Geeky Traveller

Via AdHack, the folks at Southwest Airlines are getting into the user-generated content game. They’ve launched a contest with an abnormally long URL, http://www.southwestwannagetaway.com/:

Ever had, or witnessed a Wanna Get Away moment? It

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This is a review for ReviewMe, first discussed on my personal site last month. The subject of the review pays me to review their product or service, though I’m under no obligation to provide a positive review.

One other note: I’m using the rel=”nofollow” tag for ReviewMe companies, so that they’re not buying my link juice along with their review.

HotelReservations.com looks like your bog-standard reservations site. It’s not particularly attractive. Compared to say, Kayak, its interface is busy and generic. That’s a bit moot, though, if it provides better deals and is easier to use than other accommodation sites.

It’s not a very exotic locale, but I live there, so I’m pretty familiar with the hotel landscape. Let’s compare the prices we get from a search for a two adult, two night stay in January. We’ll compare HotelReservations.com with two services I regularly use, Expedia and Kayak. Prices are for the first night of the stay, a Wednesday, the most basic room option and are in US dollars:

That’s a small sample, but I don’t see any reason to switch from my trusted and reliable booking services. For a second test, I picked a small town in BC. There were 4 results for a search for similar dates for Fernie, BC in HR.com. That’s the same as Kayak, but compares poorly with 19 results from Expedia.

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Susan Stellin wrote a piece for the New York Times about the sorry state of wireless internet access in hotel rooms:

Will Allen III, an organizational development consultant who travels most weeks, attributes growing connectivity problems to the shift to wireless access, estimating that he has trouble with Wi-Fi service in hotels about 50 percent of the time, in contrast to 5 percent of the time with a wired connection.

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The folks at Lonely Planet kindly sent me a couple of new books to read and review. Additionally, I recently bought one of my one that’s worth mentioning. Here are some quick and dirty reviews:

Getting Out: Your Guide to Leaving America – I first read about this book on Boing Boing. We’re considering moving somewhere tropical next year, and we needed an overview of destinations for Westerners. There are few on or offline resources that I could fine, and this book came close. We’re not American, and the move isn’t permanent, but the book has plenty to recommend it. It’s got overviews of 50 destinations, and most have first-hand accounts by ex-pats living in those regions. There’s also a bunch of material on foreign citizenship, taxes, work permits and so forth. It definitely helped us narrow down our list of possible destinations.

Micro Nations – This is a Lonely Planet book about ‘home-made nations’, the most famous of which is Sealand. The book features those corners of the world where people (mostly eccentric or just plain nuts) have claimed land as their own. In some cases that land is a flat in London, in other cases it’s a corner of Australia or Antarctica.

There are many interesting stories here, but the book doesn’t tell them the right way. It’s structured like most travel guides, with each destination broken down into ‘facts for the visitor’, ‘things to do and see’ and so forth. This formalized structure can’t respond very well to the peculiarities of the faux nations. And besides, we can’t visit it’d be very difficult to visit most of them anyway. I’d have much preferred a book of essays or stories instead.

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Boris writes about an intriguing new service called MP3tunes. It’s basic premise is that you can make your music library available via streaming, download or synching to any computer, anywhere:

It's only $40US/year for an unlimited size locker and syncing between unlimited computers (there is a free 1GB account that you can experiment with). This was a Flickr-size investment, so I decided to just go for it. On paper, it seems pretty perfect. Here's what MP3Tunes does:

• It keeps your playlists and music in sync with a desktop sync client
• You can selectively sync subsections (solution for my laptop!)
• Sync can be bi-directional or uni-directional 
• You can access/stream your music from the web
• There is talk of a mobile client for Symbian Series 60 

Sounds pretty much perfect. The *only* downside is that protected/DRM'd music can only be played on authenticated devices — i.e. no streaming of DRM music.

I have maybe 5 DRM’d tracks in my 6349 songs, so the DRM thing isn’t an issue for me.

We’re going to move next year, and I was considering what to do with my aging CD collection. Though I’ve acquired a thousand songs over the past couple of years, only a few dozen of them have arrived via new CDs. I’ve ripped all the CDs at a high bit-rate, so I’m trying to get my head around selling or otherwise disposing of my physical music media.

Knowing that my music is backed-up in some fancy server farm would make it easier to dispense with all that plastic.

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I was recently in Ottawa, and needed to print something out from the Westin’s business centre. To their inestimable credit, they had installed Firefox on their public use computers. I happily used it to access my Writely Google Documents and Spreadsheets account. That’s the first time I’ve seen a really big, non-technology organization using Firefox.

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As you can no doubt tell, something’s gone deeply pear-shaped here at GT. I’ve got my excellent hosts at Bryght looking into it, and we’ll return to normal operations as soon as possible. In the meantime, if you can make them out, let me point you to some other sites in the sidebar.

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The folks at Intel sent me a Sony Vaio laptop to kick around for a month or so. I was pretty happy with it, as my 4-minute video review (recorded with the laptop’s on-board video camera) indicates:

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Dethroner points to a review of a half-dozen bags by Slate’s Seth Stevenson:

The ideal bag will fulfill three roles: 1) You can wear it to work every day, transporting all those books and papers; 2) It must be designed to hold and protect a laptop computer; 3) It works as an airplane carry-on for business trips, keeping your work easily accessible on the plane and your boarding pass and passport easily accessible in the security line.

His favourite is the Zero Halliburton (more or less unrelated to that other Haillubrton) 4″ Deluxe Briefcase. It may be practical, but it doesn’t look very cool if you ask me. I’m with Dethroner, who’s looking for the perfect smallish brown leather bag to fit his 12″ laptop.

I’ve been using a Timbuk2 bag which I got free a while back. It’s all right, but I’d prefer something that’s a little smaller and looks a little fancier.

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The Wickaninnish Inn is a little slice of luxury heaven in one of my favourite spots on the planet–Long Beach on Vancouver Island. We’ve been there a few times, and it continues to rank as one of my top five accomodation experiences, ever.

Their website, though, was always a bit shoddy, and never truly reflected the awesomeness of the inn.

I recently got an email from them indicating that they’d revamped their site. I checked it out, and they’ve done a great job of both simplifying the site, and improving its aesthetic.

The cool bit, though, is the clever Flash implementation on the front page. It’s soundless, navigable, super-slick and gorgeous.

As it turns out, I know one of the guys at Wallop Creative, the design studio that redid the site. That had no impact on my response to the site–I learned that I’d surfed around for a few minutes.

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