Air France sucks!

September 10th 2015: my Mother (a "senior") is to fly back from the San Francisco area (where I live) to Mauritius Island (where she lives) with a 5-hour layover in Paris. Mauritius is pretty much at the antipodes of San Francisco; each flight (SFO -> CDG, CDG -> MRU) is about 10-11 hours long. This is a tough trip, even for me.

That morning she gets an email from Air France: AF83, from SFO to CDG, has been cancelled, she will fly the next day (9/11) on a replacement flight and will arrive one day late in Mauritius. No explanation whatsoever.

Let's summarize the disruption:
- her whole trip is delayed by 1 day
- Luckily she's staying with family in San Francisco. Did Air France arrange hotel nights for other passengers?
- the layover time in Paris increases from 5 to 10 hours
- the replacement SFO to CDG flight arrives in Paris at 6AM (Paris time, that is 9PM San Francisco time) instead of 11AM for the flight she had booked. Her replacement flight to Paris is basically a day flight in San Francisco time and she will have to wait 10 hours in CDG right when she's supposed to be sleeping. With the original flight she had booked she would have been able to sleep about 5 hours in the plane and she would have had much less time to spend in the airport.

Did Air France offer ANYTHING to soften the disruption? No.

We called Air France in the US, prior to her departure and asked if she could be given access to the Air France lounge in CDG so that she can rest (a really low cost minimal "favor", compared to paying hotel nights to stranded passengers...) . Answer: we can't do anything for you, you'll have to ask the ground crew in once in Paris. Once there, email from my mom: negative answer again - it's against the "rules".

Air France is losing money. With that kind of service, may they be wiped out, sooner than later.

Practical panniers for e-bike rear racks with thick tubes

I recently purchased a Benelli Classica e-bike which my wife uses for commuting.
Like many other e-bikes, its rear rack comes, for some reason, with very thick tubes: in this case, I measured a diameter of about 18mm.

This is well beyond what most common bike pannier brands, using clamps for attachment, can support. The standard limit tends to be around 12mm, with a few options up to 14-16mm.

What are the solutions?
Some pannier systems use straps (eg Thule) rather than clamps. Unfortunately in my case, the rack, more aesthetic than practical, could not fit them well (and hold the bag safely in place).

Changing the rack? Not obvious to me and possibly expensive.

The only solution I found: Ortlieb QL2.1. The standard clamps support up to 16mm tubing, but can be replaced with 20mm clamps (separate accessory #E193).

The Ortlieb QL3 system is limited to 10mm tubing with an accessory (#E195) that can only deal with 14mm tubing.
The Arkel system is limited to 15mm racks.

The Ortlieb 20mm clamps I got are a bit loose but I worked around this problem by applying a few layers of transparent surface guard tape on the rack where my wife hooks the clamps.

I did notify the e-bike maker; they were aware of the issue... Let's hope they stick to say 14mm max for their future products!

AT&T wireless pricing & monopoly

If you care a little bit about broad coverage, including outside of your city, AT&T and Verizon are pretty much the only cell phone providers where I live. I travel a bit and, until recently, Verizon CDMA phones were a "no go" (few countries in the world use compatible technology - this is changing with Verizon LTE phones). Basically, as a customer in capitalist America, I can choose between 1 maybe 2 providers. Weird, I though capitalism was about ferocious competition.

Let's look at AT&T's pricing policy. It's interestingly very close to Verizon's and both go in the same general direction: offer "more" (data usage, number of text messages, minutes of call...) for higher prices.

• Until 2011, you could get 200 text messages for $5. Now you must either pay 20c per message or buy a $20 unlimited texting plan. Great if you are indeed sending/receiving 1000s of messages per month, but really the cost of 200 messages only has increased from $5 to $20. To put things in perspective, text messages cost "nothing" to AT&T - way below than 20c per message: it's a cash cow.
• The new "mobile share" plans push the price bar higher for basic users. Old family plans are still around but for how long? The cheapest "mobile share" plan (1GB) with 2 smart phones is $130. You can get 70+20+20 = $110 with no "unlimited" texting. True you get less data (300MB + 300MB), no unlimited minutes (700 minutes)... but you can pay less just for what you need and you can add smart phone lines at $30 with an extra 300MB of data (instead of $45 for mobile share).

Basically options to control cost for customers are being pushed to the backstage and eventually eliminated.

I'm not complaining about AT&T: like all businesses it wants to get more $ from each of its customers and is "encouraging" them to spend more for features they may not necessarily need.

... But I can only point that in a truly competitive market, it would be very hard for a service provider to push that kind of policy without at some point being bitten by a competitor. This doesn't happen here: Verizon price points follow the same upward trajectory.

[Note: they are free alternatives to text messages (google talk...)!]