Tag - flights

Find the cheapest flights …

ITASoftware.com, which provides the technological backbone for many airfare shopping sites, allows users to scan an entire month’s fares for the least expensive rate. (Log in as a “guest” and click on “month-long search.” ) In January, the 28th and 30th were the cheapest dates to fly nonstop to London from New York ($536) for a week’s vacation, according to a recent search. The next best was Saturday, Jan. 23, at $640. To book the ticket, users must go to another site. Kayak.com has a flexible-dates option (registration is required) and a calendar that shows the best fares found by other Kayak users in the last 48 hours. Bing Travel, the Microsoft search engine, offers a similar option, found under “plan trips,” about halfway down the page.

via Practical Traveler – 10 Ways to Cut Your Travel Costs In 2010 – NYTimes.com.

Googling predators in airplanes

I’ve had the most amazing neighbors on flights lately …

Last week it was a Google engineer who heads up the ?SRE? unit for Gmail. He works in Zurich, and his team’s focus is provisioning servers and other resources for the growing user base. Interesting phrase of the discussion: “up and the the right,” which is what Googlers say when they talk about increasing resources being required for services.

Today it was a chief research scientist who is a cofounder of a start-up that works on video processing technologies for Predator UAVs, among other things. They’ve grown from 8 to over 100 in about 14 months, and he had fascinating stories to tell about goverment and defense contracts. (He was a triple-booter: Mac, Linux, and Windows, and carried two laptops and an jailbroken iPhone.)

I hope I’m so fortunate in my seat selection on the way back!

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