point fu

I feel like lounges have made a lot of news lately: Delta's big c redit card access cutoff , Chase's posh new Sapphire lounges, Delta being forced into opening a competitor to United's fancy Polaris lounges... If everyone wants to be in one before they fly, won't we eventually end up at a point where the airport is entirely comprised of lounges ? But I digress… Over the years I've only mentioned lounges in passing – if something was particularly good or bad, or if there was a good tip to pass on. They're largely all the same in my head as long as they have the basics in order. But what are the basics? Clearly the Delta zombies who will wait an HOUR to get into a lounge have a very different view of the world than I do.  Before I get to my own list of realistic lounge must-haves, can I just put an "item 0" at the beginning of this list -- i.e., The Dream List :      0. If you fly on ANA's A380 service from Hawaii to Japan in a premium cabin, you ...

 Just read this article and dang this is terrifying but not unexpected, sadly. The non-programmer summary is: airline employees and pilots can go thru the TSA unscreened if they have a special barcode or an employee number that's checked in real-time to be valid the company that runs the validation service for dozens of airlines didn't implement even the bare minimum, security 101 features like preventing SQL injection anyone with a web browser can access this database and not only view it, but add their own entries and allow themselves to pass thru TSA checkpoints and INTO AIRPLANE COCKPITS with no screening The white hats who found the problem quietly reported it, but it seems like only a very cursory fix was put into place. It really points a finger at a very weak link in the chain of our national airline security theater.

a little primer :)  Ok look, I normally hate these kinds of lists because they're full of things that any halfway intelligent person with a tiny bit of context should be able to figure out (eg, footpath = sidewalk). Or worse, they're full of "Crocodile Dundee" Aussie slang that I've never heard even once in my time there ("crikey", "fair dinkum", etc). Lastly, this is very Sydney-centric and I don't care if anything here doesn't apply in Perth or Coober Pedy. All that said, here's some Australian terms that threw this seppo for a loop (or at least made me laugh). When I'm really sad I'm... Seppo = American. It's rhyming slang: American > Yank > Tank > Septic Tank > add the "o" to it like Australians LOVE to do and you've got Seppo . Most of the "o" slang is pretty obvious, but the first time I encountered the word for 'devastated' it was in a text and i thought my friend was...