Hawaii, Mexico and the Caribbean sale codes from American Airlines

by Grant Martin on

Our tireless friends over at Airfarewatchdog have found a couple of handy coupon codes today for reduced fare on American Airlines from the 48 into Hawaii, Mexico and the Caribbean.

DFALOHAGO should get you 15% off a ticket to The Aloha State while

DFDECMXCRPL should do for the latter bloc.

As usual, there are oddly juxtaposed terms and conditions that I could spend the next half hour breaking down and laying out for you, so I’ll give you the quick summary. You need to travel to Hawaii between December and March 6, in contrast to travel between now and December 20 for Mexico and the Caribbean. You also need to book pretty soon. If you want the full terms and conditions, check the AA website.

Be sure to bounce over to the airfarewatchblog as well; they have a team of staff and writers working full time finding us these codes and fares.

We are multicolored

by Kelly Amabile on

Via the New York City Tenement Museum website I came across this fun flag creation “kit” so to speak: We are multicolored is an online project that aims to promote awareness around the contemporary immigrant experience. In keeping with the mission of the Tenement Museum, the project takes no position on the definitions of flags, but rather encourages the expression of multiple perspectives.

Users are asked three simple questions about countries they associate themselves with — and then the fun begins! A simple interactive interface guides users to create their own artistically inspired flags. You can also search the colors to learn meanings, or to discover which countries contain certain shapes or symbols in their flags. There is a fantastic, ever-changing mosaic of new flags that appear on the website — an ongoing multicolored display of heritage, nationality and travel dreams.

SatLav: Find a toilet via mobile phone

by Catherine Bodry on

If you’re in London and nature calls, you can now respond with a text message.

A new service from Westminster City Council allows mobile phone users to find the nearest public restroom. All the user has to do is text (as an aside: is “text” a verb now?) the word “toilet” to the number 80097 and he or she will receive a reply with detailed directions. It’s a bit pricey (£0.25 compared to the normal £0.01 per message), but when it’s between a back alley, your shorts, or a sweet public toilet pod, what’s twenty-five pence? It’s not like you’ll be sending messages back and forth, after all.

The service is available throughout Westminster, an area that includes such sights as Big Ben and Buckingham Palace.

Download a college education while on the road

by Neil Woodburn on

Jack London never received a college education. Well, not officially at least. He did, however, get his hands on class reading lists from UC Berkeley and then proceeded to consume all of the books featured–which is far more than most students normally do.

Today’s modern equivalent is actually downloading the lectures themselves.

And now it’s never been easier.

Apple has inked deals with 28 major American universities to make lectures available for free on their iTunes website. That means that Jack London wannabes seeking a free, quality education can download lectures from not only Berkeley professors, but those from Stanford and Yale as well two dozen other schools. Of course, there’s no degree at the end of the day, but there is knowledge, and that’s a pretty cool thing I’m told.

So why are we telling you about this on a travel blog? Because the best way to pass the time between Point A and Point B is to enrich your mind along the way.

The perfect forum for airline conspiracy theorists: PPrUne

by Grant Martin on

If you ever want to read some great airline conspiracy theories rumors over your smoke break, check out the Professional Pilots rUmor network or PPrUne.

This forum is home to a community of airline enthusiasts and professionals alike and you’ll find a great deal of data about any sort of mishap or news in the aviation world discussed among their threads.

It’s also kind of creepy finding out a pilot’s interpretation of some of the hijinks that the airlines downplay. As metafilter blogs, initial reports of “vibration in the No. 2 engine” by the FAA were later decrypted as “uncontained engine failure” by the community. It’s great that when Dateline NBC and 60 Minutes aren’t out there scaring our pants off, PPrUne can step in and do the job when needed.

I mostly tease. The PPrUne has always been a great resource for me when I need to learn more about the happenings among the airline folk, and I love their members dearly. Make sure you take the posts with a grain of salt though; as the forum title states, it is the Professional Pilots Rumor Network. Think hard about the statistics of airline safety and performance before you fly (pun!) off the handle and put your aluminum helmet on.