What’s Your List

Posted on April 19th, 2008 in Personal, Tools by Jay

I’ve been watching a lot of TED videos recently in an effort to pickup a few things about doing better presentations.  While I have picked up a few things (which I’ll talk about here at some stage) I find myself getting caught up in the content of these talks also.

Last night I watched a talk by designer Stefan Sagmeister and his search for what makes him happy.  He talked about his life lessons also, which are below:

List

What a great list!

I need one of these and have decided that I’ll work on this more now.

TripIt | We organize your travel

Posted on August 21st, 2007 in Just Cool, Personal, Tools, Travel, Web by Jay

Through a facebook post I managed to get an invite to a service called tripit.com which is still in beta.

There are many services out there that will let you organise your travel with an itinerary. What I specifically like about this though is the ‘email it in’ function.

Here’s how it works:

  • Book your travel on the travel website, like orbitz or hotel.com or whatever
  • Wait for the email confirmation
  • Forward it to a generic tripit.com email address

That’s it!  The result is that the tripit.com engine parses the email, finds out who it came from through the email address and then maps this to an itinerary you have created in your account.  Based on the dates for the booking it puts it directly into the right itinerary automatically.

My family and I are planning a big trip at the end of this year, and so we have all sorts of bookings, the ones that worked smoothly were:

  • Alamo car booking
  • Holiday Inn booking
  • BaySide Hotel booking

It couldn’t figure out:

  • Cruise booking - In fact cruises doesn’t seem to be something you can plan yet
  • Qantas flights - I would expect that this would be the case, probably towards the bottom of the list of priorities

If you have a need for something like this then let me know, I have 5 invites left.  Right now the service is a little slow in that it’s very ajax heavy and firefox struggles a little.  Also it appears to be in US date format only.  Otherwise, it’s a fantastic tool and worth getting to if you have a busy trip coming up. 

 

TripIt | We organize your travel

Time to Rebuild

Posted on July 29th, 2006 in Development, Personal, Rebuild, Web, Websites by Jay

Some of you might now that my wife and I run www.newagestore.com.

This site is currently running using some really old ASP code that I wrote, and an access database (or 4) that has is well overdue for a re-design.

So, over the coming weeks and month I’ll be writing about what I have learned and the process for completing the re-write.

Step 1 - choosing the right CMS. No decision as yet, however I have set up a test environment for the new site consisting of a server running Win2003 Server and SQL server.

More to follow…

Homage

Posted on May 18th, 2006 in Personal by Jay

I wanted to tell you about an amazing person in my life.

She runs one of the most popular new age sites on the planet and spends countless hours helping visitors get what they want.  She does this without reward and offers all this for free, including 12 weekly podcasts.

She is selfless, always putting her family ahead of herself and sacrifices the things she needs for the things they want.  Her love for her children is endless and without question.  Her commitment to ensuring they make the most out of life is without compromise.

She has an amazing brain from which some of the most amazing ideas have sprouted.  Most of which after implemented have had a huge impact! 

She is my guiding light.  When we’re apart i ache, I miss her smile.

She puts up with the dumb things I do and say and always manages to center me again after i’ve been spinning a little.

I try to live by the mantra “the more you give, the more you get”.  She gives to me without question, she gives support to her friends without end.

I am blessed just to know her, let alone be loved by her.