Well at least in part to google…
…As you may have noticed there hasn’t quite been the usual level of blogging this week, this is mostly to do with the fact that I am working like a mad man at work to allow myself a week off before Christmas to go snowboarding in the alps. Check out all the lovely snow on the web cam this morning!
Im at Aberdeen Airport just now, Rachel and I are flying out to Ljubljana, Slovenia to go snowboarding for her 21st Birthday. We are about 5 minuites from the austrian border in the Julian Alps and an hour and a half from Italy. Keeping all of that in mind we are also planning to fulfill an ambition of mine to go to Venice! Even if its just for one day.
I don’t blog this to brag (OK, I don’t ONLY blog this to brag) but to let you in to some brilliant web apps, tips and tricks which have made my job as "trip co-ordinator extrordinaire" much much easier so that maybe you can plan an equally brilliant trip using your work terminal and an internet connection!
Some of these tips will be specific to a snow sports holiday, and some will be specific to slovenia or venice but hopefully there will be one thing here that might help you organise a trip with more ease.
1) del.icio.us and its tag system – This was the filing cabinet for all my holiday research, if you’ve never used delicious before it basically acts like a bookmarker for websites but differently to the bookmarks you’re used to using in your browser as you file things with a tag or mulitple tags. So for example I could tag something as ski, slovenia, holiday, and something else as Venice, Italy, Holiday but each word becomes a category, so if I want to look at all the bookmarks regarding my holiday I click on the holiday tag, but if I want the ones related just to skiing, I click on the ski tag.
2) Google Calendar - Is a brilliant invention, I have started running my life from it due to the fact I can access it from any access point to the internet unlike my previous calendar preference which was microsoft outlook. I used Google calendar to detail all the timings of flights, coaches and and in the details section I included all the confirmation codes for things like car hire! Pretty useful for before hand and while you’re away if you end up loosing some details! As a side note Ive also realised that you can import outlook and ical format calendars onto Google calendar and over lay different calendars onto the one screen so for example, I have a work calendar (public) in yellow which I sync with the office calendar and is full of everyone’s meetings and movements, a personal (public) in Blue with plans for evenings, doctors appointments and holidays and a Financial (private) in red which has the details of when certain direct debits come out, when I get paid etc. Google Calendar has some great stuff built into to it which I may talk about in another post but a particularly useful feature is that it alerts you by SMS to an engagement on google calendar 10mins before!
3) Google Maps - This has been a brilliant tool to see how far everything is away from each and keep a note of where all the ski resorts near our’s are,just in case our early snow hopes didn’t pay off. Ialso managed to print out point to point directions to Venice from our little village in Slovenia…
More to come, but we’re just about to board.
