would do the same, so it might be a very inconvenient, useless plan indeed, unless you fly a lot. If they were to go it alone, I think I’d prefer instead that they just cut the price a bit, since airline reward systems are generally just quagmires waiting to happen.

Borrowing a page from Shoppers’ playbook, Mr. Durfy said WestJet envisages stimulating travel demand by issuing bonus points to passengers who fly on slower days, notably Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.

“There’s some neat stuff that you can do if you have control of your own loyalty program. The sky’s the limit,” he said.

Ok, that is not a reason to leave Air Miles. You can already offer double Air Miles or bonus 100 Air Miles for features — other retailers such as A&P do all the time. Buy 4 pineapples, get 3 Air Miles; buy a carton of milk and a box of cereal, get 10 Air Miles; Sunday double bonus Air Miles day!

And finally, a quick comparison of Air Miles vs. Aeroplan:

Air Miles are worth approx 14 cents each (based on getting a $20 gift certificate to A&P). Aeroplan miles are worth approx 0.74 cents each (based on redeeming for a $100 gift card). For a direct flight to Victoria for a conference this summer, both Air Canada and West Jet are having a seat sale so it’s $264 each way, total of $528. Air Canada will give me 176 Aeroplan Miles, or a kickback of $1.30 (it’s actually better to take their offer to knock $3 off the price of the flight and not collect any!). West Jet will give 26 Air Miles, or a loyalty value of $3.64. That’s about a 0.7% loyalty kickback, which is pretty typical for many loyalty programs (Shoppers Optimum, RBC Rewards, etc). When it’s Air Miles they’re giving me, that can add up and I can use it somewhere. If they switch to their own flight rewards system, then it’s likely I won’t be able to redeem for anything until I’ve collected hundreds of dollars worth of points, which even flying a few times per year would never happen within my lifetime.

I generally do like taking advantage of loyalty points programs — who doesn’t like getting something for nearly nothing — however, I start getting really pissed off and uninterested when each and every individual store has their own, separate points game. At that point, unless it’s somewhere I shop a lot, I’d just rather they just cut the prices or improved the product/service and stuff their loyalty programs. West Jet certainly fits here: West Jet has slightly better service than Air Canada, as long as the prices are close, I’m going to pick West Jet. The few dollars worth of points in Air Miles are not swaying my choice, and a more restrictive West Jet exclusive program would have no influence.

For a week I had bad headaches, that were made much worse by moving my head, looking down, etc. On Monday (the first day), I felt like throwing up, then Tuesday through Thursday were relatively normal, aside from the pain. I tried to hold still and not do much and it was actually quite manageable that way. On Friday, things took a turn for the worse. I was sick to my stomach, spiked a fever of 39°C, and was just ruddy awful. On Saturday, I had a rash start on my chest, and continued to feel nauseous and had no desire for food. Reading up on the internet, I found that I had the whole grocery list of symptoms associated with meningitis, just none that were quite severe enough to really worry me enough to go get checked out. On Sunday, nothing had changed, but this was starting to worry me, so I went to the hospital.

As the title may have spoiled it already, I won’t try to draw out the suspense: I don’t have meningitis. I do have shingles though, which I always thought was one of those made-up old people diseases my grandfather used to get. It’s basically childhood chickenpox, which has remained dormant somewhere inside some of my nerve cells, rearing its ugly head. So it’s been a pretty miserable few days here. The shingles manifests as a rash on my chest: basically a concentrated collection of a few dozen chicken pox spots all merging together — and it’s exactly as itchy and painful as that sounds. It burns. On top of that are the systematic effects: the headache, nausea, and what I still don’t quite understand: the fatigue. I seem to wake up from a sleep feeling pretty good, energy wise. As long as I don’t move my head or touch my shingles rash, I figure I can do something normal, and I can (witness: blogging!) for a short while. But after a few hours I have trouble concentrating, and after about 5-6 hours of being awake, I just crash, and have to go back to bed. Then I sleep for 7-8 hours, and repeat. It’s a very strange schedule to be on, and unfortunately doesn’t mesh well with a standard 24-hour day.

I’ve lost 4 pounds in as many days, and while that weight won’t be missed in the slightest (bye now, don’t write!), it’s not a healthy rate. Fortunately, that seems to have leveled off today and yesterday, now that I’m back up to two decent-sized meals a day.

Oh, and calamine lotion is amazing. I wish they had invented it when I was a kid and had the chicken pox.

For the new year, I don’t think they’re keeping the PC-Cillin name: now it’s just Trend Internet Security 2008. There are a number of changes from the 2007 version. First up, the UWO site license/student version isn’t good for unlimited installs. One copy, one install. Granted, it’s still cheaper than buying a retail copy with 3 installs, but combined with the price increase per disc, it has driven the cost of antivirus software up by a factor of 11 for my family (from a bargain basement $12/year to $135/year). They (and here I’m not sure if “they” are the university, trend micro, or a combination thereof) used to be of the opinion that giving cheap-as-free antivirus to students protected the network as a whole from virus outbreaks and security threats, and was a good loss-leader to boot. I don’t know why what was good in 2003*, 2005, 2006, and 2007 is suddenly not profitable enough, especially since you could only renew those student licenses through the campus computer store, so any and all graduates (and lazy distant family members) would be prompted to pay full retail price if trying to renew over the internet. (* – 2003 was good for 2 years)

Internet Security 2008 is a lot quieter than 2007 was: no more nag messages for everything — 2007 used to nag about windows update trying to access the internet, and for each update that tried to install. It would nag about firefox and thunderbird, twice, every time one of them had an update. Now I’ve had windows updates and a firefox update, and still no peep from 2008. It also doesn’t pull up the updating progress window on top of whatever you’re actually working on whenever it wants to update, it just animates the taskbar icon. However, it does still manage to steal focus when updating or starting a scan — if I’m in the middle of typing something and it decides to do something, even though I don’t get the giant pop-up covering my work as in 2007 (which was, admittedly, turn-off-able for some cases) my cursor still magically disappears and my keystrokes stop registering in that window. In some ways, that may be worse, because it takes longer to register what happens, and I still get just as angry.

One real annoyance for me is that the icon in the taskbar will change to a yellow hazard symbol (yellow triangle with a !) indicating that there’s a problem. This last week, the “problem” was that Internet Security 2008 was “out of date”. Well, it wasn’t: I had automatic updates on, and tried to manually update a few times. I was using the latest version. The problem was, the stupid thing is set up to flash that warning if it hasn’t been updated in 3 days (and Trend usually pushes updates something like every 12 hours), but for some reason the script kiddies were taking the week off and there hadn’t been an update available in weeks. I haven’t found yet if that’s user-configurable. If the default is 3 days to a warning though, then Trend should consider releasing “empty” updates every 2 days just to keep the program happy and to keep people from freaking out.

It’s been said so many times that so many people are just way too aggressive in winter driving conditions. Last night’s storm was particularly nasty: dropping a thick layer of ice on everything, followed by heavy snow. So this article in the London Free Press (I know, I said I’d stop reading it!) about a man caught going 127 km/h and flashing his high beams at slower traffic, and then even after getting his ticket and being warned by police ending up spinning off the road in the slippery conditions. Thankfully, he didn’t take anyone else with him, though from the sounds of it he and his car escaped pretty much unscathed. I think true poetic justice might have required the car to be totalled and him to be found at-fault by his insurance :)

Speaking as a visitor from another planet, contagious human behaviours can be really interesting to watch. Everyone already knows that yawns can spread, but I was surprised to see how contagious fear can be.

I can be a little high-strung sometimes. I can also zone out and go into complete introspection (or a visit to my nothing box). I can be both at once, and then someone can come up and snap me out of it, and I won’t expect in the slightest. To me, it’s like they snuck up on me out of nowhere, and I startle. Now, my startle response is towards the “extremely surprised” end of the spectrum. This isn’t a little hand on my chest, an intake of breath and a hushed “oh my, you startled me.” No, this is a hands in the air, jump halfway off the ground “BWAAAAAAA!!!!” In fact, I can startle people who sneak up on me with my startle response.

It was funny at curling the other night. I was watching the rock go down the ice, lost in my own thoughts, and our lead comes up from behind to stand beside me, hitting my broom as she did. I think it was the combination of popping up from behind into my peripheral vision along with the unexpected tactile feedback of someone hitting my broom that made my startle particularly bad. “BWAAA!!” I yelped. “Ah!!” She exclaimed, startled by my startle. Then she hit me. “What are you doing that for? You are surprised when you’re in an arena full of people and someone comes up beside you? What’s wrong with you?!”

I could get deep at this point and draw parallels to stock market psychology and sell-offs, but I think I’ll get some sleep instead and let the obvious remarks write themselves in your minds.