Purchasing plane ticket

I've been trying to figure out when the best time to purchase a plane ticket on orbitz.com is.

It's been quite a confusing process, purchasing a plane ticket has got to be one of the least straight forward things I have ever tried to acquire.

Each day brings slightly different pricing, and occasionally when I click on a price I want to explore it has disappeared.

Another very annoying thing is price disclosure. Orbitz seems to at least try, but some flights require the archaic method of mailing me the tickets on paper. This ends up adding about $30 to the total package. Not only does this make me mad when I have already settled on a price, but how does it benefit the airline? They now have to go through the work of mailing out a set of tickets, which is extra overhead, when they already have a better system in place; and they have to deal with tickets getting lost in the mail.

Also it is hard to shop around and compare prices on other ticket sites with the pricing changing so quickly, I might come back to my good deal only to find it gone.

getting ready for permanent duty.

Well in a couple of months I will be heading to my permanent duty station. Looking like Ft Drum though possibly Ft Lewis. I would much prefer Ft Lewis, Ft Drums snow doesn't sound super appealing, plus Ft Lewis is much closer to home.

AIT barracks are horrible, so I was looking at trying to figure out what my new home would look like. Here is a picture someone took of their room at Ft Drum:

googles new blog type idea sharing tool

I've played with the new google sharing tool for a few hours now...

So far I'd say it has potential, but still isn't worth using just yet.

It has the ability to pull in posts from other rss type sites which is rather cool.

It is trying to integrate into gmail which has potential, however the integration is pretty poor still.

It has some pretty big security concerns still and is difficult to find exactly what you want when looking through it.

My biggest complaint is the email integration, it floods the gmail inbox with emails that are only half integrated into the sharing tool, they allow comments and moderation to be performed from them, however archiving and deletion have no effect on the sharing tool post itself. It's like a separate copy of the post was sent to gmail that has shortcuts in it to perform some of the convenience actions. This is a problem for me because the big thing I like about google is centralization, having two copies of a post sent to me seems to make management more difficult and just creates clutter.

Edit: this post is getting spammed a lot so I am trying to reword it to cut down on spam.

google docs

Google docs recently came out with a new feature that I have been waiting for for awhile. It now allows you to add all types of files, not just those supported by docs themselves. This is great in that now I have one central place to save all my most important documents.

Unfortunately storage is still limited to 1GB so I still use skydrive.live.com for longer term storage of documents that I need to save but might not need to access quite as frequently. Skydrive is pretty week on features still, but it offers more storage than any other free service I have found.

selectCheckboxes and commandbuttons in Sales Force

Through a lot of trial and error I discovered that the use of selectCheckboxes in Apex code built for salesforce.com disabled all command buttons on the page from executing their code, even though they still posted back to the server.

It was a very odd thing and was easily fixed by changing to selectOptions which is what I needed instead of checkboxes anyway. I am hoping that I had some sort of error in my code that caused the issue, I am sure that others have used selectCheckboxes just fine before.

My guess is that some sort of syntactical error that Eclipse didn't catch is what caused the issue, however since it is gone now I do not plan on digging further into the matter.

Starting Classes

I have finally started classes in AIT for the MOS 25S.
So far we have crammed through basic electronics which I got 100% in.
Next we will be learning some of the more specialized equipment.

Free faxing with Skype

I discovered a wonderful little add-on to skype that allows you to fax with your computer. For infrequent faxers it is free, and there are paid options for those who fax a lot.