Pragmatic

I recently found that it is on the whole better to explain one’s idea with not frameworks, tools, techniques, lemmas from the bottom layer but with ideas from the immediate lower one layer of all levels; and then one shall use the one layer still lower as one’s philosophical backing.

Six-word Story

Wired magazine asked writers of various genre and of various media to emulate Ernest Hemingway’s six-word story (”For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”).

Two outstanding ones:

Joss Whedon: “Gown removed carelessly. Head, less so.”

Margaret Atwood: “Longed for him. Got him. Shit.”

wherefore am I?

If there was a line on a piece of paper, you would look at it. Why not the blank?
I focus. I linearize. I prejudice. I have the built-in mechanism to construct the bell.
I know this way is doomed to fail within certain extent, but it is the best I have, it is also the only one I have. There’s no choice. Is there?
But the opposite cannot survive without it, either.
It is overwhelming. I couldn’t have survived three minutes without incessantly constructing them. How confident that my heart shall beat, my lung breathe, air flows, laws obeyed…
There is no winning for either side. Or losing.
So it is trifling.
Linearity must fail. Chaos must fail, too.
But there is a problem. There is a surprise.
I am here.
I really am.
Say I could solve any problems if I wanted to – I saw a problem, I improved something, I solved it, then I met another problem on another level, I improved something, I solved it…
But that line on the piece of paper does exist.

So there’s more to say. There’s always more to say.
There is ying and yang. And it is impossible to purify a cup of water.
In between two stars, there is always a third one.
Something breaks, something emerges, as we zoom.
The opposite sees the same pattern.
They cannot exist without me.

I am the smoking gun.
So why am I needed?
Wanna explain why the line is there for me?

Survival?

Of finding the lowest airfare.

How are you doing life hackers?? Good-good to hear.

Knowledge says traveling is too much of a financial burden so let’s hack it!

First of all, find out where and when you want to go.

Then inquire airfare on all of the following websites. But before you do that, consider the following tweaks:

1. Because you will be searching over ten websites simultaneously, do use a tabbed browser to help you organize the pages, such as Internet Explorer 7 RC1 (pc), Mozilla FireFox (pc)(mac). If you wish to stick to IE 6 or you may not do anything to the computer you are using hence sticking to IE6, that is fine.
2. Using keyboard shortcuts is a must when navigating among more than one webpage. In both IE 7 and FireFox, the keyboard shortcut to jump from tab(page) to tab, from left to right is CTRL + Tab. From right to left is CTRL + Shft + Tab.For IE6, just simply use Alt + Tab (from left to right) and Alt + Shift + Tab (right to left)
3. When filling out the From, To, Departure/Returning Date and etc, use Tab key to jump from the current to the next field, and Shift + Tab to jump from the current to the previous field.
4. To make life easy on filling out forms often means to use as much keyboard as possible. When you select the date of departure or returning or both, you are often forced to use the mouse/pointer to select the date. But you need not to. Case 1 the form’s date input is separated in to day of the Month and month (and some times year, too) like Kayak.com, after you type in the day of the month, you Tab the focus to the month drop box, without using the mouse, you simply type out the first few letters of the word of the month that you are traveling in and it will be selected, i.e., “ju” for June, “au” for August, “nov ” for November, “f” for Februrary. Case 2 the form has only one long field wherein you are supposed to type the format MM/DD/YY as with cheapair.com, you need simply type “21oct” for 10/21/06 and “7Jan07″ for 07/01/2007 — just because the MM/DD/YY format is so annoying for typing. In general, when you are choosing from a drop-down box, you can always type the first one to three letters of the word of your choice to select your choice.
5. You shall often find necessary to go back to a previous page, for instance, returning to the home page from the results page to do another search, Backspace or ALT + left arrow are your friends! You often have to Backspace or Alt + left arrow several times to get back to the home page as there are often one or two interim pages between the home page and the result page.
6. Use Tab to select the search button then use Enter to hit the button as oppose to use mouse click. So you use Tab to navigate through the form, what about the final step of hitting the search button? Well, in almost all websites, you can use Tab to “highlight” the search button and then hit Enter to “click” it. You will recognize that it is focused when there is a dash-lined box around it. Even better, on some website you need only to hit the Enter button upon finishing filling out the last item on the form to start the search.
7. I assume you now have IE7 or FireFox. So open this page, and hold down CTRL then click all the links one by one. You will see them opened in a new tab. Now right click on any one of the Tab and select something that says save or bookmark Tabs (plural) in group/folder. Then next time, you can just go to that folder under Favorites/Bookmark, right click on the folder and select open all in tabs to open them all.
8. Why Am I Doing All These? Because you are expected to fill out a form on each website every time you do a search and because you are searching over 10 websites and because you are to repeat most of the searches with adjusted date of departure/returning or both and because there exists not one website that always has the lowest fare (that would have been nice, wouldn’t it?)
9. Don’t be lazy, search every one of them.

Other tweaks

• Airlines often update their database of airfare at midnight of Wednesday (Tuesday night). Keep an eye on this time of the week.
• Wednesdays statistically have the lowest fare; somehow, this is Tuesdays for travels within the E.U.
• As far as I know, Kayak, Cheap Air, PriceGrabber, FareMax, and  Student Universe display the final price, i.e., price including tax and fees.

I will keep updating this post to include 1) more sites, 2) more details of the sites 3)Special detail of certain sites worth paying attention to.

Post your tricks of finding the lowest fare in the comment page!

The Life Hacker Challenge

Knowledge recently got a round trip tickets from SFO to CDG, email me the lowest fare you can find and if it is lower than mine, you will be given a secret prize! By this Friday.

Good Hunting!

This is Nik, hacking so you don’t have to.

Kayak

Fare Max (this site includes unpublished fare

PriceGrabber Travel

Cheap Air

CheapTickets

Booking Buddy

Expedia (Worst I’ve seen)

STA Travel (You might have to be a student in order to get the lowest fare)

Student Universe (That’s where I found the lowest fare for many destination, but although you need to be a student, there may be way around it)

Air Gorilla

Overstock Travel

Fly China (as name suggests)

Airline Consolidator

Ticket Spotter

Mobissimo Travel

Attitude Travel (Traveling within Europe)

Utopia

FareCast (A fairly new site, very intersting looking, domestic only for now, but they keep adding more destinations)

Orbitz

Travelocity

SideStep

Antioxidant: Fire at will!

12:00AM 11:00AM Thanks Brittany!

Party!

My friend Scotty and I are going to celebrate our birthday on 24 Aug 2006. And you are invited! We’re going to have a party at the cafe of Scotty’s business partner and close friend Harris. Food is provided. Here is the detail:

24 Aug 2006 Thursday, 7 P.M. - 10 P.M. (though our birthday is on 29th)

1550 California St. btwn Larkin st. & Polk st.

1550 California St. btwn Larkin st & Polk st. (Next to Lumiere theatre)
San Francisco, 94109
P.S. from Scotty: Bring your own bottles.

You are expected to come!

Updates: Remember to bring something to share:)