Chilled Out Bearded Man

I’m going to try something new for myself and for you. A daily quick summary of what I learned and/or accomplished today.

- Left joins are different than inner joins in that with a left join a comparison predicate (in the where statement) and the same predicate as a join predicate (in the join “on” statement) do not necessarily give the same result as would be the case in an inner join.

- Wrote a song about breaking up again with someone I broke up with over a month ago and have not gone out with since.

- Roman Polanski is a pretty awesome guy with a very complicated life. I have pity for him and I don’t think he was a horrible rapist. I learned this from the Documentary about Roman Polanski on HBO:

http://www.hbo.com/docs/docuseries/romanpolanski/

- Some programmers are incapable of organizing their logic. It makes people around that person work twice as hard and be 5 times as stressed out.

Step 1 is accomplished. The tickets are purchased. I’m flying from NYC to Rio, Salvador, Panama City, and Costa Rica. Luckily I was purchasing the tickets far enough in advance that there were plenty of seats available. Still, everything seemed to be more complicated than it should have been due to financial limitations, flight restrictions, and various website glitches on the sites I attempted to purchase from.

Here are the sites I ended up using:

1) www.abstravel.com

This is actually a pretty simple site to use. Everything is straightforward and clear. The prices were especially good on trips to Brazil – under $700 to fly NYC->Rio->Salvador->NYC. Adding on Costa Rica and Panama City made the flight exorbitantly expensive and it didn’t really allow me to choose times. Unfortunately, I discovered in my searches that transportation from Brazil to Costa Rica is pretty limited and hence quite expensive.

I ended up purchasing the first two legs of my trip on this site for under $450(plus booking fee). NYC->Rio->Salvador.

Warnings on abstravel.com:
- They have a $100 booking fee (after taxes, etc), which is not made clear at any point in the searching process.
- They do not answer their phone (even if you can manage to find their number on the site).
- They do not respond to emails.
- They do not respond to voice messages.
- The site breaks down when you try to search for too many legs.

So if you can’t find what you are looking for on abstravel.com on your first couple tries, just push them out of your mind and move on.

2) www.cheapoair.com

Even though this site has a pretty sketchy name, it does actually have some pretty good prices. I purchased the last 3 legs of my trip with a bunch of personal travel restrictions for $950(plus booking fees). Salvador->Panama City->San Jose, Costa Rica->NYC

One really nice thing about cheapoair.com is that it gives a ton of options based on your itinerary. Took me a long time to search through all the options, but I ended up finding exactly what I wanted. Other sites, tend to show you what they think are the best options for you, or they just limit the options because they don’t want to give you what you want for too cheap.

Warnings about cheapoair.com:
- They have a booking fee, which isn’t clearly explained how its calculated.
- I had trouble entering my credit card information for a valid card that I use on a daily basis. They didn’t recognize it as valid for some reason.
- After I had completed what seemed like the final step, the site gave me a new notice saying that they need to charge me an additional charge of $12. Even though I had chosen all e-tickets, they claim that some of these smaller airlines do not offer e-tickets and they need to ship the tickets to me. And $12 was the cheapest price they could offer me for a Fedex delivery – no USPS even though there is two months till the flights. I guess this guarantees that I receive the tickets – wouldn’t want them getting “lost in the mail”.

3) travel.yahoo.com

I tried this. They claim to search many travel sites. The prices didn’t seem to be anything special, but I think its definitely worth a look due to the ease of use.

A quick note of advice on searching these travel sites…

Always try searching for your itinerary with “anytime” for every flight time. It may give you what you want and the prices are usually less expensive the less specific your requests are. If that doesn’t work, you can always try it with more specific times, but the price will probably go up significantly due to the pricing algorithms, etc.

Great article listing a few interesting regulations in various tech fields:

http://blogs.mediapost.com/omd_commentary/?p=655

I discovered that you can send your Pandora stations to other people.

So, here is my favorite. Its very relaxing. Its perfect for chilling out alone, when you need some serious downtime.

Chilled Out Bearded Radio @ Pandora.com

In case they ask you to sign up… Its free and very painless.

Joined Digg.com. Like friendster, they have limits. 15 letters on usernames to be more specific.

In short, my username at digg.com is only chilledoutbman instead of chilledoutbeardedman. I almost didn’t join.
I did Digg some stuff though. If you have never heard of Digg.com, you’ve got a nice surprise waiting. Digg is where you find a list of the most interesting stories on the internet. Its second only to ChilledOutBeardedMan.com.

My beard trimmings should be scattered throughout facebook soon enough.

Help me be the bearded member of facebook I’ve always wanted to be.

The Chilled Out Bearded Man is now officially a member of Friendster.

Funny thing about friendster. They limit your personal url to 12 letters so you have to make me your friend at:

http://www.friendster.com/chilledoutbm

Be my friend. All the cool kids are doing it.

I just signed up for myspace. If you haven’t heard of myspace, take the wax out of your ears and listen up.

Myspace is what everyone’s doing. People create online personalities to try to impress their friends and meet new friends. And sometimes friendships are built that break the internet boundaries and work out in the real world.

Visit my myspace page at http://www.myspace.com/chilledoutbeardedman . Be my friend.