Dylan Schiemann

Given the large amount of traveling I have done the past few years, friends are surprised that I generally avoid British Airways when flying to London, even if it means a connection on the east coast, a few extra hours of travel, and a slightly diminished quality of in-flight service between first class service on BA and US Airways.

I’m based in Phoenix currently, so I’ve focused my efforts on US Airways and the perks earned when achieving their Chairman’s status, which means an upgrade on almost every domestic flight, and reasonable upgrade options internationally. So why do I try not to achieve the same status on British Airways? Because I’ve had nothing but bad luck and service with them.

Flash back to 2007. I was excited to fly British Airways non-stop from Phoenix to London. A couple of weeks prior to the trip I had to change my reservation in premium economy from two passengers down to one, and change the return date a bit. BA was actually reasonably accommodating at the time: change fee + difference in fare for me, and a reasonable refund for my companion.

When I tried to check-in online for the flight, I was unable to do so. I called British Airways and they were unable to check to me in over the phone. I arrived at the airport early as I wanted a reasonable seat assignment. The agents at the ticket counter were also unable to check me in for the flight. After standing at the ticket counter for almost two hours while they made numerous phone calls and other efforts, they finally explained that when I changed the ticket, the agent had transposed ticket numbers (translation: NOT MY PROBLEM). The flight was getting close to departure time, and they actually explained that I would need to buy another ticket if I wanted to fly that day. They said they would issue refunds and take care of things. So, another $1800 on the AmEx card, and I was rushed to the security line.

While waiting in a long queue to board the flight, several people asked why I was at the counter for so long and I explained my story to their shock. I then sat down in premium economy and shared the story with the passenger next to me, who was frustrated that he hadn’t been upgraded to business class (he was a high mileage customer on BA).

Less than an hour into the flight, a flight attendant spills apple juice all over his shirt and pants, and his seat. Had I been in his seat, my laptop and trip would have been ruined. I was considering myself lucky, but was also expecting the world-renowned BA to shine at offering customer service. I was wrong.

While there were empty seats in business and first class, it was the most unapologetic response I’ve ever seen. Their answer: pajamas and that he should continue sitting in a wet seat for 9 more hours. The lead flight attendant was equally flippant, basically offering to clean his clothes when they arrived in London (which wasn’t going to work as he had a connection to make on to his final destination).

I was pretty shocked, but not as shocked as when I returned to Arizona. My card had not been credited, and the people at the airport really didn’t know what the next steps were. We called the airline and they were not processing my request. Finally after several unsuccessful calls, we were provided an address to write. So we wrote, and we received a letter back that basically said, this is not the right department, you should contact this other department instead. Seriously?!? Shocked at the passing of the buck, we sent a letter to this other department, and soon received a letter back that basically said, this is not the right department, you should write this other department instead, which was the first department we contacted.

Furious, we were fortunate that we had used AmEx. We called them, faxed them the details, and the full refund was issued faster than I’ve ever seen one issued (less than 24 hours later).

Back to 2009. My fiancee lives in London, and she wants to visit me in Arizona. I don’t want to inconvenience her with having to make a connection on the east coast. With the rumors of BA having financial troubles and trying new programs such as their business grants for 2010, I figure that maybe they are trying to win customers and might be easier to deal with.

She has a successful first visit to Arizona in the summer (other than the heat), so we book her to come visit in San Francisco and Phoenix for new year’s and part of January. She’s been recovering from a foot injury, and the British healthcare system is slow. So after a few months of waiting, late last week they finally confirm her for a CT scan on the foot… during the time of her booked flight to visit.

I contact British Airways to find out how to change the flight and what the change fees are. Well, it turns out that the change fees are 100% of the original fare, minus 5% or so in taxes, plus the new fare. In other words, the $3200 ticket is completely unchangeable at all. They explain that I should have bought travel insurance or a more expensive fare (3-4 times the original price for a changeable ticket). The problem of course is that travel insurance doesn’t actually cover this scenario because the injury occurred prior to the purchase of the ticket.

The people I chatted with on the phone with BA were reasonable and friendly and I was perfectly calm and pleading our case, but they have no authority to make any sort of compromise in this situation (unless she was injured mid-trip). So, the options are basically: a) have Mar pushed to the back of the queue for the scan, or b) forfeit the full price of the ticket, minus tax (about 5% of the ticket price). And this request is not last minute, but rather several weeks in advance.

Because airlines do not allow you to transfer tickets (not for security reasons, but to prevent ticket scalping), you’re locked in. But this is the first time I’ve ever seen an expensive ticket be this inflexible. I would think that an airline like British Airways that is struggling so much would be doing anything they can to appeal to customers willing to pay for business class tickets. But instead they are hoping to make money by not actually flying passengers, which may be lucrative in the short term but has the long term effect of making them not want to ever deal with them ever.

For now, I’ll keep my 100,000+ miles/year on the star alliance. US Airways, hurry up and add non-stop servoce from Phoenix or the west coast to London with your new suite class!

Note: It’s been too long since I’ve blogged about my trip. I promised my grandparents that I would finish my blog series about the trip.

On May 2nd, I took a great boat tour up and down the Rhein River from Rüdeschiem down the stretch with many many castles and the famous Loreley. Pictures do this tour much more justice than words:

On the ride back, the view cleared up a bit, and I enjoyed hanging out with the laptop open, enjoying the view.

Upon returning to Rüdescheim, I walked around town a bit, and also learned a new term for tourists:

I then took a long train ride across the German country side to Berlin. The architecture changes from traditional to a distinctively more eastern european style, but the beautiful countryside remained green and gold:

On May 1st, I left München to start my short tour around Deutschland and the Czech Republic by train. From the main hoptbahnhopf, I took an express train to Frankfürt, and connected to a regional train to Rüdescheim.

The train ride provided a great view of the gorgeous green German countryside. Pictures struggle to capture the essence of the quaint rural areas of Germany.

I arrived in Rüdescheim which is a small town that is a common starting point for Rhein River tours.

The Rhein River valley is where my paternal grandfather is originally from and I wanted to at least get a feel for the region. On the rare occasion that I drink wine, I generally prefer Riesling, which is something that was true even before I realized that this wine is commonly from this region of the world. I checked into the Rüdescheimer Schloss… the rooms were very modest, but the food and service were outstanding. It was a perfect choice for a one-night stay.

I walked around Rüdescheim for a while and then had dinner in the courtyard of my hotel which had live music.

The band played a few sets, with a mixture of German and American music, and some American music with German lyrics. The hotel is part of the slow food movement, so the dinner lasted for a couple of hours and was entirely too much food! I thought the appetizer was the main course…. I was about to ask for my bill when the full dinner arrived! They followed the slow food movement, and the quality of the food was outstanding. Dining alone isn’t as bad in an outdoor environment with a band playing as the focus is generally on the band, though it’s still a bit weird for me to eat alone at finer establishments. The dinner afforded me the rare opportunity to reflect on the origins of my family and to write about my trip. Alles gut!

The book Even Faster Web Sites has been out for at least a month, and I’m finally getting around to writing about it! I was invited by the book’s primary author, Steve Souders, to write a chapter about Comet. I’ve generally been extremely hesitant to commit to any amount of book authoring as I don’t generally consider myself to be a very good or productive author. I actually sat down one day and wrote most of the chapter before formally agreeing to do it, as I didn’t want to flake or let Steve down before knowing what I was getting myself into!

I’m reasonably happy with Chapter 8, with one exception: I ran out of time to create figures and charts, so there are no visual explanations at all in the chapter. But as an introduction to the challenges of scaling with Comet, the chapter is good and hopefully adds a lot of value to the book. The editorial process was both more and less challenging than expected. Early on the suggestions were extensive, but it quickly became much easier to work with the various suggestions for improvement and converge on a much improved chapter.

I was much more excited to read the other chapters and learn some new performance optimization tricks. In general the book flows really well and doesn’t sound like a book written by seven different authors. Steve is excellent to work with as he’s very organized and is the type of guy that you don’t want to let down.

You can of course pick up the book through Amazon at the Ajax and Comet Store!

If you’re looking to attend a conference or two, QCon San Francisco in November has a new track titled the Browser as a Platform. I had the opportunity to speak at QCon Beijing and QCon Tokyo in April, and had ample opportunity to get to know Floyd from InfoQ. We started talking and that led to this track that I am hosting. I’ve lined up a set of talks that I’m excited to hear. Hopefully this track goes well and can expand into something bigger next year! I’ll also be conducting a one-day Intro to Dojo, Comet, Grids, and Charts workshop prior to the conference.

In December, I’ll be speaking at the Rich Web Experience in Orlando. No Fluff Just Stuff is organizing this conference, and they are going out of their way to line up a great collection of speakers and events. I’ll be speaking about Dojo, Comet, and the future of the open web.

I’m also tentatively scheduled to give the previously mentioned Intro to Dojo, Comet, Grids, and Charts workshop at the end of September during the London Digital Week. If you’re in London and want a quick crash course on Dojo, this is a great event and will of course include a Dojo Beer event in the evening.

Finally, there are tentative plans for a free evening Comet panel hosted by SVWebBuilder in late October in Mountain View. More details to follow on this event.

On April 30th, I flew from Amsterdam to Munich. Unfortunately, This meant missing the bulk of the Queen’s Day festivities and the million or more people crowding in the city. That said, I’m part German and Irish, and I was excited to start exploring my ancestral roots!

The lounge in Amsterdam was pretty lacking in the food and service department, but provided a reasonably quiet place to hang out prior to my flight. Lufthansa’s (and perhaps other European carriers) definition of business class on a regional jet is: no one sits next to you, you get a meal, and a curtain and sign between your section and the rest of the plane. It was somewhat amusing when a passenger inquired about sitting in the empty row behind me. The flight attendant said no, and explained that it was for business class passengers only. Given that it looks identical to coach other than the divider curtain, it made me laugh because she stated it as if it was obvious that this section was somehow different and more extravagant.

I was disappointed that I did not get a passport stamp when arriving in Munich. For anyone traveling around Europe, if you want to collect passport stamps, you’ll need to connect through the UK or Ireland frequently, as they are not part of the EU customs region. I found the train into the hoptbahnhopf and was greeted by Tobias and Wolfram, the other two thirds of Uxebu. Tobias drove us to lunch where I has my first authentic German or Bavarian meal which consisted of a pretzel (of course) and a sort of ham steak. I received a bit of a driving tour of Munich on the way to Wolfram’s house. It’s a beautiful city with lots of parks and greenery and nice architecture.

At Wolfram’s house, we worked for a bit and then I met his wife and kids. His wife is from Spain, and their kids speak German and Spanish, but not English yet. After hanging out for a bit, Tobias went home to Augsburg, and Wolfram and I met a few other developers in the Kellar and had dinner inside a beer barrel. The waiter was initially impatient and kurt with me, so after I dished it back a bit, he was a lot more tolerable. According to Wolfram, waiters in Munich somehow think that people want to be treated poorly… I guess they want to be like New York.

The best part about the day was getting to see the German language spoken live, and to observe the culture of Germans. I see a lot of stubborn traits in me that I seem to share with other Deutschlanders. We seem to be picky and set in our ways, regardless of what that way is! I speak German like a preschooler… hopefully I can get up to kindergarten level by the time I leave Germany. My Deutsch vocabulary is reasonable, but my ability to construct sentences is long list since the days of Herr Parkhurst in high school back in the late 80s.

On April 29th, I was still in Amsterdam. After another wonderful brunch at the hotel, this time with Peter, I gave my talk at SpringOne. It was the last talk of the conference and Peter bought me a nice pint of pear cider which I finished while delivering a lengthy (75 minute) presentation on Dojo, with an emphasis on Data, REST, and integration with Spring. This was a new slide deck and the talk went reasonably well.

After the conference, I checked out of the hotel early. Tomorrow is Queen’s Day, the biggest holiday of the year in the Netherlands, and public transit is shut down in the area near my hotel. So we headed to Nikolai’s flat to drop off my bags, and then we headed to dinner before walking around the streets of Amsterdam. Throughout the city we would walk into random street parties with bands or DJs. Each block was a completely different scene… the crowds were a bit overwhelming in places. People were decked out in orange everywhere we went… Vicki was nice enough to provide us with orange shoelaces… apparently my ginger hair wasn’t quite festive enough for the occasion. Overall though it was a lot of fun and a great spectacle to see, and my photos don’t do it justice at all.

On April 28th, I was in Amsterdam. After another wonderful brunch at the hotel and working on finishing the slides for my conference presentation, I spent my afternoon at the Van Gogh museum.

Not everyone is a Van Gogh fan, but I generally always have been because I was fascinated by the way his art form changed so drastically as did his sanity. One thing I learned was how to say his name properly rather than the American-ized “van-go”… instead it is van-gough, in a very Dutch cough-ish way.

I was very lucky in visiting the museum during this visit, because the visiting collection included much of the rest of his work including Starry Night. I was most fascinated by the fact that Van Gogh created mockups of most of his work, in the form of drawings and letters and journal entries. Why is this fascinating? Well, because it’s what web developers do today. Michaelangelo obviously did this with various sculpture drafts in working his way up to David, but it has never really occurred to me that painters did this as well with diagrams and drawings of what they were planning.

As is this case with most great museums, photography was not allowed so there’s not much for me to show.

For dinner, Peter, Nikolai and I had dinner with a local developer. The first place we met was not open, so we meandered around a bit until we found a surprisingly excellent Thai restaurant. We walked around for a while and found an interesting Belgian bar with eclectic American music, and then called it a night.

On April 27, 2009, I woke up and had an amazing breakfast buffet at the Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky. Their breakfast feast puts to shame almost any other brunch out there.

During the morning, I caught up on work and did a very small amount of shopping and exploring. I retrieved my badge for SpringOne and attended a session of two before heading over to Nikolai’s place to meet up with Peter Higgins. I don’t speak until April 29th, so I was more focused on tonight’s Dojo Beer event.

We met up at De Balie and had a drink or two before walking a while and eventually settling on a decent restaurant for dinner. After dinner we walked around to a few other pubs before calling it a night.

Overall, today was a fun day in Amsterdam filled with discussions about Dojo and JavaScript.

On April 26 2009, Nikolai Onken met me at Schiphol airport, and we had a good chance to drive around Amsterdam so I quickly got a nice feel of the city. Amsterdam is a great city with a number of interesting historical buildings, and many many canals and bridges.

As it just a few days before Queens Day, the city was quickly gearing up for festivities, with a fair setup in the park right outside my hotel.

We went to Nikolai and Vicki’s new place for a great dinner. Their building is brand new, so the elevator had a fair amount of tagging on temporary boards protecting the elevator from people moving in. We added our own Dojo tag:

After a great dinner, I found my way back to the hotel via the tram system. I am staying at the Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky, the conference hotel for the SpringOne conference where I am speaking about Dojo. The people in Amsterdam seem a bit more reserved and shy than in Australia and New Zealand, which surprised me a bit given that this is Amsterdam after all.