I have an upcoming trip to visit my Mom during the holiday season. Flights, of course, are ridiculously expensive, plus I had to juggle my work schedule. So I made my arrangements a few weeks back. It was a rather unusual round trip where I take different major airlines each direction.
Then a week or so back I went to make a parking reservation at Preflight Airport Parking at BWI, which I've been using probably since 1998. (I've also made trips out of Dulles and Reagan.) Only I couldn't find it. Ir was bizarre; a few Internet queries didn't solve the mystery. There is a hub website for Preflight, but BWI was conspicuously missing without explanation. So I made alternative arrangements. I asked a work colleague who lived here for years and thought it was ridiculous to make reservations anyway and preferred the public lots. Long story short, I noticed today when I did a Google search, there was a promotional ad for Bullseye Parking at the head of the listings, and when I drilled down, I saw a familiar list of promoted amenities (e.g., daily newspaper, bottled water, etc.) and the street address seemed familiar. I still don't know the specifics but it looks like this location got spun off or purchased from the national chain. I don't know how I didn't stumble across it earlier.
The reason I mention parking is because I recall having to give estimates offsetting my flight times for the parking vendor. So among other things, Google automatically put (at least my trip out of BWI) on my calendar, and I've integrated my Google Calendar with my Thunderbird email client. I suddenly realized that I was staring at a 6 AM flight out, and I thought it was more like mid-morning. My Google calendar had the right time, and I double-checked with the airline.
It was fairly clear for some reason Thunderbird was offsetting the time zone for the Pacific Coast, not that unusual for high-tech items like PC's. I didn't query clearly enough to see a solution for my problem. Long story short: if you go to Tools/Options, there's a Config Editor button on the lower right. (You'll see a draconian warning of changing things at your own risk, sort of like when I had Lasik done, they warned of a risk of blindness.) Do a search on zone; (calendar.timezone.local). I then modified Los_Angeles to New_York. I then bounced Thunderbird and now my events had the expected scheduled time.
Then I had a weird experience with American Airlines when I clicked on My Trips and seemed to pull up no flights. It then seemed like I had to query using my name and the record locator, a fairly Procrustean approach, purely for the convenience of its own system.
