Yesterday there was a story on the news about voice being given to the thought of pay toilets on airlines. Now we're all certainly tired of fees and some airlines, like Southwest, are taking advantage of that to advertise their lack of fees.

An exchange this morning on the flight has me thinking about how we think about the airlines.

Economy Plus

For some background you need to understand Economy Plus. United has implemented this "tween" class. It is basically economy but for a fee you get seats with extra legroom. It costs more and you get something for it. The "extra" amount isn't as much as business class or first class, but it is a higher priced ticket. Generally these sections are the front of the economy section from the exit rows forward.

Just over a month ago, on December 10, Office Depot announced that they were closing several stores. Hardly the first to succumb a worsening market, Office Depot joined OfficeMax in announcing cuts that will leave additional workers looking for jobs.

The ink had barely dried on Office Depot's announcement when the dinging of my mail program played the new mail sound. There was the email from Staples asking "Will Office Depot closings affect you?" My initial thought was that this was a little bit of a cheap shot but would likely have some useful information. Instead upon opening the email it turned out that Staples was purely spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt. Far from offering solutions and providing information on how Staples might help, the email instead was designed to play on fears that Office Depot's troubles will cause my business to have problems.

For the second year running Drupal won Overall 2008 Open Source CMS Award in the Packt Publishing 2008 Open Source CMS Awards. With many great open source projects and several very good open source content management systems the award is even more meaningful.

"To win the Best Open Source CMS Award two years in a row is quite an achievement for Drupal," said Damian Carvill, Packt Spokesman. "In what were extremely close categories, with high quality finalists, Drupal's strength and power shone through for the judges. Particular praise was reserved for the development team's dedication to improving Drupal alongside building a loyal and passionate community, that has enabled its growth, adoption and advocacy. Congratulations from Packt both to the development team and to the community!"

I wrote recently about the terrible G-Technology customer service experience with my G-Drive Mini Triple. After getting it off my mind I figured it would be the last I'd write on the subject. However tonight I'm convinced that there must be a time-sync or time-warp on the thing to go along with the impressive heat sync.

Picking up where the story left off I'd since sent two separate email inquiries about the status of the case. One, two and then three days passed with nary a response. In fact I still haven't gotten a response. I did, however, get a new drive so consider the issue resolved. And then tonight the event leading me to believe there is a hole in the fabric of time around this drive. I received an email from the store that sold the drive telling me my drive shipped today. At least the FedEx number was correct and correctly showed the drive arrived over a month ago.

So I'm cautiously loading the drive with some data. Hopefully it's not gone for good this time.