Rubénerd!

What started as a mere observation regarding the obvious cuddliness of the Airbus A380 resulted in the this tweet from @johncarneyau, the tweet below from @DrRachie, a Google search and the above plushie!

@Rubenerd it's totes your fault I googled this! bit.ly/HL8Pru bit.ly/HL8ODU #want #huggableA380 @johncarneyau

I'd had a pretty difficult day, but this made me grin from ear to ear... in public! :D Who says Twitter is nothing but people complaining?

How to further destroy a brand, show how utterly and bafflingly out of touch you are, and create a subject that generates video parodies in less than 12 hours, within weeks of grounding your entire fleet over a pay dispute after your CEO rewards himself with millions. It's genius.

To enter tell us 'What is your dream luxury inflight experience? (Be creative!) Answer must include #QantasLuxury.TCs http://t.co/WDTO0FKG

Better get Cale Sandle Lands on this one, or whatever that git's name is. Personally, I wouldn't mind some new pajamas, though I don't know how they'd compare to the Singapore Airlines ones. Those are some fluffy garments, let me tell you.

UPDATE: SMH is referring to the incident as a hijacked hashtag. Class.

The reasons behind the grounding of all Qantas aircraft aren't nearly as interesting or precedent than the flaw in our transport infrastructure this whole farce has exposed.

I've been writing essays and reports all day, so in lieu of a more detailed post I'll merely say: I can haz high speed rail now?! Australia has several of the most crowded air lanes in the world; high speed rail wouldn't replace air travel, but it'd sure relieve some of the strain. Not that it'll ever happen.

In the meantime, Singapore Airlines is infinitely better anyway, as I've always said. Not that I'm biased or anything. Photo by Phillip Capper.

Does this Qantas greeting card make no sense... or is it just me?

It was probably just me

From time to time I check my Gmail which -- now that I use PGP and my own hosted mail -- has been relegated to the role of receiving email from newsletters, site registrations and other such disposable crap so I don't have to handle it on my primary address. Handle... that's a bit of a pun, as you'll read in a second. Or however long it takes for you to read posts like this, it could very well take longer. Handling.

So I was checking my aforementioned junk email account like a good little slave, and I got an electronic Christmas greeting card from Qantas. As with all their electronic communications they never include the intended message, but rather a brief hello proceeded by a link to follow.

Hello Ruben

As 2010 draws to a close, we would like to wish you and your family a wonderful festive season. From all of us at Qantas, please enjoy this message as we share the spirit of the season.

Find out more at the link below.

[Some super long, narly link]

The link is the drink

Clicking the link, I was directed to a festive web page loaded up with... Flash. Making an exception for it in NoScript, the page loaded and I was presented with a perplexing video of a 747 having cargo unloaded, then loaded again. It looks just like any other movie player with a timeline and a pause button. Once the movie had finished, the player faded out and a thank you message appeared.

While the latter was touching, I haven't the foggist idea what the video was supposed to be for. There were no Christmas or other holiday images anywhere, no people in fuzzy red and white hats, and despite watching the whole clip in anticipation of a Santa popping out or reindeer being offloaded from cargo pallets... there was nothing. Just a video of baggage handlers and bags being unloaded and loaded from planes.

Check out the link for yourself if you so wish, and tell me if I'm missing something. I have no idea what's going on!

Well actually I do know what's going on, their marketing department wants me to talk about Qantas. Mission accomplished! Speaking of which, how funny are Trent 900s, I'll bet Rolls Royce aren't getting any confusing Christmas greeting cards from Qantas.

While I've been able to unsubscribe from most email newsletters because they either offer an RSS/Atom equivalent or because they're pointless, some contain personal information which can't obviously be syndicated in the clear. I submit that of these remaining newsletters, Qantas is guilty of sending the most useless ones!

Aside from removing the URIs and whitespace, this is verbatim:

Hello Ruben
Welcome to the March edition of the Qantas Frequent Flyer eNewsletter.

Articles include:
- Win four seats to South Africa with the Qantas Socceroos
- Did you know?
- Latest news
- Member specials and exclusives
- Use your points at the Store
- Do this and more at qantas.com
- Your Account details

To view the articles and latest offers in full, view the online version. To view a full list of the e-mail types you're currently subscribed to, or to unsubscribe, log in to Your Profile at qantas.com. [URI REDACTED] To unsubscribe from "Points Balance and e-Newsletter" only, click here to update your preferences. [URI REDACTED] Otherwise, please do not reply to this email.

Privacy Statement [URI REDACTED]
FAQs [URI REDACTED]
Contacts [URI REDACTED]
Qantas [URI REDACTED]

Qantas Airways Limited ABN 16 009 661 901

Aside from the parts I highlighted in bold, it's the same text, every single month! Despite the subject line being "March points balance and program news" they don't mention how many frequent flier points I've received nor do they give me any news.

As with their service in general, Singapore Airlines newsletters are far more useful. Perhaps Qantas is just steamed that they're never been my first choice... as reflected in my frequent flyer points :P.

If I had posted this entry before my praise for Unicomp (Kudos to Unicomp), it would have been entry 1787, a particularly onerous number considering troubles at Boeing with their latest generation 787 Dreamliner. A sub-par segue I admit, but I did think it was spooky.

After yet more delays, Qantas have cancelled their order for 15 of the medium range, energy efficient airliners and have deferred their order for Jetstar, their low cost subsidiary. From Flightblogger:

The news came early this morning in Sydney, that Australia's largest airline, Qantas had made significant changes to its 787 order, deferring the 15 787-8s it was supposed to receive starting in mid-2010 for Jetstar, while [cancelling] 15 additional 787-9s scheduled for delivery in 2014 and 2015.

Qantas management claim this has nothing to do with the repeated delays for the 787, instead citing troubling economic times as the reason. I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt on this one, but I can't help but think these delays did have some bearing on their decision. On the other hand as a regular air traveller I would take designs thoroughly safety tested over well timed releases any day of the week!

While ultimately I'd much prefer to have high speed trains replace the bulk of air travel because they'd use less energy and would be more comfortable and fun, I think the 787 Dreamliner is a remarkable plane. If you haven't followed it's development, the fuselage is the first to be fabricated largely out of composite materials which is more lightweight and stronger than aluminium, and the uniquely shaped GE engines give similar thrust with less fuel consumption. We're really looking at the future here, at least I hope we are.