Offbeat Travel Websites

I've been playing with two interesting travel websites lately and I'd love to know what others think of them if any of you have been using them too.

The first is Kayak.com. This is a meta-search engine for airline tickets. You enter your search criteria and Kayak.com will search all of the airlines' websites directly and return the best results. They've recently branched out to other interests such as car rentals and hotels, but I haven't played with those features at all yet.

The second is FareCast.com. This site tracks airline ticket prices and tries to predict whether or not the ticket price for a specific route is likely to go up or down over the next few weeks. They'll also rate the confidence of their prediction. The major downside right now is they only track certain routes, but the number has grown significantly.

Links:
Kayak.com
FareCast.com

AlQaedaAlQaedaAlQaedaAlQaedaAlQaeda

On July 24th President Bush gave a speech in South Carolina at the Charleston Air Force Base. Someone at SuicideGirls.com removed all of the words that weren't references to the President, 9/11, Iraq or Al Qaeda. In the 29 minute long speech, he mentioned Al Qaeda 95 times and Iraq over 100. While those number sound impressive, seeing the 'whited-out' transcript really leaves a lasting impression.

Since SuicideGirls.com isn't a work-safe link, I'm linking to a copy of the site, Politics.ie.

Link:
Politics.ie

Pirates vs. Ninjas

Arrrr! Who would win in a fight? Pirates or Ninjas? Find out below!

Link:
Pirates vs. Ninja

Tools for working with Office 2007

Office 2007 has a new file format which isn't compatible with Office 2003. Now, those using 2007 can explicitly save their documents in the 2003 format, but that seems so unfair to put that burden on the writer. Instead, here's a compatibility pack from Microsoft that will allow Office 2003 users the ability to open documents saved in the 2007 format. It also allows them to save their documents to the 2007 format.

But it would be unfair to only give a new gift to the Office 2003 users, so here's something for those of you using Office 2007, the ability to save documents as PDF files! Originally this functionality was going to be built in to the 2007 release, but fear of a lawsuit from Adobe prevented that. Now this separate download restores this functionality as Office should have been!

Links:
Office 2007 compatibility pack for Office 2003
Office 2007 PDF plug-in
CNet - Office changed in wake of Adobe threat