Category Archives: personal

Travel Tip – Hotel and Airline prices

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Over at WebmasterWorld a member was suggesting that contacting hotels directly leads to the lowest price for a room. Not true. There's no magic bullet site online for cheap rates, you need to surf around and may often find a "consolidator" that is cheaper than the hotel itself. Hotels.com, Travelocity, and Expedia are major consolidators and there are hundreds of smaller ones. In Europe, for example, Venere may find you a cheap room.

Example: Last week I used a small flight consolidator called cheapseats.com to book Delta to Boston and paid about $100 less than the cheapest fare Delta had online at the same time.

This situation is common in travel because pricing is very market driven and surprisingly inconsistent both for flights and hotels.

As a travel publishing guy I know how some of the deals are cut and it's a very sloppy and counter-intuitive process where some consolidators will force properties to sell them blocks of rooms far below rack rate in exchange for a guarantee of selling those rooms. Hotels.com is notoriously unpopular as the top consolidator because they tend to squeeze great deals from properties in exchange for guaranteed volume and lots of bookings. Good for consumer, somewhat hard on profit margin for the properties.

If, at the last minute, the consolidator has a lot of rooms left they may sell them at rates far below what the hotel will charge if you call them. You especially see this in places like Vegas and big cities with Hotels.com. During a November Vegas trip I got the Hilton through (Travelocity I think) for about $55 which I think was under their own website rate, though during a March trip I found the best price for Oriental Palace at their own site – a fantastic $65 nightly for a nice room in the middle of the strip plus some buffets.

All that said I think the hotels are getting smarter and some provide a low price guarantee at their own websites, so you are certainly right that you should check the hotel site as well as other places.

Golfing…in space

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A Russian astronaut may get to drive a golf ball out into space as he orbits in a space station.   It is likely the ball would stay in orbit around the earth for some time, meaning the drive could measure hundreds of thousands of miles – maybe millions of miles.

If you'd suggested this to golfers back in 1900 I'd guessing they would have said you were insane.  

What unusual things wil we be up to in 2100?

Learning curves

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What if most task learning takes place very early in the learning process, with refinements and “expertise” coming later and at much greater cost in time involved in the task?

For example what if most of our driving skills come from the first 50-100 hours of driving? Interestingly this is the amount if driving time required to get a license in Oregon so the state seems to feel it’s “enough time” to drive safely, I’d agree and suggest this is the case for most task learning.

IF TRUE across many tasks, then I’d suggest we should be spending a lot LESS time teaching people refined skills because the return on that time investment goes way down as we continue. Rather we should be *introducing* kids to more things so they can choose which to pursue in depth later in life. This is done to some extent – I think more than in the 1950s – but I see little reason to push calculus on students who often lack basic investment math skills UNLESS they’ve chosen a career where calculus is important. There are not many of those, and you hardly close doors by substituting practical life skills for advanced math (or science, or literature) studies.

As adults we should focus on learning new approaches and information rather than refining our expertise in very restricted areas *unless* our life depends on that expertise. Though I’m not even sure in this latter case that broader learning won’t trump specialized learning in terms of producing a well rounded intellect capable of handling the varied and sundry tasks of the modern world.

guns or butter?

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This clever site offers some insight into the cost of the Iraq War in dollar terms.   Human costs are of course ultimately more important than money, but most people simply refuse to recognize that when you are talking about things like war and hunger the *human costs* often boil down to dollar costs.

You can save  LOT of people in the developing world by allocating a relatively small number of dollars, especially if they are spent on famine or health items. More about that later as politically and emotionally motivated spending is a fascinating examination of human irrationality.

The human death toll in Iraq (or even the total global WAR death TOLL) simply pales in comparison to the global hunger OR health tolls.   It's a factor of many thousands of preventable hunger deaths for every ONE (arguably NON-preventable) Iraq war death. 

Unlike most fiscal conservatives I simply stagger from the failures of the neocons when it comes to intelligent budgeting and ROI.    McCain, very much to his credit, was talking about this years ago and is talking about it now.  

People Always Love It Only

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I've found a new table tennis rubber sheet I really like with one of those funny, malapropesque Chinese names.    It's the "PALIO" CJ 8000 tension model.    PALIO means "People always love it only".  The numbers and other stuff might make some sense – I don't know.

But I do love my PALIO sheets and have ordered more.  At about 10.00 per sheet they are a third the cost of comparable German or Japanese rubber and so far feel about the same as the German equivalent.

I've GOT to get to China – both to see the changes, internet buzz, and to play some great table tennis with my Palio! 

Web 2.0 as the “generous” internet

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Over at O'Reilly's blog there is an excellent discussion about the nature of biz in a Web 2.0 world (why does the term Web 2.0 BOTHER so many people?  Get over it!)

Doc Searls seems to suggest that old style biz is selfish where new style is generous, sharing resources in a virtually unrestricted way.   One poster suggests, I think wrongly, that generosity comes after affluence.   Based on my experiences I'm often surprised that when I share ideas openly and honestly I build trust with people and that trust leads to opportunity *for everybody in the equation*.   Sure there is a *chance* that somebody will nab your idea, implement it better than you can, and do great thing.   But that is:

1) OK because ideas, even great ideas, are not a key component of change.  The key is a fully implemented great idea and is a much taller order. 

2) unlikely, because they are probably working on a new angle or different idea or implementation anyway.  At MashupCamp I was pleased and surprised how few people were even interested in doing some of the things I thought would make "great mashups" in the travel space.  Why?  Because they were busy with THEIR vision of the next big thing.  Cool, and the best part is that the collective intelligence in such a group, or in the internt community at large, leads to a sort of *collective* expanion of horizons and creation *even better* stuff than without the open exchanges.    I'd note that MSN's traditional failure to understand and harness this power may be their biggest impediment to moving ahead successfully in the new Web world.

What one should seek in the new "generous" internet are relationships and mechanisms (e.g. blogs, websites, wikis, wifi, free computers, etc, etc) that foster bigger and better ideas which in turn will foster bigger and better improvements to the global web, still a very immature system.

Somalia starves, nobody cares. Why?

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Jan Egeland of Norway is the key person for the UN’s humanitarian affairs. He noted last year that Tsunami areas got plenty of international aid (almost 100% of that needed to rebuild) while Pakistan earthquake victims languished (I think it was 25% of the needed relief).

In Africa starvation now stalks millions. Egeland was recently quoted suggesting urgent need could rise to 15 million, momstly in Somalia, and correctly noted that if, for example, Scandinavia faced hunger on this scale the world would be scandalised:

“It would be evident if, say, all of Scandinavia faced collective starvation, the world would really respond. “If all of northern Iraq was facing massive starvation, I think the world would really respond. If Kosovo and Bosnia again faced starvation, I think the world would massively respond.”

Some suggest foolishly that starvation is a natural limit on population, yet it’s clear that over long periods development leads to LOWER birth rates. Thus funding development in third world can *theoretically* lead to a positive feedback, creating less suffering in the long term.

Political impediments caused by instability and despotic leaders and persistent ignorance about basic health issues stand in the way of optimal distribution of aid. Yet there are always better ways and collectively we should be able to find them.

I think many who oppose higher levels of aid to Africa would support much higher levels of international aid if there were better mechanisms to make sure the funding was working and demonstrate the benefits to the skeptics.

As the cost of the Iraq war approaches $400,000,000,000 I’m reminded that 20% of that number, or $80 billion, was cited a few years back as the cost to eliminate world hunger. Where are all those conservative economists when you need them for this cost/benefit analysis?

Laziness and self interest as the means of production?

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One of the most common and legitimate criticisms of both  public and private sector enterprises is that they are run in ways that serve narrow, often selfish interests rather than the broad public good.  

In the private sector this takes the form of profitability, sometimes attained at the expense of "doing the right thing".  In the public sector one often finds that spending can be very inefficient due to lack of incentives – sometimes more a function of political pressure and interest group influences than common sense and the public good.

In many cases one could argue that in business the short term return on investment is too important where in Government it's not important enough.

Whoops – I got off the point.  I was wondering about how a model of production would look if you characterized activity primarily in terms of how people *avoid* work and feather their own nests at other's expense.  How businesses use regulation to thwart competition and create unneeded goods and services.

Just a thought 

April TWO

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I'm a big fan of setting the clocks BACK in the fall, but I hate this spring forward stuff.  It's robbing us of sleep which is a precious commodity, not to be toyed with in this direction.    Why not just ALWAYS set the clocks back an hour, each night, forever?   Studies show we need a lot more sleep and this would be a way to get it!   

Scobleizer vs Mini-Microsoft

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Robert's April Fooling as well. You can never be sure with the new pace of business, but I think the guy who set up the prestigious few who had lunch with Bill Gates last week at MIX06 probably won't be jumping ship anytime soon. I'd be posting a pic here with me and Microsoft's king of Web 2.0, taken at the Myspace party in Las Vegas last week, but it didn't come out well.

Robert's Naked Conversations is intriguing at many levels, one of which has created a stir over at Amazon where the authors were received somewhat .. discourteously.

But Naked Converstation's intriguing points don't make them "right" about blogging. I'd suggest that Israel and Scoble overrate the positive aspects of corporate blogging and fail to note, for example, the significant harm done by bloggers like mini-microsoft , a mystery Microsoft employee with a blog that has become a very prominent whipping post for anti-Microsoft dialog.

I'd suggest blogs are more a reflection of what's up rather than a shaper of what is to come.