connecting dots.
spent close to a week over here now between LA and SF and have really come to believe that this is one of the best places to be in the summer. The weather is nice, people are generally upbeat and happy and there is a bunch of stuff going on everywhere, including NFL opening day.
Happy to have seen old friends and met new ones… Always good to come back and get close to everything again and get the pulse of what’s going on.
Planning trips has always been somewhat of a mixed experience. On one hand, I’m excited and look forward to the new things and places on the trip but on the other hand sifting through the infinite number of repetitive recommendations is incredibly excruciating and painful.
With the ever increasing number of travel related apps out there I still don’t feel satisfied by any of the given experiences. What is it that we are looking for when preparing to hit the road? Are we looking for the cheapest passage? Curated and guided? Tours and packages on arrival or something to remind me of everything that I’ve planned? Perhaps something that combines all the elements above? There are of course great individual services out there that solve some very useful problems. Here are a few that I always look at and use.
Kayak. Just to get a sense of everything form flights to hotels and cars.
Airbnb. To find some cool local places to stay vs mainstream hotels.
Viator. Check out and plan excursions and tickets to places I don’t want to lineup for.
Trip Advisor and other Guides. These get a bit confusing and not always the most locally knowledgable but does a broad sweep. There are some socially crowd sourced apps that I’ve played with too but who are these people rating and talking about places?
I think that at the end of the day, something should understand my price range, cool or main stream accommodations, choices of things I want to do and to lay it all out within the dates I want. This may be asking for a lot but is it? Let’s hope more teams out there come up with smart ways to make globe trotting easier!
Suggestions?
Under very random circumstances, quite a few things I’ve experienced recently have made me think about “reality”. It’s not in a ‘the world is not flat’ type of way, but more about how far we’ve all come and how much there is to go. Bare with me.
Not more than 3 months ago, I had the opportunity to truly experience Virtual Reality for the first time. As a kid, I remember thinking of HMDs (are we really going to call it this?) as the perfect piece to a halloween Cyclops costume then eventually as futuristic private 100″ screens googles but I also remember completely forgeting about them as a consumer product. It seem to never really deliver for what it was made up to be. But after putting on the Oculus, I honestly feel that the time has come. What I felt was not movie screen to IMAX wow, it was radio to TV wow (so to speak…). It may sound geeky and silly to some people but how my body felt and reacted was NOT what I expected. The scale and size was nothing like I’ve seen before…. well other than in real life. Feeling like I was there at the live (NOT virtual) venue was amazing… again being there in person would be amazing too but I was sitting in my office… For a second there I was a mixture of shocked, excited, suspicious, confused and happy all at the same time. Truly spectacular stuff and I can’t wait for the proliferation of headsets in the consumer market to really see where entertainment can go. It’s starting to play mind tricks and crossing Total Recall/Matrix lines…. but I know I’d pay good money with no hesitation if I were able to BE back at Cameron Stadium for the season home games again.
A short chat about game consoles today while at the Vectr office construction site also made me think about this. Pong to Pacman Arcade to handheld consoles (the single game ones) to Gameboy, Game Gear, Nintendo (red and white), Genesis, Atari, Super Famicon (Asia), full scale Arcades, Playstation/Saturn, N64, Dreamcast, Wii, eventually Xbox and PS 234……all lead to VR and being “in the game”. Reality?! Look how far its all come. very cool.
Another realization was completely not related was from Brazil. The shock, unity, anger, horror, sadness, more sadness, applause to opposition ending with a cynical self applause of the 7-1 score between Germany and Brazil in the World Cup semifinals was another crazy reality. It took me a while to register witnessing what will be talked about for decades, if not forever. Couldn’t quite believe that Brazil, of all teams, would get crushed like that… and at home!!??!?! Unbelievable. On the other hand, I completely see and understand how the Brazilian team got, strategically and technically, crushed that way. I guess in the historical context of Brazilian football…. unbelievable… but as the squad that day…. completely possible, obviously.
Anyways. This is my first real post and not sure if and how it will be read but… I had a good time writing it. Hope everyone is doing good!
the techathlete. 