If you’re reading this on any device other than a mobile phone, you’re behind the times. If I can’t persuade you to post this piece on Facebook, I’m doomed to irrelevance. And if you want to tweet a complaint about my bad jokes or ask for a restaurant recommendation in Heathrow, I’d better have a round-the-clock team ready to respond.
O.K., so those lessons were intended not for me but for the travel industry types at EyeforTravel’s Social Media and Mobile Strategies for Travel conference, which I attended last week in San Francisco. I did, though, pick up some tips — and a few warnings — about how a budget traveler should maneuver in this fast-changing world.
TIPS
Hold those prices: Several companies allow you to put a no-risk hold on airline tickets for days or weeks for a small fee. If you haven’t heard of this, you most likely will. Robert Brown, the founder of Options Away, one of those companies, said his service’s “call option” will be integrated into more mainstream booking sites within months.
How could it save you money? It’s sort of like insurance: capture a low price before your plans are finalized and take a few days or weeks to decide. If you cancel, you lose only the fee. (If the prices goes down, you save more.) A competitor, Level Skies, has the advantage of allowing you to move the travel dates forward or back one day up until when you finalize your purchase. Their interface, though, needs some work — and there’s no app yet.
Better photo sharing: Have you already traded a heavy SLR camera for your iPhone when you travel, posting your pictures on Facebook and Instagram? Several sites now help you share your experience more elegantly. A new one that officially launched at the conference and should soon be available at the App Store, Tripstr (iPhone only, at least for now), is designed to turn your photos into an appealing record of your trip that others can view and even add to their own “bucket list.” In addition to sharing with others on your Tripstr network, you can share a link through Facebook and email.
Get an emergency interpreter: Google Translate and its automated competitors can be miraculous in everyday situations abroad. But if you really need an interpreter in a difficult situation — when you’re a victim of crime, your travel companion lands in the hospital or you’re just horribly lost, for example, instant, reasonably priced live translation is hard to come by. A new app due out next month, TalkLingo, undercuts established services like VerbalizeIt by charging $1 a minute, without requiring a subscription or package fee. It will offer 200 languages, with interpreters from 20 major ones from Spanish to Swahili, guaranteed to be available within a minute.
Ready to be pushed? Another conference consensus: users will need to seek information less. Instead, phones will know what you want without asking you. That’s an evolution that, in theory, is especially useful for travel. Walking through an unfamiliar city, your phone puts together where you are with what it knows about you and pushes out suggested attractions, historical information, even articles from trusted sources. Budget travelers might be pinged about nearby sales or receive discount offers for the restaurant right across the street. For those of you who find this horrifying, here’s some mild solace: Companies (at least those at the conference) know bothering you unnecessarily is a grave danger for this technology.
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There are already apps that do this. Google’s Field Trip, currently available for iPhone and Android, pushes content to you when you’re in the vicinity of a historical site, architectural landmark, shopping area, restaurant or the like. I’ve tried it in New York, where I’ve had some success with it — for example, as I passed near a new Mexican restaurant near my home, a review popped up from Eater.com. (Lots of other trusted and lesser-known sites have their content integrated here, like Zagat, Thrillist and Atlas Obscura; you can customize which ones you hear from.)
The new technology is especially designed for what those in the know (now including me) call “wearables” like Google Glass — which several conference attendees were strutting around with — and the company’s coming smartwatches). But those are likely to stay expensive for quite a while. Budget travelers who want to try it will have to continue to do stare down at their phones and then stuff them back in their pockets for the time being.
It’s not just Field Trip, but other technology that integrates more smoothly into your phone, like Yahoo’s Aviate (in beta for Android) or Google Now — which is part of the Google search app — that is now growing on me. On the morning of my 8 a.m. flight from New York to San Francisco for the conference, my alarm did not go off. About an hour later, my phone let out a single beep, and I somehow woke up and looked. “Time to leave for UA 397,” it read. “Leave by 6:37 AM to arrive at the airport 60 minutes before your flight.” I bolted out of bed, grabbed my bag and hopped in a taxi, barely making the flight and saving a rebooking fee. If I were nit-picking, I’d say it should be smart enough to know I prefer public transportation and ping me an hour earlier, saving me a few more bucks. It’s not as if Google doesn’t know what I do for a living.
Is customer service transitioning to social media? Shashank Nigam, the chief executive of a research and consulting company called SimpliFlying, told an amazing story of a passenger on Turkish Airlines who, frustrated that the flight attendants would not turn down the heat, vented on Facebook via the plane’s free Wi-Fi. Because spots sent from the plane’s IP address are flagged, the airline’s social media team spotted the comment, contacted the pilot, and a compromise was reached. Many other airlines are also responsive on Twitter: KLM, for example, says it responds to 4,500 tweets and Facebook posts a week, in 10 languages and always within an hour.
I asked Mr. Nigam if some companies had perhaps swung too many resources toward their social media response team to the detriment of call centers. “There is an unfair advantage to the connected traveler,” he said. But that’s true only with some companies — and don’t expect miracle solutions. Just having a Twitter team doesn’t instantly make the flood of requests during weather-related cancellations go away, for example. Still, the industry is moving in this direction if you don’t have a Twitter or Facebook account, it can’t hurt to open one just for this purpose — it might end up saving you time and money.
WARNINGS
You are the marketer: If there was one theme conference participants harped on repeatedly, it was that companies are relying less on traditional advertising campaigns and more on recruiting customers to market on their behalf. Mike De Jesus, head of travel for Twitter, noted that the company had counted 640 million conversations about travel. “There are some good opportunities for you as a brand to jump into these conversations,” he told company representatives.
Reviews required? Your social networks — or at least what’s public on them — also help hotels in their efforts to know you before you arrive, allowing them to “delight” you with a personally-tailored surprise. If that appeals, fine — in the places I stay, a clean bathroom is “delight” enough for me.
One presenter caught my ear by noting that hotels can now discover (or hire a company to help discover) which of their guests are frequent reviewers on TripAdvisor, presumably to delight the heck out of them. TripAdvisor says this would be difficult to do, but let’s say it isn’t. Does anyone see a problem here? I see two: 1) If hotels pamper TripAdvisor reviewers, their presumably rave reviews will bias the site’s influential rankings; 2) Nonreviewers become, by default, second-class citizens.
Maintain your independence: Company efforts to create customer loyalty are often bad news for budget travelers — something you already know if you’ve been tempted to book a more expensive flight just to gain miles toward a theoretical free trip on “your” airline. But that’s old news. At the conference, it seemed that companies are now quite keen on having you download their own apps. Those who use airline apps to access digital boarding passes or hotel apps to bypass check-in lines already know that this can be a very good idea. But be aware that companies can use their app to ping you with offers, and hope that as you become accustomed to the app, you’ll use it to book future trips, locking you into their brand instead of doing a broader search on, say, hotels.com. So remember: brand apps for convenience, search apps for booking.
http://www.gogobot.com/westhill-consulting-travel-an-singapore-attraction
https://foursquare.com/westhilltravel

I'm almost to the point where I need to start using another editor. Don't get me wrong, I love Sublime Text 2, but the tab management interface is lacking significantly enough where it's affecting my workflow. After I get more than 15 files open (on a large monitor), the UI starts to fall apart. I've currently got 29 files open, and the tabs are unusable because I can't read the file names. Instead I have to use the explorer tree, which takes too much time when you're dealing with a large project. I've also inadvertently closed tabs by accident when the tabs are small, which is a huge pain in the butt when you don't know where the file is.

I recommend doing something like eclipse... only allow a certain number of tabs in the tab bar, and the rest are in a little menu that is accessible from the tab bar.

A world becoming warmer and experiencing more droughts and other climate-connected disasters is apt to bring about a considerable upsurge in fierce conflicts between individuals as well as whole societies, a major study has revealed.

An analysis of 61 in-depth cases of violence has shown that personal clashes and wider civil conflicts grow considerably in number with significant changes to weather patterns, such as rising temperature and lack of rain, scientists said.

Even fairly modest shifts away from the average lead to noticeable rise in the occurrence of violence, according to the study which theorized that the expected rise of in average world temperatures this century could result in a 50 per cent growth in major violent conflicts such as civil wars.

The scientists suggest that climate shifts, especially rising temperatures, are bound to cause more frequent conflicts over progressively declining natural resources, on top of the physiological impact on people due to hotter weather.

"We need to be cautious here. We do not mean that it is inevitable that further warming in the future will produce more conflict.  We are saying that previous changes in climate -- especially, past temperature increase -- are connected with increasing personal and group disputes," said Marshall Burke of the University of California, Berkeley.

"It is certainly possible that future communities will be more able to deal with severe temperatures than we do today; but we believe that it is risky to just presume that this will be so," said Mr. Burke, one of the authors of the study published in the journal Science.

The study was based on an investigation of the scholastic literature for historical narratives of violent disputes, from individual aggression, such as murder and assaults to greater conflicts such as riots, racial tensions, civil war and even primary declines of civilisations that existed thousands of years back.

Disputes between groups rather than between persons exhibited the clearest link to alterations in the climate, the scientists said, with temperature increases being the most prevalent risk factor -- all of the 27 causes of contemporary societies, for example, established a connection between warmer weather and increase in violence.

"We found that a one standard-deviation shift towards warmer conditions causes personal violence to increase 4 per cent and inter-societal conflicts to grow by 14 per cent," Mr Burke said.

"To appreciate the magnitude of the shift, this sort of increase in temperature is about equal to warming an African nation by 0.4C for a whole year or warming a United States county by 3C for a given month. Although these are moderate changes, they have an immense effect on communities," he said.

"Our findings give inkling to a couple of aspects of the matter that might link climate to conflict. The first is economic shortage. Years of high temperature and severe precipitation cause a degradation of economic conditions, principally in poor countries, and if things turn really bad, desperate people who lack other options might choose to rise up in arms.  This appears to be a major path connecting climate and group conflict in many agricultural communities," he added.

"Simultaneously, exposure to extremely hot temperatures also seems to promote a physiological reaction in how humans interrelate with one another:  People become less trustful, more hostile, and more vicious. It is probable that both of these factors are prime motivators, and we hope that future study will aid in determining which factor applies in which setting," he added.

Solomon Hsiang of Princeton University, another co-author of the research, said that the connection between climate shift and violent dispute is apparent but for now there is no obvious rationalization -- somewhat akin to the link in the 1950s between smoking and lung cancer, which could only be established after many years.

"Presently, there are some suppositions pointing out why the climate might induce conflict. For instance, we know that shifts in climate influence current economic circumstances, particularly in agricultural countries, and studies imply that people are more liable to take up arms when the economy declines, perhaps partly to preserve their livelihoods," Mr Hsiang said.

How social media fuels holiday inflation

Parents are now under pressure to fill summer holidays with activities for their children by the explosion of social media, as claimed by some people.

According to the Future Foundation think-tank, the facility with which people can “post” their vacation pictures and other activities online puts pressure on others to stay in step.

The authors claimed that their data shows time spent on holidays increasing in the last five decades, identifying a particular rise in the amount of time people spend socialising outside their homes, as well as an increase in the variety of activities they get involved in.

The appearance of what they called an “experience economy”, in which the amassing of experience is more important than the accumulation of material things, can be partly explained by the great upsurge in mobile phone users with Internet-linked smartphones, up by 20 per cent since 2010.

The report, entitled “Fifty Years of Summer” and created for the Nectar loyalty card company, said the way families and individuals socialise during summer has also shifted, with 66 per cent saying that barbecuing is the most frequent way to dine with friends; a drastic increase from only 6 per cent in the 1960s.

They also claimed that there is a rising pressure among young people to plan for their summer experience, with more and more of them using spray tans, sun beds and exercise programs to prepare for warm weather.

Source: http://blog.crowncapitalmngt.com/fewer-resources-greater-stress-more-disasters-climate-change-linked-to-violence-among-people-and-societies/

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So my routine right now is 1) select text, 2) command+alt+f to bring up the find-and-replace bottom-bar, and then 3) control+alt+enter to replace all in my selection. I would like not to have to do step 2 -- it should remember my settings from last time.

I have no idea how i ever survived programming without this absolutely, amazingly, incredibly powerful tool.

Sublime Text is in a league of its own when comparing text editors to each other Just a week of use will get you addicted for life!

There's no need to settle for generic, touristy restaurants in Edinburgh. Food blogger Jonathan Jones's favourites are an eclectic mix but all have fine food to shout about

The Ship on the Shore
Many tourists head to Leith to visit the Royal Yacht Britannia but many neglect to stop at The Shore. That's a shame as this area by the water is home to some 10 of the best restaurants Edinburgh's most welcoming and best quality restaurants. The Ship on the Shore focuses on seafood, with the catch of the day joined by a host of regulars, including a mean seafood chowder. If the sight of water isn't enough to perk up the seafarer inside you then surely the nautical maps along the wall will. Try a bowl of steamed Shetland mussels – they'll provide you with an enduring memory of this fine City.

Castle Terrace Restaurant
This is the sister restaurant to Edinburgh's Michelin-starred The Kitchin. Enjoy a drink in the bar or, even better, wait to be invited down to the chef's table, which overlooks Dominic Jack's kitchen – although seeing the preparation of the beautiful food makes choosing a dish even harder. Perhaps put your faith in the Surprise Tasting Menu (£60), from which the pistachio souffle lingers long in the memory. Inside the dining room patches of purple puncture calming neutral tones – this is a place where whole evenings pass with ease.

Ondine
Ondine has been a breath of fresh air for Edinburgh's seafood scene. After opening in late 2009, it soon picked up a host of awards for the near-perfect manner in which the locally sourced seafood is prepared. Work your way through the oysters, feast on the sea bream curry or push the boat out and try the roast shellfish platter. Huge glass windows provide views of Edinburgh's old town, while the silver-topped horseshoe bar provides an impressive internal focal point. Post meal, go for a nightcap in the stylish bar of the Missoni Hotel next door.

La Favourita
La Favorita is a modern pizzeria, with black-topped tables and whitewashed walls. In recent years, owner Tony Crolla has expanded his brand to include a takeaway fleet of Mini Coopers and a mobile van, complete with a log-fired pizza oven. Yet it is the original restaurant on Leith Walk that continues to offer what is surely Edinburgh's best pizza, with their thin crispy bases and superb quality ingredients. That said, overlooking La Favorita's pasta and regularly changing specials would be unfair; their saltimbocca is superb.



Wedgwood
When this restaurant opened four years ago it sent out a clear message that on Edinburgh's touristy Royal Mile you could still find seriously good restaurants with seriously interesting menus. Many a business in this historic location would be tempted to bask in their success; maybe put their feet up and watch the tourist money roll in. Not Wedgwood; its pigeon served with haggis, neeps and tatties is as unusual as it is delicious. Try to avoid being seated downstairs, as the natural light of the street-level dining room is where you will enjoy this inventive and innovative experience the most.

Kweilin
While its decor is traditional – paintings of China adorn the walls and paper lanterns hang from the ceiling – Kweilin's food is spectacular. The wafer paper prawns are the best I've ever eaten and the eight treasures duck – a breast of braised duck buried deep in various fish and meats – is an all-time favourite. Monkfish, halibut and lobster all make appearances on the seafood-heavy menu. The prices might be a little higher than your average Chinese restaurant but then so is the quality of food.

The Grain Store
When eating out in Edinburgh it's not unreasonable to expect the very best Scottish meat and fish. The Grain Store consistently delivers, with its venison, beef and lamb never failing to impress. The upstairs setting sums up all that is great about Edinburgh: an intimate dining room, moody lighting, bare-brick walls and views of picture-perfect Victoria Street. The three-course lunch for £15 has been running for a long time and offers superb value.

The Honours
Martin Wishart's in Leith is probably Edinburgh's best outright restaurant (with a correspondingly expensive menu and long waiting list to match). So there was much anticipation before the Michelin-starred chef opened this classic brasserie. The interior is lined with marble, huge mirrors and grand lampshades bathing the interior in a golden hue. The menu has depth, appeal and grabs your interest in a way many newcomers cannot: there are surely few restaurants where you can start with a pressed pigs head terrine and end with an ice-cream sundae. The Honours has 70 covers and there will be few nights when all are not taken.

Dusit
Dusit is a Thai restaurant a notch or two above the norm. Situated on quirky Thistle St, it rubs shoulders with champagne bars and designer boutiques. It simply doesn't do disappointing dishes but you'll be most mesmerised if you order anything with scallops, king prawns or monkfish. For meat lovers, some dishes can be ordered with venison, providing a Scottish twist to classic Thai recipes.

Sushiya
This small restaurant has been satisfying sushi cravings for as long as I can remember but as its popularity has risen so has the competition for seats. Through the huge front window you'll see diners perched on stools; food competing for space on cramped tables and a sushi chef working his magic at the rear. No wonder Sushiya has a buzz similar restaurants lack. Enjoy a selection of the excellent salmon and tuna sushi, then follow with the delicious soup-based udon (noodles).