Collecting fruit stickers: how serious can this be?

Looking over http://www.hobbieslist.com/ … this is not even a hobby…
I’ve seen many websites that try to give “hobby ideas”. I guess searching your hobby in a list works as well as having a list with people names to choose your friend from.
In my opinion there are 3 rules to call something a hobby:

1. You avoid naming the activity “hobby” to yourself. It’s some kind of little obsession or “passion”.
2. When some practical guy asks you “What is the use of doing that?!”, you won’t give an answer. It does not mean there is no serious reason. It simply means that your main reason is that you love doing it. By the way, that guy is narrow-minded ;)
3. You are actually going to learn interesting things from this activity but learning was never your main goal.

I’ll give an example. I collect fruit and veggie stickers. I must confess, I also collect the triangular labels from the cheese wedges since I was 10… Yes… these are two of my little obsessions.

What have I learned?
The number (PLU code) from the fruit stickers can actually reveal a very important thing
1. If it starts with 4 it is a normal veggie
2. If it starts with 8, it is genetically engineered
3. If it starts with 9 it is organic.
I am not the only software engineer under the sun… collecting fruit stickers and having this particular urge to collect small disposable things following of course two common sense rules:

The allure of like objects (that is, a set of things with similar size, shape, and whatnot) is difficult to resist. I am uneasy about the collector mentality, with its inevitable trajectory of ever-increasing sums spent on objects whose values are appreciated by a diminishingly small number of people. I can't stomach the idea of consumption as a creative pursuit. A more informal sort of acquisition - saving the disposable artifacts of everyday life - lets me satisfy the urge to collect. The rules for my fruit sticker collection are 1) each sticker must be unique (no repeats), and 2) the item of produce must be eaten by me.[Andrea Shiman- Fruit Stickers—The Overlooked Booty of the Lunchroom]

I tell you collecting fruit stickers is a serious thing… :)

Alize on travel

What can it be more exciting then travel? Actually a lot of things (like computer games for some people :P)… but seriously traveling changes the way you think, your personality and somehow the vision about esthetics. There are all kinds of travel… but the way I see it…
There is weekend/opportunistic travel. That’s right. There is never time/ enough money to travel. It is never the right moment. Therefore, the philosophy is not to miss any occasion.

It is a big disadvantage with this approach: you visit everything in a hurry. You go and see stuff in a “veni, vidi, vici” style and meditate about it later. The advantage: you don’t have time to get bored. This is important. I always fear that one day I might say that I find travel some kind of exhausting effort and decide to stop searching for exciting places to go.

When I want to travel some place new (or an event) I go to Flickr and other similar web-sites to set up my expectations. There are all kinds of travel / tourist attraction sites but it seems to me that they always miss the essence. I’ve found other people’ travel photos so useful for so many times that I felt in debt to share my small collection in a public gallery too. :) I haven’t yet time to sort all of them but what I have ready is on my Picasa photo album.

So… here I am in WA State with a long list of cool things to do. About Seattle.. I like the I520 and I90 bridges when the traffic is not heavy… and regarding the Space Needle... I find it quite nice. When I see such a tower I remember the breathtaking feeling of being in Tour Eiffel’s elevator looking down over Paris at night. It simply worth doing this… New York is certainly an impressive urban experience but something with a medieval flavor like Brussels is more appealing to me. My all time favorite place is Brugge. This medieval city has cathedrals, old buildings, amazing architecture, daffodil gardens and even fairy-tail like windmills. Swans swim on the water channels and eat from your hand.


I think travel can help you choose the best place to live in. You have to see both awful and good shows to recognize a great one. I could never understand why a lot of young people say, “I hate living in Bucharest. Terrible city.” It is not that bad at all. It has beautiful architecture and nice parks; it has cleaner subways then Paris and New York, it is not that crowded and you have plenty of urban life. This sounds just nice to me.

I think it is nothing more rewarding and pleasant then mountain hiking no matter how strenuous the trail might be. The “let’s go to the mountain” does not mean sitting all day in a warm hotel-room enjoying the TV. It is such great feeling catching your breath while admiring volcanic lakes or waterfalls or an impressive belvedere. I must admit… exploring caves is even better for me!
I have a long list of mountain trails here around … and these are pretty much my plans for the next weeks. I hope we’ll have sunny weekends! :)

The best websites for airplane ticket reservations.

Over the last few years, many great websites have sprung up that offer outstanding airline travel fares that beat what most agencies and ticket brokers can offer.
These websites might seem a bit daunting at first look, but once you get comfortable and realize how to navigate it and how to submit your questions, you'll no doubt be able to enjoy outstanding airline travel fares in a relatively short time. Here's a quick peek of what you may see from a typical travel website.
Finding The Best Airline Travel Deals By Morgan Hamilton

I am sure that all the above is true… but...
What does everyone want when searching an airplane ticket?
Well, to optimize the price subject to the departure date time and the traveling duration.
Optimizing the price is practically optimizing the date when you make the purchase and the flight schedule.
It matters a lot how is your schedule constrained by departure hours, month or trip duration and between what airports you are traveling.
And there it is: an optimization equation with a lot of variables!

Make the reservation too early or too late, have non-flexible traveling hour or try to minimize the trip duration, prefer a certain airport from your area and the price doubles… There is no magic solution, no know it-all searching tool, no way to say "yes I did see all the possiblities and there is my best choice"!

Most of the traveling sites do not allow aggregators to use their search results. Their Terms of Use forbid the use of robots / crawlers. You should not develop one even for a personal use to optimize your travel over a largely flexible time schedule.

This is why, buying some plain tickets online is not something to I enjoy so much. I do like heuristic algorithms /approaches but not when I talk about money and time spent in airplanes and airports.
The truth is I’ve find some nice features on some websites that significantly reduced my frustration:

• autocomplete my travel request on the most popular airplane tickets sites bookinbuddy. This is a great work-around for the aggregator restrictions.
• aggregate with one search data from as many websites as possible: this is kayak.
• let me sort after trip duration, and then narrow the results by price or the departure/ arrival hour: kayak again.
• optimize the search around departing date and hours. The best place to do this: orbiz. It shows a nice table with a few days before and after.
• have the option of searching the nearby airports (expedia and kayak again)

There is a lot of room for improvement. I wish I had the possibility when choosing the departure hours to choose my own departure interval rather then a fixed hour or some general option like noon evening, etc.

I wish things could be more transparent as I only spent more time to search for the same thing.
In the end, of course everyone is patient when saving many hundreds of dollars on a plane ticket.

My favorite quotes. A small collection.

I started a little collection of famous quotes that I found inquisitive or fascinating or simply made me smile and say... "Truee... so truee"

• "Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers."
  Alfred Lord Tennyson
  =)) Ouch! This hurts...
  
  


• "You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance."
  Ray Bradbury
  All the time... on a daily basis.
  
  


• "The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of matter and of the stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness."
  Andre Malraux
  
  


• "Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it."
  Mahatma Gandhi
  For most of the people actions helps to deny the nothingness of himself between relative to humanity... Humankind also fights to deny its nothingness in front of the universe. We got some pattern here!
  
  


• "A good friend can tell you what is the matter with you in a minute. He may not seem such a good friend after telling."
  Arthur Brisbane
  I think I had this a few times... either as a teller either as a listener... was fun.
  
  


• "In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is."
  Gertrude Stein
  No comment...
  
  


• "Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults."
  Thomas Szasz
  Because people seek and talk so much about happiness...
  Because yes, happiness is kind of "If only I could... reach that or have the other"... rather then a sate. And when you finally made it... well it comes a small moment of satisfaction followed closely by new aspirations.
  Humankind needs to dream about happiness (“an imaginary condition”) to find themselves a way in life.
  
  


• "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
  George Santayana
  Sometimes I have the filling that history is twisted or forgotten on purpose...so that some politic players can benefit comfortably from that while misleading everyone.
  The UE recent decisions... are one of the things I am talking about.