I don't travel enough or consistently use the same services to build up enough miles or points to do anything.  I have a few here and a few there, but none of them add up to anything.  I had a few points on an American Express card, so I decided to move them to my Continental OnePass account to try to get them to add up to something useful.  I went through Continental's web-based process to do this, but I received the following error: 

We're sorry, but a minimum transfer of 2,000 Membership Rewards points is required. You have 2,240 Membership Rewards points in your Membership Reward account. 

Please try again once your Membership Rewards account has at least 2,000 points.

I read this about 17 times to see if I was missing something.  I even tried the process a few more times to make sure it wasn't a random glitch.  Finally, I decided to email customer support and ask them for some advice.  I've actually had some good experiences emailing customer support at various airlines and rewards programs, so I had moderately high expectations.  Here's what I said: 

I'm trying to transfer some rewards points from American Express to my OnePass account.  This is the error message I received.

We're sorry, but a minimum transfer of 2,000 Membership Rewards points is required. You have 2,240 Membership Rewards points in your Membership Reward account.

Please try again once your Membership Rewards account has at least 2,000 points.

I'm no mathematician, but I was under the impression 2240 is more than 2000.  Am I missing something here?

I could've been infinitely meaner with something like this, so I stuck with a little humor/sarcasm.  I was hoping some geek in tech support would get the email and thank me for being the highlight of their day.  Instead I got this: 

Dear Mr. Hosier:

Please contact American Express Membership Rewards at 800-297-3276 for information regarding transfers.

Regards,

Belinda Harris
OnePass Partner Liaison Representative

Ah, progress.  "We're stupid and can't program our website to do math correctly, so contact someone else entirely because I didn't even read your whole email."  Thanks, Belinda.  You've been such a big help. #business

I'm planning on starting my own airline in a few years.  Here's how a typical flight will work: 

- No assigned seats.  The best seats will go to the people who got there earliest and/or fastest.  Sorry grandma and fat people, but I'm sure you could get a ride on one of those crazy beeping carts that doesn't stop for bi-peds like me. 
- No first class.  What better way to differentiate between classes of people than by publicly displaying how much money they pay for things. 
- No food or drinks will be served.  What is this, a restaurant? 
- No peanuts or pretzels will be handed out.  What are we, monkeys? 
- No flight attendants.  Figure things out for yourself.  Buncha idiots. 
- No seat belt instructions.  Honestly, if you can't buckle that stupid seat belt, you have bigger problems to take care of than surviving the experience of falling from the sky at 300 mph from 30,000 feet in a tin can strapped to a removable cushion. 
- No pilot talk.  Nobody cares how fast or high we're flying.  And nobody likes to hear the deafening voice of a stupid pilot who doesn't understand how a microphone works. 
- No cell phone use while on the plane.  The person picking you up can wait 3 minutes for you get off the plane before you call to tell them, "Hey, we just landed.  We're on the runway.  We're taxiing to the terminal." 

Thank you, and enjoy your flight. #travel

I have a theory that the Palm brand of smartphones and PDAs is on its way out.  They essentially created a whole new market by making the first Palm Pilots, enabling people to store and organize information digitally without dealing with a computer.  And as they developed better technology and software, their devices became more and more useful.  My Treo 650 is a great example of this.  It's essentially a handheld computer combined with a phone. 

The problem with all this is that Palm is losing market share, and fast.  Just a few years ago, there weren't many choices of smartphones.  There was a Palm model, some sort of ultra-expensive Siemens model, and a failure of a Windows model.  Now, there are a plethora of good Windows models to choose from, and Palm is essentially in the same place as they were 3 years ago.  I don't think it helped their case when they released a smartphone that ran Windows software.  And with the abundance of Windows models comes an abundance of software and addons.  Plus, Windows Mobile feels pretty much exactly like normal Windows.  Palm doesn't make operating systems for computers, so they're already at a loss in that market.  But choosing between a Windows feel and a Palm feel is making it harder and harder to choose Palm. 

Palm used to be cool like Apple and Linux because it was a sort of underdog.  It had cool applications that performed simple yet useful functions, and nothing could compete with it.  Now Windows is competing with it, and I think Windows won.  Unless Palm can introduce something that blows the competition away, I think they'll be stuck with being the 3rd-place handset maker that also used to design handheld operating systems. 

Update (2007-05-07 9:28pm):  To clarify, I think Palm as a software company is dead, but Palm as a hardware company is still alive and will continue to live. #technology

Have you ever reached into a bag of candy and magically pulled out every color?  I just did that with a bag of jelly beans.  Man, life is good. #food