Daily Archives: July 18, 2007

Travel

The next trip will include a SideStep…

I travel, all the time. Pretty much once or twice a month. My company books my travel but I always look to see what flights are going to work best for my personal schedule. I have been using the site Orbitz but I find that limiting. However I have just found a very cool site called SideStep the travelers search engine.

What makes SideStep so different than other sites for travel is that it combs the web to find all prices from many other travel sites and presents them to you in one easy to see screen. Just for the heck of it I put in travel to Fort Lauderdale. I know we were just there a couple of weeks ago but I also know that we are going to be going back multiple times to visit. So I searched for specific dates and I got a huge return on options. And the search was fast. I got 798 possible flights returned to me in seconds.

And what is really cool is that I can use the SmartSort feature to turn on and off the features I am looking for, so lets say that my budget for tickets was $450.00 however some of the 798 possible flights were well over that price. And I am looking for some Cheap Flights so I then moved the slider for the price range to my budget area. The search reorders itself to return just those flights that fit my needs. I can then play around with options of time of departure, time of arrival. This is key for me because I used to have to start a search all over to change the options. SideStep is awesome with making tweaks to your travel searches.

And for the heck of it I checked out the Travel Guide for Philadelphia. I am traveling down that way tomorrow and wanted to see the prices on Philadelphia Hotels and also take a look at the Travel Guide for Philly. Even though I am not a fan of the airport there. I would like to explore the city because of the rich history it has. And with SideStep I can do that tour virtually. And in the travel guide I can find out more information by seeing Philadelphia travel blogs, tours to take, as well as the best places to eat and have fun. I’ll be SideStepping to my next vacation.

Blogging

Can I blog faster?

I have to admit it, I spend far too much time blogging, thinking about blogging and planning to blog. I am adamant about providing the best content that I can and giving my readers something for their time that they spend coming to visit this blog. And I type pretty dang fast for not being a touch typer. Man I would get in trouble in my typing classes in high school because I would always sneak a look at the keys. I still do it but my fingers fly on the keyboard.

But if I could blog faster I could blog more, since this isn’t a full time job for me I need to budget the amount of time that I actually spend blogging. I want to do this faster but not lose out on the quality of each of my posts. At work I can use Dragon Naturally Speaking software in order to enter information on reports. I know that using this software I can set up special macros for performing specific functions. For example I could set a macro to open a new blank post by programing a macro to recognize, “Write Post” as a command to open a new blank post. Then I could say “Title” and move to the title field, say what I want the title to be and use another macro to move on to the post.

I have used the software and it is pretty good for many needs at work. I think that incorporating this into my blogging may in fact help me to blog faster. But we shall see.