Gadlinks for Friday 6.19.09

by Brenda Yun on


I don’t know about you guys, but this Friday feels like a much needed one. It’s been quite a week, especially with all of the revolutionary news from the Middle East and the world in general! My parents are embarking on their own month-long globe trot, so I hope they have happy and safe travels while I hold the fort here at home in sunny Hawaii (things could be worse!). Here’s a dose of Gadlinks to carry you through the weekend.

‘Til Monday, have a great weekend!

For past Gadlinks, click HERE.

Bench 2.0: the strangest seat in Bury St. Edmunds

by Tom Johansmeyer on

In 2001, sleepy Bury St. Edmunds, England received an interesting gift, ultimately from Microsoft CEO Bill Gates. In the Abbey Garden, the town’s centerpiece, is what the locals claim to be the world’s first internet-enabled bench. Sponsored by MSN.co.uk, the seat contains jacks for internet cables and is said to provide direct access to the web. Unfortunately, the development has been rendered irrelevant already, thanks to the ubiquity of wireless internet access in Europe and around the world. Since I no longer travel with an arm’s length of Category 5 cable, I don’t know if the access from the bench works … though tour guide Anthony Mitchell referred to its functionality in the present tense.

Today, two cultures coexist comfortably in the Abbey Garden. The latest generation bench sits amid ruins from more than half a millennium ago. I guess there are worst settings for checking your Twitter feed!

Disclosure: Visit Britain shelled out some cash for this experience, and British Airways supplied the flights. I do wonder, though, if they would have liked me to write about anything else from the four hours I spent in St. Edmundsbury. We spent about five minutes at the bench, after all.

Trax metacrawler launches with First Class Frenzy upgrade game

by Grant Martin on

The newest metacrawler in town, Trax, is wooing users with added incentive to abandon their old Kayaking ways: upgrades. The travel search engine, which is undoubtedly scrapping for market share, just launched First Class Frenzy, an online trivia game where you can answer a host of questions and virtually “move up to first class.” Winners of the online game will be entered in a drawing to win an upgrade on their next flight.

“What sort of upgrade” you ask? According to Trax knower of things Ani Custer, winners will receive one, one way, domestic upgrade good for a year on a major US carrier. One winner will be selected every month, starting on July 16th. Fair enough. If you’re not traveling on the carrier that Trax selects, you can always give away the certificate.

As far as how Trax performs as a search engine, the site has real promise. I just ran a comparison search from DTW – CDG for a week in July and Trax found a fare $75 lower (via vayama.com) than Kayak did. I’ll be sure to include it in my battery of engines next time I run a real search.

Could Twitter and technology make you a target for criminals when you travel?

by Jamie Rhein on

Canceling mail service, stopping the newspaper, and putting house lights on timers are ways to make it look to a potential burglars as if you’re still home.

Twitter, though, could undo all your careful planning if you agree with Israel Hyman that his Tweets about his travels tipped off a burglar that he was long gone. When Hyman returned home after his vacation, he discovered valuable electronic equipment was missing. His wife thinks it was most probably a random, coincidental act. Hyman leans towards with his theory.

After reading the CNET News article that recounts Hyman’s story and tells about how technology and cyberspace are interacting in a way that makes us more vulnerable to people taking advantage of us when we travel, I’m not so sorry that I have simple little cell phone and that I haven’t hopped on the high tech gadgetry bandwagon.

The details about how Mathew Honan was able to track down a woman he saw taking a photo at the Golden Gate Bridge using her iPhone 3G is a bit alarming. He wrote about how he did traced her on Flickr and Facebook in this article in WIRED. Honan isn’t a creep, just someone checking out the power of the equipment and a person with sleuthing know how.

Still, even with the technology that might tip off strangers to ones whereabouts, stopping the mail, the paper, and hooking up the timer makes sense. Being careful about what you Twitter couldn’t hurt either. On the other hand, why be paranoid?

I was broken into when I was gone on vacation and I’m convinced it was a guy who was a friend of the friend of mine taking care of my apartment. He knew where the key was. Maybe Hyman should think about who he knows who knew he was out of town.

International CouchSurfing Day: Do you have a couch lined up?

by Jamie Rhein on

Ten years ago on June 12, CouchSurfing was born–or rather CouchSurfing.com was registered as a domain name and sleeping on the couch of people you just met became an organized system. More than just a way to hook people up with a free place to call it a night, CouchSurfing was created as a way to help make the world a better place.

See, if you stay on the couch of people who have agreed that they like people to stay on their couch as a way to get to know traveling types and expand their connections, the world becomes more friendly. When you make this a global scene, the power just grows.

As a person who CouchSurfed before it was conceived as an organized entity, I can attest to the value of staying with strangers. When I traveled across the United States with a friend of mine after we got out of the Peace Corps, we used our connections of friends to stay with their friends and family members. In most cases it determined where we headed and the experience created a sense that the U.S. was warm, welcoming and friendly.

Our couchsurfing found us staying in: Des Moines, Iowa courtesy of a home for wayward women; at a dairy farm in Vinita, Oklahoma, an itty bitty town; a bachelor pad in downtown San Francisco; and in a house near the beach in Carlsbad, California. At each place we hadn’t met the people before we showed up at their door (or they picked us up at the bus station). The rest of the time we stayed with friends of ours or my family members in various towns and cities in Kentucky, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, and California. Her parents sprung for the hotel room in Seattle and Vancouver and we tented it Utah and at the Rocky Mountain National Park.

That do-it-yourself couchsurfing experience has prompted me to welcome other people who have needed a place to stay into my home which has added to the feeling of expansiveness. It has also created a rich bank of memories of the people who have stayed with us who live in other parts of the world. One of them, Rita Goldman Gelman, author of Tales of a Female Nomad has made couchsurfing an integral part of her life. She stayed with her when we lived in New Delhi and we visited her two summers ago in Seattle.

Without our connections, there’s no way we would have been able to afford this trip and would have missed out on what helped me transition back into a life in the United States (until I moved overseas again).

Thanks to CouchSurfing.com people don’t need to rely on their own connections which might be a paltry number. The whole world is ones oyster thanks to an organized, Internet based system. To date there are 232 countries, 59,929 cities and 1,168,136 people who are registered with couches.

To celebrate International CouchSurfing Day you can also begin looking for a couch in a place you’ve always wanted to go–or offer someone yours. Here are two events happening to celebrate the occassion.

For more Gadling couchsurfing perspectives check out Brook Silva-Braga’s experiences in northern Europe and Tynan’s in Haiti. Neil also vouches for couches and has fond memories of an experience in Kazakhstan.