Have Guides, Will Travel

You know you want to come visit Heather and me in Slovakia, so I figured I'd make it easy by putting together a few travel guides for you. OK, that's not completely honest--I just typed "Bratislava, Slovakia" into TripWolf.com and it made one for me. For free. You can check it out here and download the PDF.

Whatever your destination, if you haven't checked out TripWolf and/or Offbeat Guides yet, you're missing out on a lot of awesome. Also visit traveldk--they don't offer guides for the breadth of destinations as the other sites, but offer very solid info nonetheless.

Of course, if you are, in fact, planning a visit to Slovakia, feel free to skip out on the travel guides altogether--Heather and I would be more than thrilled to put you up in our quirky little flat and put together an exhilerating itinerary for you. I'm just saying...

Harry Potter versus Heather

My dearest Heather, after protesting for years that Harry Potter was beneath her and her English degree, is now officially consumed by the series. She hardly spoke to me yesterday except to say, with fierce intensity, "Go away! Leave me alone!" as she tore through the last couple hundred pages of Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince. When she finished, she immediately curled up in a ball and refused to leave the refuge of her covers. I think someone might be emotionally invested in the story...

fonolo: Saving Your Sanity

Raise your hand if you love dialing 1-800 numbers and fighting through a maze of pre-recorded touch-tone phone tree menu options before finally being put on hold for half an hour so you can ask a surly customer service representative your simple question.

What? No hands? Didn't think so. Neither did fonolo, the genius company that decided to transcribe the phone menus of large companies so you can navigate them visually and skip the hassle.

'Pick the company you need, scan through their phone menu visually, then just click the spot you need to call. fonolo will automatically dial, navigate their menu and then dial your phone. When you answer, you will be connected to the right spot in the menu. We call that “Deep Dialing”. You’ll call it smart.'

No. I call it brilliant.

You Should Have Seen This

I recently stumbled upon youshouldhaveseenthis.com. This rather pretentiously named URL hosts a "definitive list of the 99 things you should have already experienced on the internet unless you're a loser or old or something," graciously compiled by someone named Greg Rutter. He's a copywriter, so I respect that, but I'm not sure what gives him the right to suggest I'm an old loser for the simple reason that I hadn't, until I found his stupid list, wasted 4 minutes of my life watching Charlie the badly animated Unicorn getting his kidney stolen. But, hey, if you've got a lot of time on your hands and nothing good to do with it (be warned: in both professional and social circles we call such people "losers")... check it out.

Sorry, that was harsh. And hypocritical. I've laughed at many of these clips myself. As for the clips I haven't seen, I must confess I've bookmarked the site for future time-wasting reference.