I finally received a response from Senator Patty Murray last week. It was not what I’d hoped for, to say the least:

Thank you so much for contacting me regarding the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) new security methods at airports. I appreciate hearing from you on this important subject.

I share your concerns regarding the need to balance between national security and civil rights. As you know, the TSA has continually adapted their policies and implemented new technology to help thwart those who seek to do harm to our nation. The most recent security measures added include full body advanced imaging machines and enhanced pat-down procedures. These procedures are aimed at preventing attacks like the attempted shoe bomber Richard Reid or the Christmas day bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. I believe it is critical that we continually adapt our policies and practices to respond to these threats. But I have also been in contact with airport officials about ways to reduce the impact on passengers.

Again, thank you for contacting me. Rest assured, as the 111th Congress moves forward, I will keep your views in mind. If you would like to know more about my work in the Senate, feel free to sign up for my weekly updates at http://murray.senate.gov.updates.

Sincerely,

Patty Murray
United States Senator

“I believe it is critical that we continually adapt our policies and practices to respond to these threats.” How about we continually adapt our approach to best serve our travelers? There’s a concept. And, you know, it’s being shown all over that the new procedures do NOT WORK.

The TSA’s approach is a placebo, at best, and I feel Sen. Murray (who I voted for!) is a disappointing party-line parrot on this issue.

Posting may be a bit light because things are always a bit of a madhouse in Anchorage, plus the travel hours are insane. Here, have some Bob and Doug Mackenzie to tide you over. “Alaska is like Hawaii.” ::snort::

This year, I started a new tradition, making that same expedition with my extended family – mom, Mary, Cheri and Ben this time around.

We headed across Snoqualmie pass, then up through beautiful rural Blewett pass toward Leavenworth.

We stopped at my favorite Prey’s fruit barn for apples and pears – 40 pounds each for me, I make lots of apple and pear butter. They always have amazing varieties of both – giant Sekai-Ichi, super sweet Ambrosia and crispy Winter Banana apples, and Flemish Beauty, Stark Rimson and Speckles pears.

Then on into Leavenworth. Ben noted that Wikipedia lists Leavenworth’s Oktoberfest as the second most popular in the world, behind only Munich. I’d believe it, it was a madhouse. The highway was a parking lot and the town was wall to wall people. There were hundreds of patient festival-goers in line at every food venue, festival music floating overhead, and lederhosen- and dirndl-clad herrs and frauleins everywhere.

Since we are not beer (or is that bier?) drinkers, we had to be satisfied with a long, long wait for a beer brat and potato salad and wandering the various crowded shops.

We gave up fighting the crowds after a while and headed home on Highway 2, Stevens Pass. The fall color was glorious in the late afternoon sun; it was a beautiful day.

Autumn is my favorite season – I’m thankful I got to celebrate it outdoors today with some of my favorite people. Tomorrow I’ll be making apple butter and preserving a bit of the season for the rest of the year.

Note that there are two areas of Priceline – the full rate travel section which functions like Travelocity or Expedia, and the name-your-own-price bidding section. The site will often redirect you to the full rate section so keep track of which part of the site you’re on.

Basic Priceline: How does it work? You select a city, a zone within the city, and a class of hotel and submit a bid, naming your own price. You don’t get to choose the hotel in advance – if your bid is accepted you find out the hotel you got upon acceptance. You provide your credit card when bidding, it books when the system accepts your bid, and there are no changes and no cancellations.

This is to the hotel’s benefit because they can sell their unused inventory of rooms based upon expected occupancy. And it’s the user’s benefit because you can save a good deal of money.

There are sites that help with Priceline bidding strategy – the one I use is Bidding for Travel. The site can help with determining good bidding prices, hotels that typically come up on Priceline in a given city, and ways to rebid again within Priceline’s rules if your initial offer is declined.

Free Rebidding: When you bid on Priceline, if your bid fails, you typically have to wait 24 hours before Priceline will allow you to submit another price. However, Priceline will allow you to instantly resubmit another bid, if you loosen your requirements, for example, if you lower your star-level requirement or if you add extra regions to your bid.

Free rebidding is a technique that frequent Priceline users have developed to get the best price possible. Free rebidding strategy depends on the fact that not all Priceline “regions” contain the same distribution of hotels.

For instance, when bidding on a hotel in Seattle, Priceline will let you specify regions including Downtown/Pike Place, Seattle Center, Renton or Southcenter/Seatac. However, of these regions, only Downtown/Pike Place has a 4-star hotel affiliated with Priceline (You can check this manually on Priceline’s website or look at the lists on Bidding for Travel, but the latter is not authoritative.

A free rebid is when you add a region to your bid which is guaranteed not to change which hotels you are actually bidding on. For instance. To illustrate: Your initial bid is $75/night for a 4-star hotel in Downtown/Pike Place. You will be able to get a free rebid by adding Seattle Center to your list of acceptable regions. Since Priceline has no 4-star hotels in Seattle Center, this bid is functionally equivalent to your original bid – but Priceline will allow you to instantly submit this bid, since you have “loosened” your regional requirements.

Following this line of reasoning, and doing some research on the Bidding For Travel website, you should be put together a series of free rebids for a 4-star hotel in Seattle, such as this:

• $75/night for a 4* hotel in Downtown/Pike Place
• $80/night for a 4* hotel in Downtown/Pike Place or Seattle Center
• $85/night for a 4* hotel in Downtown/Pike Place or Seattle Center or Renton
• $90/night for a 4* hotel in Downtown/Pike Place or Seattle Center or Renton or Southcenter/Seatac

This series lets you try a sequence of bids in a row on the same region, hopefully getting you a bid that comes as close as possible to the “minimum acceptable” price that Priceline will accept. If $90 doesn’t work, you can wait 24 hours, and try again starting at $95. Of course, you can adapt the above strategy to 4-star hotels in any region by researching available hotels in that region.

Suggested Price: Priceline will often display a “suggested price” on hotels in the area you’re bidding. Disregard that – it’s usually far greater than the bid price that might be accepted. Research recently accepted bids on Bidding for Travel, or look up hotel rates on a full price travel site and start at 33-50% of the listed rate.

Priceline has also been known to very occasionally respond with a counteroffer. You don’t have to accept it – it may still not be the lowest price you can get. Many users have reported success with logging back in and using another free rebid that only increases the amount by 50-75% of the increase suggested in Priceline’s counteroffer.

Good luck – and happy traveling!

• Monday: Work all day, fly to Anchorage in the evening

• Tuesday: Get up at oh-dark-thirty for a project deployment, spend the morning providing customer support onsite, then the afternoon prepping for the next one.
• Wednesday: Get up at even earlier oh-dark-thirty for a second project deployment, then go back to bed. (Yeah!) Go in late, coffee in hand.
• Thursday: Work on budgets for next year’s projects. Fly from Anchorage, to Fairbanks, to Anchorage, where my flight to snowy, icy, Seattle is delayed. Make it to Seattle by midnight, and crash on my kind sister’s couch.
• Friday: Creep home slowly on icy roads, work a couple of hours, then take boys back over to Seattle to train station. Wander through awesome indie bookstore Elliott Bay Books, navigate skating rink roads to dinner date at Etta’s Seafood. (Mmm, crab cakes!)

This morning, after coffee and green chile omelets, I’m being lazy. If I could go *nowhere*, I would, but we’re expecting Snowpocalypse v.2, this time with 2 feet of snow and then freezing rain. I need to get groceries today if I’m going to get them at all. All in all, we’re supposed to be socked in with snow and freezing rain for the next week.

I can think of worse things than to be snowed in with my husband while my children are out of town.

Happy stormy solstice, all!

US airports installing the technology include:

TSA’s web site indicates that the technology will be used initially as a secondary screening measure, meaning that only those passengers who first fail the standard screening process will be directed to the X-ray area. Even then, passengers will have the option of choosing the backscatter or a traditional pat-down search.

The security agency says the machines will be effective in helping detect plastic or liquid explosives and other non-metallic weapons that can be missed by standard metal detectors.

The TSA indicates the X-ray scanning systems will be set up so that the image can be viewed only by a security officer in a remote location. Other passengers, and even the agent at the checkpoint, will not have access to the picture. TSA states that the agency will delete the raw images, but there is no law or regulation that prevents the agency from saving the original, detailed images.

Critics, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), say the machine constitutes an invasion of privacy as it can display graphic images of nude bodies and its use could pave the way to widespread abuse of the images taken.

In addition, enthusiasts for this technology are already talking about extending its use to other venues where screening might be desirable – subways, buses, federal/state buildings, even colleges and schools. The spread of this technology raises many additional concerns.

Personally, I dislike the technology and object to the invasion of my privacy. I feel that we’ve badly warped the “innocent until proven guilty” premise of our investigative and legal system and we treat everyone, equally, as criminals and terrorists.

I fly frequently, but I do not want to volunteer for an x-ray scan any more than I want my underwires groped or a latex-snapping strip search.

If we allow our fear to turn our airports and cities and into an armed police zone without privacy or freedom, then the terrorists have won and Big Brother is here.

Nadia was the embodiment of the connector, an immediate friend, what Tipping Point author Malcom Gladwell calls those amazing people who “link us up with the world … people with a special gift for bringing the world together.”

She was an Italian/Somalian woman, petite, with clear, caffe latte skin, beautiful long braids, a brilliant turquoise shirt, expressive hands and flashing eyes. Her accent was musical and her laughter frequent.

As she boarded last, as a standby passenger, she needed help with her lead-heavy rollaboard, stuffed stem-to-stern with frozen fish. After we all got it hoisted, perhaps unwisely, into the overhead compartment, she settled in and began telling stories.

Nadia fit no stereotypes. As youthful and exotic as she seemed, she immediately boasted of her three-quarters white grandchildren, showing off pictures of twin, blond haired, blue-eyed three-year-olds. She said she’d asked for a DNA test before providing them with financial and practical support, and yep, they were her descendants.

As the beverage cart rumbled by, she asked, “Do you have any Courvoisier?” She shrugged, and grinned sideways at me. “I’ve been stuck in Dutch Harbor for two years, and tonight I’m going to treat myself.” She bought the only two bottles of cognac on the plan.

She’d been working in the Aleutian Islands as a licensed security officer, inspecting personnel documentation and cargo. She was a polyglot, speaking Somalian, Italian, Spanish and Arabic, and had worked for Health and Human Services as a translator. She left social services after receiving one too many death threats after translating a denial of benefits decision.

She fumed about religion. “God doesn’t want his followers to kill people!” She blamed much war and strife in our world on it. Interestingly enough, she was a Jew, through her mother.

The young man in front of her was a tall, skinny Sudanese Christian refugee who’d fled persecution in his primarily Muslim homeland. He, too, had been in Dutch Harbor, working on a processing boat. Nadia teased him, calling him “Mr. Blue-Black” because of his intensely black skin. Nadia congratulated him; in spite of the lack of any education available to him in Sudan, he was now headed for Western Washington University, showing off his new student ID with great pride.

She spoke a little bit about the situation in Africa – the war-torn nations, religious persecution, human rights issues, extreme poverty, and complete lack of health care for all but the elite. After many years in the US, she was still sending much of her income home to her parents, sisters, brothers where it made all the difference in the world – she proudly showed me the telegrams.

In front of me sat Jamal, an immaculately-dressed African American financial planner in a custom made brown suit and matching top hat. He was on his way home from vacation; I’m sure he was dreading his return to the office, as this was the evening of the worst stock market crash in the last 50 years. It didn’t show. From the minute he boarded he was cheerful, kind, the consummate gentleman. He helped those around them with their luggage, called the flight attendants “Ma’am”, listened attentively to his seatmates, and was fascinated by the story of the two immigrants.

After some conversation, Nadia recognized him; he’d volunteered at a shelter near her DHS office, so they traded downtown Seattle stories.

Towards the end of the flight, she pulled out a lunch bag and shared some of her cooking with the small group around her – samosas (spicy stuffed fried rolls) and injera (ethiopian flatbread). They were delicious – the samosas, especially, filled with a spicy cumin onion lamb mixture.

Nadia, with her connection-making, story-telling, people-charming magic turned what could have been a boring flight, spent reading a book or watching a video, into a fascinating evening of expanded horizons and interesting people.

What was more striking to me, as a fledgling writer, was how she became the center of a web of stories – each person’s uniquely fascinating tale interconnecting because of this one evening’s shared flight.

It’s a special, modified Boeing 747 large cargo freighter called the Dreamlifter. Four of them were built to carry aircraft parts and subassemblies in support of the 787 Dreamliner project.

(OK, I travel frequently enough to have many travel pet peeves – but I’m sharing this one today.)

I really detest it when the flight attendants make their sales pitch on the airline’s mileage plan credit card. It annoys me on many levels.

If it were a telemarketer calling me with the same spiel, I’d hang up immediately. I don’t have that option when I’m on the plane, I’m a member of a captive audience, and hearing is the one sense you can’t turn off.

I already paid a pretty penny to be a member of that captive audience, and I shouldn’t be subject to intrusive advertising while I’m picking through my .75 oz of pretzels, crouched in my tiny, uncomfortable seat with the guy in front of me reclined into my lap. It’d be different if I received a discount for being willing to be bombarded with ads, because I didn’t. I wouldn’t take that option!

I especially hate it when it’s a night flight and they wake the whole plane up early to make their sales pitch. Yeah, I’m sure that’s real effective.

The airline needs to consider their demographic. I’d guess that 99% of those flying booked their ticket using a credit card; having access to credit is an entry criteria for air travel. In my case, I’m a frequent flyer. I have to listen to their sales garbage on a really frequent basis. I clamp down on a strong desire to trip them when they come down the aisle – twice this time – waving credit card applications around like they’re major league baseball tickets.

The Alaska Airlines marketing pitch is currently quite misleading, with a hard sell on the “receive 20,000 mileage points, enough for a free ticket anywhere Alaska airlines flies!” Those who read industry news know that AK Air is raising their mileage ticket award threshold to 25,000 points later this fall, so the whole hard sell seems slimy to me.

You know, I already have one of their freaking credit cards. The flight attendants even addressed the existing cardholder issue this time around, with “You can get the mileage bonus if you apply for a business card in addition to your personal card.”

Let me get right on that. What the U.S. economy surely needs now, in this recession, is more access to credit and more people spending themselves into debt.

I’m hopping on a plane to Denvention 3, the world science fiction convention. The lovely and gracious Anne is putting me up for the weekend, and I’m meeting up with Janiece and Tania while I’m there, so I’m looking forward to some great UCF bonding time.

What do I want out of the weekend? See a couple of famous authors speak – and even get a chance to meet them (Lois McMaster Bujold & John Scalzi, for example). Pull up a quiet table in the bar and watching the weird people of the world go by. Socialize a lot with fellow science fiction fans. Relax and enjoy not being hyperscheduled.

I have a personal rule about blogging. I guess you could call it an acknowledgement of the golden rule, or karma. While I might describe particularly strange goings-on – and take and post pictures of interesting people and places, with permission – I am not going to surreptitiously take pictures of the truly weird and post them here. (Believe me, in downtown Seattle I see plenty.) I wouldn’t want to have my picture taken and posted, however anonymously, in a stupid moment – and I won’t do that to someone else.

I am set up to mobile blog from my BlackBerry, so I’ll be doing that as I can for the next couple of days. See you at the con!

Update:

Road reading: Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson. I really like Stephenson, and I’ve somehow missed this one. At 1152pp, it should keep me busy for a long time, even at my hyper-fast reading rate.

Update 2: First class upgrade! w00t!