Tretakoff Musings

Not sure if Yahoo is reflecting on their dark mood after Microsoft's ratcheting of the takeover bid, but my Yahoo Widget Engine weather widget apparently is either forcecasting a black hole, an eclipse, or the end of the universe today. Or it just forgot it's daytime. :-) No worries; the sun IS still shining here. YWE obvious is trying out the new "mood ring" function.

I travel a lot for work and fun. I tend to book trips on the individual airline's websites (after I use Farecast and SideStep to find the best deals), so I get the mileage bonuses. The pain of that is that you get all of these different confirmations, emails, and tracking numbers, so it's not easy to consolidate them down to my schedule. I use TravelTracker for the Treo to type it all in, but it's time consuming, and annoying. Enter TripIt . That email confirmation you got? Forward it to plans@tripit.com. In under a minute, you head over to TripIt, and you get this: Want to add more to the trip, like a car rental? Just forward it on, and TripIt adds it to it. Want to track some activities you want to do while on the trip? Use the TripClipper to bookmark it to your trip. I like the service a lot: they focus on ease of use and solving a problem. There is definitely room to improve here, though: syncing with Outlook or Google Calendar, for instance. Consolidating Frequent Flye...

Ok, before we start, the pics are all here. We headed to Tucson to see my mother's new winter homestead. Never been, but I love the desert, so we were looking to have some fun. She lives in the Catalina Foothills, with the city below. Tucson's population is, surprisingly, about the same as San Francisco's; it's also the home to the University of Arizona: I had no idea. While downtown is nothing to see, the landscape is stunning. First tourist attraction: the Wildlife Museum . Located way out in the desert, it's an open-air, self guided sprawling facility that covers all of the native plants, animals, and minerals of the Sonora desert. The cave tour was amazing: walk through the cramped passages, and see a wild open cave, along with gorgeous exhibits of semi-precious stones from the area. The native plants and cactii are stunning, and the feel of the place is decidedly unhurried and hands on. Lots of trails and paths to explore. The animals? WOW. A pair of mountain l...

What the heck happened to the mild temperate climates of Northern California? I returned home from Chicago this week, only to encounter colder temperatures than Chicago in December! For instance, the picture to the left was out my front door, on the hillside: the entire mulch was covered in a thick blanket of frost! Biking was a trip: it was the first time my new "colder weather gear" was put to the test, and it passed. Slipping on ice was a new sensation, however!