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Diesel Crisis and Priority Boarding

At Innsbruck airport, boarding is via a bus.  This bus crosses the tarmac, sometimes covering as little as twenty-five metres distance as the crow flies, but is mandatory. It's a two-carriage bendy bus. While the bus is boarding, it has all its doors open, and its diesel engine idling.  The diesel fumes come in to the bus, and the passengers breathe them.  Mentioning this to the driver does not result in the engine being turned off. Some passengers have "priority boarding".  This means they get to go first to the diesel bus, to breathe in the diesel exhaust for longer.  The ones without priority boarding stay longer in the lounge with the cafe.  Everyone ends up on the same bus. When the bus sets off, several people observe out loud what a tiny distance it covers.  Sometimes the bus does a big circle to make it seem longer. If Europeans want access to hydrocarbons again, maybe they should be more sensib le about diesel exhaust.  Just an idea.
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airline in unable to sell airline ticket surprise shock

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British Airways still has rubbish online booking. Payment for putative flight just failed in three different ways. First time, the page with the payment form showed whizzing around for a long time, and then displayed: the exact same unsubmitted payment form, with no indication of what went wrong. Second time, this "we're processing your payment" page, indefinitely, with more whizzing.  The photos of happy people don't make up for the fact that it doesn't function.  You're an airline, but it's almost impossible to book tickets using your web site. Third time, different browser (firefox), page said "an error occurred".  No information about what the error was.  I guess it's better than an indefinite waiting page. Fourth attempt, different card.  It did an SMS code.  Then the indefinite "we're processing your payment" page.
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Transport services should not be named after other modes of transport

It is confusing to name a transport service after another mode of transport, or imply it with the name. Here at T5 today, we have “railair”. I guess their thought was that it connects the airport to railway stations (why not just join up the rail network per se?). But it’s a bus. The bus service to Oxford is called “the airline”. No. I have been on a train in Austria called “Railjet”. Wrong. And the manufacturer “Airbus” is named after the omnibus. Bad. Come on transport marketers, let’s go back to sensible names.
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Elisio...

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A recently-spotted departures board at LGW says "Depart..." instead of "Departures", and things like 14..." and "15..." instead of the times: At least it didn't crash.  But this is a design failure for a departures board.  The designer should have designed it so that the required information fit in the space. But there wasn't a thoughtful designer, or possibly a designer at all.  Instead, there were geektards, running rampant.  And geektards love to solve the general problem.  So here, a whole team congratulates themselves on the clever way they generalised a thing of "if there isn't enough space, truncate the text, and put in an elipsis", and the way they did this is a great piece of abstraction, possibly even a "design pattern", and so on.  Meanwhile, people can't see what time their flight departs, or even the word "Departures" in full, and any normal person can see that as a departures board, this is n...
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Sony PRS-650 e-reader

The Sony PRS-650 is the only e-reader I've read lots of books on.  From around 2010 onwards. Tried the PRS-350 too, but didn't end up reading much on it. Tried fbreader on smartphones.  Have read a few books on it, but not extended reading like with the PRS-650.
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BA flight BA1344 2026-04-19

BA have just started a Heathrow-Guernsey route. They said it was their first flight on that route since 1980. Checkin at Terminal 5 was bad. They couldn't find it from my passport.  I had to give my booking reference three times.  Then show the screen.  They were grumpy.  Security was bad, just very slow. The flight was good.  All the crew except one were from Guernsey.  They served Guernsey butter.  The salad was fresh.  They served Champagne.  The napkin was made of cloth, not paper. Lots of people were parked just north of the airport fence, to watch.  Some photographers and a Deputy were on the tarmac.  Customs and Immigration were present, but for a change did not harass me based on an incorrect hunch that I was smuggling drugs.  A choir in the arrivals area sang Flower Duet, the BA song.
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BA determinedly unable to sell airline tickets

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I created a new BA account.  This was because the old BA account required either an authenticator code, which I never set up, or a rescue code, which I never set up, to log in.  The account would still sometimes work, but only when they didn't want extra authentication. I made a new American Express card with the new BA account.  I went to log in to the new BA account for the first time.  I got challenged with a captcha.  I had to say what items performed the same function as a chair: sofas, vs other things.  I had to do at least two of these.  Then, I got the fruit of my labours: An error page from under accounts.britishairways.com saying "Bad Request".  This is what we have.  This is the pinnacle of human achievement.
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