smallchou.com/blog

i might not have mentioned this, but i’m currently on vacation. i flew out to chicago yesterday (tuesday) and immediately attended the cubs game at wrigley. that’s kicking off about five days in the second city, where i will thoroughly attempt to answer the question: “why is chicago the most unhealthy city in the country?” the list of things consumed so far:

• shawarma sandwich (near wrigley)
• three bud lights at the sports bar across sheffield from wrigley
• two ‘old style’ beers at one of the country’s most beautiful ballparks
• a ‘wrigley dog’
• three hoegaarden’s at jonny o’hagan’s in wrigleyville
• a two-piece chicken meal at ‘Harold’s Chicken Shack’
• a rainbow cone, courtesty of pseudostoops
• pita chips and hummus dip at La Casa de Stoops/Pseudostoops
• a boatload of mussels, sandwiches, and fries
• a nice variety of belgian brews from Hopleaf

what’s left on the list? a nice corn-fed dry-aged rib eye. chicago-style stuffed pizza. a dining experience at some place called Mr. Beef. a trip to this mythical Wiener Circle…

and i wonder why chicago seems to have a larger percentage of overweight people than anywhere else i’ve been in the world.

after chicago, i’m heading to las vegas on monday morning. i’ll be camped out in the city of sin playing LOTS of poker and generally trying out ‘the life’. i’ll sleep at a decent hotel, eat as cheaply as i can, write often (lucky you!), and try to have some fun. more writing and pictures later. talk to you soon…

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every time i fly on southwest (which is, unfortunately, pretty frequently) i vow never to take that evil, devilish airline ever again. the reason? well, besides the fact that the airline hasn’t departed a flight ontime in about 10 years (only on southwest will you commonly hear the line, “well, the flight was scheduled for 8:20, so i decided to arrive at the airport around 8:15 because it’s southwest.”), i think the airline website is a pain-in-the-ass to navigate. other people probably don’t care much about this, but i find the user interaction on the site to just be incredibly difficult and kloodgy (a term that we at oracle use to describe software that differs greatly from the user’s mental model). in fact, i was once in a presentation where a certain large enterprise software company touted southwest’s online interface as an example of the company’s great ability to service complex web applications on top of databases. i thought to myself: “hmm, southwest huh? that’s unfortunate.”let’s take one example: the login to your rapid rewards account on the site is incredibly stupid, requiring you to provide your southwest account number. besides people who have incredibly great memories (i think ivy has hers memorized), who in the world has the time to memorize a bajillion-digit number? there are so many ways to do a login correctly. they can use e-mail (amazon.com), SSN (fidelity), or even the tried-and-true *gasp* username (everyone) methods. any of these login id’s are relatively easy to implement and save the user a fair amount of grief. instead, they choose to use a multi-digit random account number that they issue to you. that’s great. good call, southwest. from a technical point of view i understand that issuing a user a primary key into your database and then having them access their records through that indexed column will be incredibly easy, but as a user i don’t really give a hoot what’s easier to do technically. and honestly, neither should southwest.

of course, this is just one of a host of issues i have with the website.

the reason i bring this up today is that i was randomly poking around on the jetblue site (which is generally beautiful and well-conceived) and noticed that the geniuses at jetblue have managed to obscure the whole account number thing from their users:

how in the world do they DO that? a little decision can go a long way in the world of interaction design. now if jetblue would just get some better coverage, namely SJC-LAS (note to self: you might be going to vegas a lot if you can remember the airport code), i might never have to fly southwest again. the downside? i might have to get to the airport on time for once.