AlexHopmann.com

LucasArts announced a Wii Lightsaber Game. This could easily push me over the edge to purchase a Wii. The bad news is that Amazon is still out of stock- seems like I better get moving now to get one before the Christmas rush will have them really sold out.

Another stupid mistake I just made. I’ve been developing some 64-bit .NET code and was trying to call gacutil to register some DLLs. I kept getting the error message-

“Failure adding assembly to the cache: Strong name signature could not be verified. Was the assembly built delay-signed?”

It turns out I was trying to run a 32-bit version of GacUtil on a 64-bit assembly. The error message was unhelpful, but switching to the 64-bit Gacutil solved the problem right away.

Dave posts about some great airline experiences and it doesn’t surprise me that the airlines involved are Southwest and Jet Blue. There is this great opportunity for up and coming airlines that emulate these guys to take over and provide a great, efficient air travel system for our country. The main thing holding this back is the lobbying efforts of the old guys. The old guys grew up under the old system of regulated air travel and while they adapted once the industry was deregulated, they never figured out how to escape the trap of their old business models that were based on charging 10x fares to last minute and business travelers compared to everyone else. They also appear to be stuck in a fundamentally hostile management/labor relationship and the combination results in the bizarre poor service that we all see.

There was a thing on the radio yesterday about a movement to create a passengers bill of rights. This appears to be driven by people who are focused on the incidents where they have been trapped in airplanes sitting on the ground for 5+ hours. My feedback would be that there are some good ideas in this movement, but they are missing the bigger picture. Passing new rules that protect passenger rights is putting a band-aid on the gushing wound. What we need to do instead is to stop subsidizing the old-style airlines and let the bad ones fail. In the mean time we need to provide good customer information on how the airlines are doing and try to remove some of the restrictions that are holding them back. I understand Southwest still deals with some bizarre rules about flights into and out of Texas, and if you look at the pain that Virgin America went through to get permission to fly in the US, its just a shame. Another great move would be to pursue a more consistent energy policy that helps the airlines have more predictable fuel prices. One of the cornerstones of Southwest’s strong business performance over the past decade is that they did a great job of locking in fuel prices before they went swinging all over. In theory the government could be helping provide this kind of stability for the whole industry and even making it available to new entrants in the market.