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Ryanair Sucks

I am just back from the airoport.
I bought some time ago a return ticket with Rayanair to Rome, going on the 4th August, and return on the 19th of August. Well, long story short I needed to change my going there ticket. I am no longer going with Ryanair to Rome, but to Athens, passing some time in Greece and coming back still with Ryanair on the 19th.

So I tried to move my first flight to another date. I know for sure I will go to Rome for Christmas, so moving it to the 21st of December seemed the best thing. You can’t actually do it online because the system would not accept a going ticket (21st of December) later than the return part of the ticket. I thought, fine, it sounds like something that really needs an operator.

And the operator just confirmed me the same thing. We can’t move a going part of a flight later. We can’t twist a flight around making what was the coming back the going, and adding a flight after while deleting the first.

Those things make me boil, it sounds like machines are in charge.

The crazy thing is that if I had bought the ticket as two separated flights I would have paid the same and had the possibility to change them. Crazy, eh! And ths limit is a total nonsense imposed by some wanker programmer, who imposes on other useless limitations.

So the first take away message is: when you buy a ticket alway buy each separate flight as a stand alone flight, and never buy two tickets as a return ticket. You never know when you might need to change the ticket.

As I was discussing the issue with my collegues, I was further told that when you buy a return ticket you still pay double taxes on each credit card transaction, so you are really paying the same. And then I was told other stories of how Ryanair handled everybody much worse. From mother who are required to submit the babies trolley as a “outsized” package. While in all other companies they can go with the trolley up to the plane and are then uploaded in a place where they can easily taken back. How then they have to walk with baby, handluggage and baby carseat to the plane (which in Dublin is about 1 km, sweet). And so on.

So generally the agreed wisdom from the office is:
never fly with Ryanair when you have a choise, and if you don’t have a choise wonder if your flight is really necessary.

MathMl: sorry for the mess.

In those last days the blog has been up and down, on and off, all the time. It was my fault. I was trying to perfection something that was already ok. I was trying to use the mathml plugin. It is a pretty plugin, and provided that you only post math formulas, one formula per line, and nothing else; provided that everybody looks at them with your font unabled firefox last generation; provided that no one ever, under any circumstance (I’nt not kidding folks !) opens the blog with an I.E. … then it does pretty graphic which seem very very similar to the professional formula in professionist texts. Albeit generally less correct.

The fact is that this bloody plugin transform your html page into an xml page. So anything which is not ok, any little fart of any other plugin, any error you might have done 15 monts ago, any “com’on who bothers now”, “who will notice”, will come back and hunt you.

In my case I had to go through all the posts to clean them. Clean the <p> and the </p>; clean the <div> and the … yes you got it, the </div> clean the *gasp* <em> opened in one paragraph, and closed in another! All this just to make sure that I could read the 3 forumula (three) that I wrote in 15 months of blogging in a pretty format. Then today, as I was chatting with a friend bragging about my new found closeness with maths symbols, I discovered in horror that not only they were not rendered correctly on his machine (…of course, the ignorant did not have the pretty fonts), but no automatic message was telling him where to get the font, and IE was committing suicide upon sight of my page. That was too much, I inserted back the errors, undo my previous changes, and now I am going to disinstall mathml. I might make a pic of the formula and insert that instead, or make a small php popup page. But no Math Ml for this blog.

Sorry folks!
Thank you Math Ml,
it was nice until it lasted.

Pietro

Mind Map Out of Order… – Fixed!

The mind map maker is at the moment out of order. This due to Joshua, who is trying to fix a minor problem with the delicious API. Please for the present time DO NOT make new mind maps (and if you do do not complain if they come up like mine).I will let you know when the situation is fine again.

In the meantime, why not spending some time reading others mind map? You can bookmark a mind map that you like using the tag ‘delimap‘, and as other tags the most important tags in that mindmap. Here are mine, for example.

Update: The mind map has been fixed, thanks to Joshua who promptly responded.

Thanks,
Pietro