air fares 2...

well, there goes $1,000 AUD I won't be seeing again. The trip's booked, with the sideline to sydney and all.

see the budget/itinerary here: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pYkGXyqd2mcXUF8cTu9KVSQ

that little sydney trick just saved me a couple hundred dollars, total cost of the outward jaunt is $488, including bus, train & plane. the next cheapest flights on that day (for much worse times) are:
qantas - $650, $778, $820, $900+
virgin - $625, $670

It's the return leg that's a real killer, at around $520. So overall not the worst, but could have been a lot better. moral of the story? book plane tickets as early as possible!!


interesting sidenote on the qantas web site (which by the way, although substantially better than virginblue still has a long way to go in terms of usability), the final booking confirmation page url looks like this: https://book.qantas.com.au/pl/QFdomestic/en/BookTripPlanServlet;jsessionid=

if in the same FF tab I overtype that with qantas.com.au, I get a SSL certname mismatch (the cert is against www.qantas.com.au, not qantas.com.au, oversight on their part I guess) the briefest flash of the Sun logo:
which leads me to believe that the qantas web site is hosted on a Sun Application Server.

The funniest bit tho, is that putting that url into another browser that doesn't have a current qantas session (like ie), it gets a 400 bad request error. strange...

Virgin isn't much better though, drop the 'www' off their site name and it doesn't resolve to anything, even though they own the domain. slack. (and the less I say about their popup window calender the better, at least qantas has the common decency to float a div...)



ps - feel free to comment!!!!

matt kerle

First post, air fares...

wow, no longer a blog virgin! now I'm gonna have to post some photo's and stuff up here.

Anyhoo, organising my trip to darwin to work on the farm with EK. I've left this so late that plan prices are horrendous, and I'm looking at doing some crazy mucking around to get them back down, like catch the bus to sydney from canberra, train to the airport, to fly to darwin, just about to run the numbers to see if it's actually cheaper. bonus of that is that I get in fri night instead of saturday, so the extra day is worth it.

I discovered that mid-week is the cheapest time to fly if you can, the wednesday flights are almost 3/4 the price of the weekend ones. was seriously tempted to swap but the beauty of leaving on a friday and getting back on a monday with 10 working days off is that you actually get 2 weeks + 2 days (the second weekend) instead of just two weeks. downside is that going to work after two weeks down the farm and a red eye flight, well, I don't think that monday will be super-productive...;-p

ah well, bite the bullet and book it!

btw - have I mentioned how much I love google stuff? I'm going to do my budget up in google docs, plot my course in google maps, and blog about it right here. Go Google!!!

Other posts should be vaguely more techo, I intend to use this blog as a random repository of cool + neat tricks and hacks that make a coders life easier (there's plenty of them!).

It seems that having an online presence is mandatory these days, if you type your name into Google, and the best hit you get is a friends bebo comment, then somethings wrong. The only other best hit is my subversion posting, which is pretty ordinary.

As Shoemoney points out, your signature is a valuable thing. One of the goals in this blog is that if someone randomly types my name into Google, that the first hit they should get is my blog/website.

Stuff WhereAreYouNow.com & other craps like that, just use google to index you and noone will ever loose you...