Kevin's Weblog

I’ve just swiped this bunch of emacs goodness from Tim Bray. I had to compile and install Emacs 21.3 to get things working, but it seems good now. (Actually, I think I could have hunted down a bunch of elisp packages instead, but it seemed easier to just grab the upgrade that has them all already.) I’m a little annoyed that RedHat doesn’t have an RPM version yet, but whatcha gonna do?

The only oddness is retraining my fingers to double hit the apostrophe key. Interestingly, I seem to have immediately adjusted to the change for double and single quotes. I think this probably says something interesting about linguistics and grammar, that I can un-overload the apostrophe symbol with no trouble at all.

That’s actually Orbitz’ motto. “Most”. Apparently, I have found the fares which are not easy. Trying to find a reasonably priced hotel in Vegas for next weekend, and their search keeps returning different results on identical searches. Then, when I actually click on “book it”, they don’t go to a reservation page, but instead the same page will reload or I’ll get sent to the front page.

I called their support line, and after spending half an hour on hold, I got a guy who claimed that that’s normal behavior when a rate has sold out. When I asked why they didn’t stop showing a rate that wasn’t availible, he said that the hotel has to update it before it’ll disappear. Now, it seems to me that something in their system knows the rate isn’t availible, in a seriously broken fashion, so I don’t really understand why their search engine can’t figure it out.