The snow is falling here in central Ohio, so I’m eager to leave here and head to warm Dallas for ALA Midwinter 2012. I’m looking forward to catching up with colleagues; making new acquaintances; learning the latest thinking on RDA, linked data, and standards activity; and talking about free/open source software in libraries. On the latter point, I encourage you to come see me give an introduction to the newly announced FOSS4LIB site, answer questions, and take feedback on Saturday morning (10:30 to 11:30) or Sunday morning (10:30 to 11:30). (Or, if you are not coming to Midwinter, sign up for one of the free webinar sessions later in January and February.)

ALA is using a new iteration of its scheduler this year, and it keeps getting better and better. This one even allows you to embed your selected schedule as an <iframe> on an arbitrary page. So here is my schedule:

You can follow me on Twitter where I’ll be tweeting about #alamw12. A Twitter mention or direct message is also the best way to get ahold of me while in Dallas.

Safe travels if you are headed to Midwinter, and I hope to run into you there.

I’m sitting in the Denver airport (and quite pleased to have remembered my note to myself about tunneling through ad-laden interception proxy) with lots to think and blog about after this year’s Midwinter meeting. It was a very productive meeting, but I am still in “travel mode” so I thought I’d mention a new service called TripIt that has made this travel notably easier.

TripIt is “a personal travel assistant that automatically organizes all your travel plans.” Getting started is easy: one just forwards confirmation e-mails from flights, lodging, airport shuttles, rental cars and the like to “plans@tripit.com” and the software starts adding all of this information into a consolidated itinerary. The software offers destination information such as maps and directions. The itinerary includes links to online check-in services and flight information. And you can do all of this without creating an account. If you do create an account, you can build a network of fellow travelers to see when you might be in the same location at the same time. (If I were to travel much, I can see where this would be a very handy “social networking” feature.)

For instance, you can see a public view of my recent itinerary for the OLE Project and ALA Midwinter trip. (TripIt didn’t understand the ALA travel service confirmation e-mails for the lodging arrangements, so I had to enter that by hand.) This view is missing my confirmation numbers and other private details, but it is a useful view to share with spouses and office managers. If you join TripIt and want to connect networks, let me know.

United Airlines, along with many other carriers, has instituted a policy of charging for checked luggage. For United, the first bag is $15 and subsequent bags are $25 each. If you check-in for your flight online between now and January 31st, however, you can save $3 on each the first bag. The online check-in process asks for your credit card to complete the transaction. You can also print your boarding pass during the check-in process. When you get to the airport, use the self-service kiosks to start your check-in process again. The baggage tag will then automatically print behind the counter and you’ll soon be on your way.

This might be old news for some — it has been two years since I’ve been on a flight when I had to check a bag — but a combined 8-day trip of the OLE project in Lehigh University and the Midwinter meeting in Denver means I’ll be out longer than the typical carry-on bag will allow. Still scheme for charging for bags based on a day’s flight activity seems a bit foreign to me. The $15-per-day’s-itinerary doesn’t correlate to any actual charges I can think of. If the main cost of handling checked bags was for the additional labor of handling them, I would expect charges for each segment of a day’s itinerary. Likewise, if the charge is to handle the additional cost of fuel to transport the checked bag, it would make sense for the charge to be by segment. So as near as I can figure out, with 15 minutes of thinking about the topic, the added baggage charge doesn’t really reflect the cost of actually transporting the bag and is just a way to collect more money.

NPR’s Headquarters, looking east
Side view of the triangular building, looking from Mt. Vernon Square. The DC Convention Center is just to the north of where this photograph was taken.

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NPR’s Headquarters main entrance
The main entrance to NPR is along Massachusetts Avenue, and this banner in front of the construction scaffolding shows the address that I hear often on the radio: 635 Massachusetts Avenue, Northwest, Washington, DC, 20001.

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NPR’s Headquarters facing Massachusetts Avenue
Three banners, “Think” – “Explore” – “Share,” hang from the front of the headquarters.

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NPR’s Headquarters viewed from 6th St and Massachusetts Ave NW
VW car billboard, supplementing NPR’s membership dues and corporate sponsorships?

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This one is purely for fun. For those at the recent ALA annual conference in Washington, DC — did you know that the National Public Radio headquarters was just a block away from the convention site? My hotel was one block further east, so I walked behind this building most days to get to the convention center. It wasn’t until the third day that I read the markings on the loading dock of the building and the fourth day when I took my camera along to take these pictures. I regret that I didn’t have time to take a tour, but next time ALA is in DC I’ll definitely make plans to do so. (Anyone up for a group tour? Maybe we can meet Kee Malesky, NPR’s Librarian.)

I don’t know how long the building has been there, but from the style I would guess the late 1970s. There was scaffolding set up around the perimeter to protect occupants from falling objects. The picture of the banner over the entrance shows the scaffolding the best. Perhaps they need some more fundraising to fix up their building. If so, as the last picture shows, they are using the east-facing brick wall of the building as a billboard for a VW car ad. That is a nice way to supplement membership pledges and corporate sponsorships.

From our hotel I had the view of the NPR headquarters building from six floors up. It was a good vantage point to see the cars as they pulled into the underground garage and adjacent parking lot. I tried to form mental images of the NPR personalities and make guesses about who was driving up to the building.

It is an odd feeling to see the headquarters in person. It is sort of like the times my wife and I drove past the OCLC headquarters when we were moving to Columbus, OH. (OCLC’s Kilgor building doesn’t have scaffolding around it, but it did have a big crane the other day lifting what looked like some sort of chiller onto the roof.) Our real estate agent thought we were a weird couple when we would bow respectively towards the building as we drove past. That was until we explained how OCLC to us librarians was like the real estate MLS database to her. Neither of our professions could function without it; then she got the point. Looking at the NPR headquarters was the same sort of thing — thinking about how the people behind all of those radio voices (at the national level) work out of that building.

Look! I think I just saw Nina Totenberg pull up in the driveway!

The jester is a member of his local NPR station, WOSU 820AM.

This posting contains microformat markup.

I will never fly U.S. Airways again, if I have a choice. A competing airline’s ticket is going to have to be substantially more expensive for me to even consider U.S. Airways as an alternative.

This all started with a trip to Ithaca two months ago. There was a substantial weather system that move through the eastern seaboard area that screwed up traffic for a number of carriers. From my vantage point on the ground — watching the FAA’s National Airspace System Status Summary as well as various flight tracking services — everything seemed to be on time for a flight from Syracuse through Washington-Regan to Columbus. Washington-Regan was spared the brunt of the storm and was not having to de-ice aircraft, as I recall. Other major airports had closed various runways and were reducing traffic with ground-stop programs, but as the afternoon wore on the system was improving. The only abnormality was an odd message on the National Airspace System Status Summary was a message that the Philadelphia airport was closed to U.S. Airways traffic at the request of the airline due to “lack of ramp space.” The U.S. Airways website continued to show an on-time departure, so I figured the aircraft for my flight from Syracuse to Washington-Regan was coming from Washington-Regan or somewhere else that was not affected by the Philadelphia airline-requested ground stop. I headed to the Syracuse airport…

…where I found all hell had broken loose. In the 75 minutes it took me to drive from Ithaca to Syracuse, U.S. Airways canceled what looked to be all of their operations in the northeast. Based on past travel experience, I’ve found that it is often better to call the airline’s central toll-free number rather than wait in a customer service line at the airport. Wrong choice. U.S. Airways’ phone system had basically melted down. It took 23 dialing attempts just to get in the queue of people “waiting for the next available agent” and after 90 minutes on hold I hung up and got in line. The guy that got in line behind me said he held on the phone for five hours at his house before hanging up and driving to the airport, thinking that the service had to be better than that at the airport. Right?

Wrong. An hour and a half later plus two television reporters on a remote for the evening news talking about the long lines of customers in front of the U.S. Airways ticket counter at the Syracuse Airport, I finally got to the head of the line. The best the agent could offer was a flight 49 hours later. I asked about compensation based on the problems in Philadelphia. She said the problem was the FAA closing airports due to the weather. I told her about the message from the FAA’s status page about the problem only affecting U.S. Airways flights in Philadelphia. She told me she knew nothing about it, but that if I wasn’t on the flight 49 hours later that I could apply for a refund for the unused portion of the ticket.

So I rented a car and booked a hotel room for the night (neither of which U.S. Airways would pay for). After a good nights sleep I drove home and picked up my car from the airport parking lot 27 hours before any possibility that U.S. Airways could get me there.

In the middle of the following week, I submitted my request for a refund via some automated automated telephone system that no longer exists (800-363-2542 — it now gets routed to the “customer relations system” at 866-523-5333, but more on that in a minute). A week later I called a separate number (480-693-6735, as documented on the U.S. Airways Ticket Refund website) and keyed my ticket number into the automated system; it wasn’t found. So I faxed a copy of everything to the number suggested (800-892-3447). A week later I checked the automated system; nothing. So I sent a copy in the mail to the 4000 East Sky Harbor, Pheonix, AZ address. I just checked the automated system again; nothing.

So I’ve had it with the automated systems and I try to get someone on the line. I call the “Customer Relations” number (866-523-5333); option #2 is for ticket refunds and such. The recorded message tells me that to serve me better I should hang up and dial a 480-693-6735. Yes, if you’re keeping track, we’ve seen that number before. It is the automated check-the-status-of-your-request number. The voice prompts don’t give you a way to talk to a human, but after hitting enough garbage into the system you get routed to what the system claims to be is the queue of people waiting for the next available agent. I only spend 25 minutes on hold here before giving up — it’s my dime paying for the call, after all. Next I call the central number for U.S. Airways where an agent gives me all of the phone numbers I’ve already tried and says that is all she can do for me.

Here’s the real kicker — U.S. Airways is acting like it doesn’t care what you think. As a last resort, I call the “Customer Relations” number once more and pick option #3 — for a “complement or concern” — and after a few rings I am offered an apology for not being “personally available to take your call now…” (no queue of people on this option). Boy, it is a good thing I didn’t have a complement for the airline, right?

Now, I never expected it to be easy to get a refund for my ticket (it is, after all, money that they would want to keep for not doing any real work), but I do expect it to be possible. So, U.S. Airways, as your pilots say when we land, I do have an option in air carriers when I fly, and from now on I won’t be choosing U.S. Airways.

Update (20070601T0956): The New York Times has an article about the overbooking practice by airlines, focusing on U.S. Airways. A part: “Overbooking is one of many airline practices that are complicated by crowded planes. Airlines are running closer to capacity than at any point during the jet age — an expected 85 percent or so full this summer, which means all the seats on popular routes will be taken.”