This is the second time priceline.com has given me joy. The first time, I blogged about here.
The story: Heather gave me an early Christmas present which was two tickets to the New Year’s Eve Dinner & Dance party put on by the Greater Phoenix Swing Dance Club. Why early? Because Marriott’s Camelback Inn that was hosting the party had a waiting list for $189 rooms and she was worried about getting a room. She told me Randy had done some research and determined that you could get a room at several lower class hotels very close to the dance for $150/night. I said, “Well, we don’t really need to stay around there, let’s open up the region and try to get a good hotel.”
So, I fired up priceline.com, told it to search for only 4 star hotels over all of Scottsdale and Mesa for $150. I figured I would use Randy’s research for my initial price, but try to get a better hotel. In seconds the following message come back (which always makes me think I overbid):
What did we get for $150? Marriott’s Camelback Inn of course!
We’ve been taking the swing dance a bit more seriously the last several months. We social dance twice a week, take three group lessons a week and one private lesson a week. Like i’ve said before, my goal is to make the semi finals in the NOVICE division of a Jack and Jill national competition. (Jack and Jill just means your dance partner is randomly chosen.) You would not believe how good the dancers are in the novice division! So far we’ve competed in two competitions (Dallas and Phoenix) and we’ve both been knocked out in the first round.
So, I’ve been listening to podcasts the last month. I wrote a blog entry on “Wasting time on blogs,” and now should probably update that to include podcasts. I mean I really don’t need to be following the daily adventures of Adam Curry in the UK. And yet I can’t stop listening! A couple of days ago, for the first time, I listened to Adam’s Daily Source Code podcast on my 1 hour walk using my cellphone as an MP3 player and listening through my Jabra bluetooth headset (no wires). That was pretty cool. I put a 1 GB MMC card ($76) in my Nokia 6620 cell phone so I could fill it up with podcasts and do precisely that.
Anyway, I HAVE found one podcast I never fail to learn something from. It’s called ESC from the World, and it’s a podcast by a 13 year old boy from New Jersey. He mainly talks about PC software. Normally, I would send him a trackback, but he claimed on one of his podcasts that if anyone mentions his name in a blog, his aggregator will see it. So this is a test. Matthew Bischoff did you see this blog entry? (G)
Just to give you an inkling of how cutting edge this person is, he was the one that clued Leo Laporte in on podcasts. And, by coincidence, he was interviewed yesterday by Leo on his KFI radio show (which I haven’t heard yet fast forward to 7:26 on the mp3)
Here’s one of Matthew’s podcasts talking about the demise of The Screensavers TV show.
Hope everyone has a great rest of the year!
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