Two stories from SF Gate really hit home today:

In the first, two reporters left the Claremont Hotel in Oakland at 6:30 in the morning, bound for a hotel in Los Angeles. One drove to SFO, where they had a ticket to fly down to LAX and then rent a car to the hotel. the other set off down 580 to I-5 and drove the 380 miles.

Guess who got there first? Here's a hint. 2/3rds of United's flights from San Francisco to Los Angeles are either over a half-hour late or are cancelled altogether. This is one of the reasons Southwest pulled out of SFO entirely earlier this year. I love flying from Oakland to Burbank on Southwest. It's faster, friendlier, cheaper, and much more reliable.

Incidentally, one day when I'm feeling long-winded, I'll tell you the story about my hell trip from LAX to SFO to Oakland Airport to home, and how it took 7 hours from start to finish, with an airporter, a bart ride, a bart-airport shuttle, and a truck plowing into Terminal Two all in the mix.

In the second story, they investigate the sorry state of undergraduate advising at UC Berkeley, where you don't get anything if you don't ask for it (and wait in line), and how even the brightest students get lost in the system because they assume someone up there is watching them. This really epotimises the problems I have with UC Berkeley, and I'm glad that it's getting some attention. I will say though, that overcoming the problems Berkeley poses trained me more for the 'real world' than any class I took.