Two things about RyanAir, an Irish airline, came out on the news this week that are particularly appalling. Both their rude response to a blogger and a potential new pay to pee policy tell me that RyanAir hates their customers.
RyanAir’s and the blogger
Jason Roe wrote in his blog about what he thinks is a bug in RyanAir’s website. Some RyanAir employees saw it and left some pretty rude (IMHO) comments. Among them are:
- “…you are so stupid you dont even know how you did it!…what self respecting developer uses a crappy CMS such as word press anyway ND puts they’re mobile ph number online, i suppose even a prank call is better than nothing on a lonely sat evening!!”
- “If you would work in your pathetic life on a such big project in a such busy environment with so little resources, you would know that the most important is to have usual user behavior scenarios working rather than spending time on improbable and harmless things…”
The response of RyanAir PR is equally rude. I would have expected them to refute (if necessary) and apologize for the event. Here’s what they said:
“Ryanair can confirm that a Ryanair staff member did engage in a blog discussion.
“It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won’t be happening again.
“Lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere all to themselves as our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel”.
Pay to pee
I saw on the news that RyanAir CEO Michael O’Leary announced “One thing we have looked at in the past and are looking at again is the possibility of maybe putting a coin slot on the toilet door so that people might actually have to spend a pound (about $1.43) to spend a penny in future.”
There’s a weird, undescriptive error you might come across if you use the CMS editor in PrestaShop. It will say “an error occurred while updating object cms ()”. That isn’t very helpful. It turns out that there are some “taboo” words that aren’t allowed to be used. It looks like it’s there to prevent sql hacking. If you get this error, check your content for the following words and replace them with something different: union, load_file, outfile, dumpfile, escaped, terminated, cascade, infile, x509, trigger, revoke
For the 1234567890 countdown, I celebrated by watching coolepochcountdown. It was pretty exciting. When it was time, the screen flashed and fireworks were shot and music was played! Here’s a screenshot.
This past weekend, I went to Seattle Startup Weekend 2 and talked about it at jongela. In this post, I’ll talk about the more technical parts of the experience. When we first got there, several people (over 50 of them!) gave quick idea pitches. They ranged from cooking websites to crowdsourcing to iPhone apps. A comprehensive list can be found here and here. After eliminating the less popular ideas, we got to choose between the finalist ideas.
Here are some of the ideas that I thought were cool. The purpose of Onevite (later called 1nvite) is to send one invite that will add a person’s Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social network accounts all at once. Wishing Well (later named FavorWish) was a website where people can list their wishes and have their wishes fulfilled (described as a “pay it forward for the web”).
I chose to join the eco-friendly commuting competition project. We named it TripChamp. This project utilizes a competition setup to encourage people to reduce their carbon footprint. We’ll be marketing to businesses that want to help their employees be more eco-friendly. Watch the TripChamp Screencast.
The people on our team were Dave Albano, Kevin Leneway, Nina Strasser, Elizabeth Grigg, Angela Chin, and me. Our team worked out really well. Dave was our leader and provided the vision. Nina, Elizabeth, and Angela worked on designing the UI and the page content. I worked with Kevin on doing the actual programming. I did most of the database interface and functionality while Kevin did the styling and screencast. It all worked out well.
We developed the website using CodeIgniter. This helped A LOT in getting the website live as quick as possible. Using DX Auth and CodeIgniter sessions cut a lot of the programming work involved.
I learned a lot from this weekend. I networked with lots of really bright people and I’m already looking forward to the next one!
Some database planning
Watching the progress reports
I came across this problem when looking to install Google Apps on a domain. It gives me this problem on both of my computers as well as some VMs I have. I don’t know why I’m having this problem–I don’t know a single thing in Chinese and have never selected that for a language.
I wanted information on what they would provide for a non-profit, but this affects the links to pages for schools and ISPs also. A Google search took me to the landing page at http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/index.html . When I scroll down to the bottom and click on “schools,” “non-profits,” or “ISPs,” I get taken to a Chinese page. When I click on the language drop-down and select “English,” I get taken back to the Google Apps landing page, not the pages with information for schools, non-profits, or ISPs. I got around this by just doing a Google search instead and avoiding the Google Apps landing page. This isn’t a mission-critical problem, but definitely an annoyance. Here are some screenshots:
