Category Archives: travel

Bound for BWI and on to Virginia

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The house is 99.5% painted and looking really nice.    We even got to some of the spots I missed ten years ago during house paint number one.   4 colors…fancy!

Off to the Virginia Reunion tomorrow with mom.    MFR to PDX to ORD to BWI.    Thanks to hotwire.com I got great deals on rental car (200 for 8 days) and hotel (Ramada near Airport for 55+tax).    I’m so pleased with hotwire results over the past few weeks of travel I think I may shift my booking sites over to them, though it’s not clear to me that most people are comfortable booking without knowing the hotel or even the exact location.   I’m finding that since motels are clustered together anyway you are likely to get a desirable location as I did in Silicon Valley and tomorrow near BWI.

Mashup Camp 2 – Day 1 – wait, there’s more!

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The excellent unconference format makes the entire conference something of a networking session.  Still,  it’s great to have a few beers with folks who make the internet … so darn interesting.

I always enjoy talking with the brilliant Adam Sah who brings plenty of Google gadget enthusiasm to the mashup mix and I’m sure will have some great stuff to show us tomorrow during the last session. Also really enjoyed meeting mashup and housingmaps.com  legend Paul Rademacher  (whoa – not to be confused with this Paul Rademacher, who is dead).

Paul’s early mashup of Craigslist and Google maps (before there was a maps API no less!)  helped usher in the notion that mashups are a very useful, great way to mix data in innovative ways.   Had a great chance to talk about some travel mashing ideas with Adam and Paul.   There’s a hurricane of real time road data at the transportation departments but it’s non-trivial to pull even a fraction of that in effectively.   Mashups to the rescue?  Maybe.

Also got to meet the famous ex-googler blogger Mark Jen who was fired by Google for … blogging!    He works over at Plaxo now where he won’t get fired because … he wrote the blogging policy!  Very nice and sharp guy.

Mashup University – MapQuest OpenAPI

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Mapquest is up next with Antony Pegg and Joe Hughes.

Most popular mapping site on web with 50 million unique users per month, 1.25 billion page views (wow). More mapping than all competitors combined. Top 10 internet brand.

Mapquest Business Solutions.

OpenAPI. Mapping, Geocoding, and routing in a single API. Sounds great. But commercial limitations sound like they may be restrictive? As with all map providers you should talk to them if you have great commercial aps – they generally like to see innovations more than apply restrictions to developers. Integrated into AJAX style scripting interface.

Shows a great icon set for plotting data points.

Joe Hughes is up now with demo of the “Load Remote” feature of the API using a service side module with third party traffic feed.

ChefMoz/Mapquest demo with restaurant listings plotted with opening times.

Move developer tools and demos:

mapquest.com/openapi 

Speed Limit – won their API contest: Betimely.com

gamedaymapping.com

company.mapquest.com/samples/index.html 

Mashup University – the UI is the API. ScrAPIs

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Assaf Arkin is talking about scraping content. I have mixed feelings about it since extensive scraping of our nicely hand-edited content seemed to be part of the problem with Google’s faulty indexing of Online Highways which still persists, but Web 2.0 sensibilities suggest that most content is now fair game. My new notions are that scraping, if accompanied with attribution, is OK and good for users since it helps them navigate the mess more effectively.

Assaf “Scraping is not evil”. He’s using Ruby. Ruby review: He started with Ruby a year ago and likes it. He’s reviewing example code for a scrape of EBay data.

co.mments.com 

Chef Chu’s for Chinese food…and travel.

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I’m informed by local Ned that Chef Chus is the place to eat chinese here in Silicon Valley. Probably won’t have a chance to check it out this trip. Apparently Chef Chu also arranges trips to … China. Cool

Jeremy Z adds this suggestion:

Chef Chu’s is good food, but my personal favorite is the House Of Orient down in Campbell: http://local.yahoo.com/details?id=21557385
It’s rarely crowded (though it should be), prices are good, and service is reliable.

Intel – context aware SDKs

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OK, this is good stuff. Intel’s talking about mashups that utilize location awareness where the device knows where it is. This may have some really cool travel applications! They’ll be demoing some stuff and I’m anxious to talk more with them about ways to integrate deviceOspheric information – ie the world of data, now mostly wasted, that is flowing in from navigation devices and other hardware.

They are really asking for feedback about the types of APIs that run at the base level – ie sort of machine level – that address challenges like connectivity.    For travel this might take the form of answering the following questions:

*Where am I located right now?

* Where is the blog/website/device located that has the information I need?

Mountain View – Mashup Camp Two

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Seems like a double life these days. At 1pm today I was home in Oregon painting our house, and now I’m in Mountain View, CA where the 2 day first of all time “Mashup University” begins tomorrow at the Computer Science Museum. Mashup U is followed on Wednesday and Thursday by Mashup Camp 2, the sequel to Mashup Camp back in February. Doug Gold, David Berlind, and supporters did a fantastic job in February and I’m sure this one will also be a great event.

Hats off *again* to Hotwire.com. I just booked the Homestead Mountain View, a great little studio suite with kitchen, for $47 per night, about half the rack rate. An extra 4.99 got me broadband wireless – for my entire 4 day stay! Sure beats the 10.00+ per day often charged by the fancy hotels.

Hertz – Hertz via Hotwire = $206

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Hats off to Hotwire.com where I just booked my BWI rental car for more than half off the rate quoted moments later at Hertz.   8 days for $200 vs $406 at Hertz.com.   Note that at Hotwire I did not get to choose my car company – I just specified my dates and car type.   But who cares about the company?  I’ve rented from most of them and had similar and mostly positive experiences.

The 200 is a fantastic rate.  I’ve been looking for a few weeks, mostly using Kayak, and have seen mostly prices in the $300 range.   I think the lowest I found at Kayak was 276 and today it’s about 300, so Hotwire really came through for me.

The moral of this story was  “if at first you don’t get cheap, try, try again”

Montreal!

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Unfortunately I’m not in Montreal now as is my pal Rob and Alicia, possibly pals Tom and Diane, and recently there were pals Keith and Anne, all on totally unrelated adventures.   Hey Dad – check out the Montreal Web Cam

I grew up in a small NY city of Plattsburgh, about 60 miles south of the thriving metropolitain, French Speaking, Expo Baseball playing Montreal, Quebec.   It remains one of my favorite cities because the French/English/Canadian cultural crossroads is so cool.    I think it’s the closest thing to Europe you are going to get in North America.  I used to go there often as a kid but now that the folks have moved here to Oregon it’s a bit too long of a drive.