Bencredible

I used to fly a lot and as such I had around 100,000 NWA miles left in my account (I have used a bunch but I still had 100,000 left). When it was time to plan for ISDC 2009 I needed to do this on the cheap, so I went with my banked miles to get tickets on Northwest Airlines.

For those who don’t know me, I really, really dislike Northwest Airlines. The service is awful, the planes are old and crappy, the tickets are expensive and the overall experience is just plain bad. Alas in order to keep costs down this is a necessary evil, so NWA for us it is!

It is the night before our flights and we’re packing our luggage. Since we’ll be recording ISDC we have to bring a bunch of gear like cameras and whatnot. NWA has an *insane* $15.00 first bag fee, $25.00 second bag fee and a $125.00 third bag fee! So If I want to check 3 bags by myself it will cost me $165.00 in each direction just to get my luggage there! In our scenario we’re really only looking at $55 each way (or an additional $110 total) to get our bags there, but still! I thought you guys were merging with Delta so these wretched rules would go away! Nope.

My inexpensive trip, after all the stupid NWA fees and whatnot, will now cost me $315.00 plus 80,000 banked miles for the two of us to fly from MSP to MCO. Not that expensive, but I could have purchased SunCountry tickets for $200.00 round trip for the two of us, and that includes all of our baggage!

Well, I guess this is less of a story of how Northwest sucks and more a story of how I should have listened to my own advice. I knew they were bad going in, I just didn’t think that even with my miles it would end up costing me more. Here’s hoping that SunCountry can stay around in these hard economic times because I’m going to be flying them a lot more from now on. Oh, and they have really great service and airplanes too. Cheaper, better and nicer. What was I thinking buying NWA tickets???

Northwest Airlines: The worst way to start your trip.

The BBC aired a story about Spacevidcast! Well, actually, no. They aired a story about UStream and how freakishly awesome it is. The funny thing is that when the Spacevidcast screen shots pop up they start talking about how you should protect your children. HA! They also mention how low quality it is, then go one to show our HIGH DEFINITION COVERAGE of STS-125. Oh well. Click the picture below to watch, the segment starts about 2:20 in to the clip.

A huge THANK YOU to Crow River Coffee Company and PSB Satellite for allowing us to install this great C-Band dish and helping to set it up.  We could not have done it without you guys.

I am a terrible blogger. How long has it been since my last update? Wow! Well a lot has happened in the last 2 months, some of which I probably should not blog about.

On the Spacevidcast front a lot of really great stuff has been happening.  First we have live High Definition coverage of STS-125.  As far a I know we are the only Internet stream that is doing shuttle launches in HD.  Even NASA does not do that!  During the launch coverage we have some pretty stiff competition from SpaceFlight Now’s live web stream as well as from traditional TV.  For the first time we were able to crush most of our “competition” which was pretty cool.  Of course I don’t really view anyone as competition because I believe all ships rise with the tide and I’m excited to see more and more people trying to show off human space flight!  It was also nice to have the largest number of concurrent viewers though.  Made it feel like all of the work, pains and effort was worth it.

At the end of this month I’ll be leaving for Orlando!  The first part of the vacation has nothing to do with Spacevidcast and will be the first time I have had a real vacation in… years!  The second half will be for ISDC 2009.  We will have live coverage of ISDC 2009 streaming on Spacevidcast (as far as I know the only ones) and we will also be hosting a New Media panel.  To say I’m excited is an understatement.  I hope we’ll find some good sources there to help relieve some of the financial burden that is Spacevidcast.  Monetize or die. I would hate to see Spacevidcast die, I truly believe it is vitally important that we get humans psyched up about human space flight again, and fast!