Now that I am going to be traveling from Asheville, NC to Juneau, AK on a fairly regular basis, I’ve been playing with several different options online for watching fares, sending me alerts for deals, and so on.

This has been my experience over the last couple months:

Twitter
Alaska Air and Delta Air both have Twitter accounts. I also use Travelocity fairly regularly, and they have a Twitter account as well. What a great way to keep up on the latest deals right?
Result?
Thanks to Alaska Air’s Twitter feed, I’ve learned a lot about the famous Olympic speed skater from Seattle. I’ve learned it’s Delta Airlines’ 80th anniversary of non-stop flight. I’ve watched a few people resolve some complaints, and I’ve even seen a few promotions for flights to Hawaii and stuff. But so far I have not seen any sort of financial incentives or flight deals that impact me directly. Mostly just a lot of chatter and clever quips.

RSS
Travelocity offers the ability to create customized RSS feeds that will only trigger when the cities and price point match my specific criteria. I wish Twitter did the same thing frankly. It’s something Dave Winer has been suggesting for awhile.
Result?
I set up my maximum amount of RSS notifications. But so far, I have not received ANY RSS notifications that matched any of my criteria. I only specified a slightly lower price point, but I have yet to be notified.

Newsletters:
I have subscribed to Orbitz, Kayak, and a couple other newsletters alerts. As I’ve asked different people about sites they use to get good deals I get recommendations of different travel sites, so I sign up in the hopes I can keep an eye out for more fare deals.
Result?
So far no good.

Admittedly, there are probably a couple things that make finding fare deals difficult for me.

• My home airport is a regional airport
  Asheville has a small regional airport. It kind of reminds me of the San Jose Airport. Well, San Jose circa 2003, since that is the last time I went through San Jose. Maybe it’s bigger now. So there aren’t a lot of people clamoring for an Asheville to Seattle flight, thus the scarcity of deals. My flights usually involve a shuttle plane from Asheville to Charlotte, or Atlanta, or some mid-west city like Chicago. Thus the added cost.
• TTL
  I have only been buying tickets a few weeks before my flight dates. As my work schedule solidifies and I can buy tickets months in advance, I think I’ll see a lot more flexibility in price.

Regardless, each flight is about 4500 miles each way. So my Frequent Flier miles are racking up. I’ll save my Frequent Flier Miles experiences for another post.

I’ve looked around online for more tips and tricks on finding flight deals. Usually I end up being pushed to a HubPages or Squidoo lens, or some lame Top 5 Airfare Tips blog post, which just end up trying to get me to click on an ad or affiliate link. Boo.

Does anyone have any tips on finding online deals? What has worked best for you?

The obligatory Elf Yourself video with me and the girls dancing.

Hip Hop

The girls spent the night at a friends house the other night and they had a cute little photo shoot. Check it:

Full set of photos here

Today’s Father’s Day with comments, as well as some old Dad moments over the years :

Fathers Day 2009

They made breakfast and then cleaned the kitchen for Father's Day. Wonderful!

Sarah Kate's Windchime she made last week at Pottery Class

Abby's Windchime she made at Pottery Class last week.

The girls made coupons I can redeem for random housework, hugs, and kisses

Sarah Kate made me a bracelet with a cool little bead.

They made me a book I can write down songs in that we can all play together.

They gave me a Certificate of Appreciation for Father's Day

The bracelet and other items came in these handmade boxes. How cute!

Anagrams are fun. I made this about 10 years ago and just found it on an old backup drive while doing some spring cleaning.

These are the panels I am planning to attend. Anyone wanna meet up and go together?

Wednesday

• 2pm
  Music Panel: “Tuning into Songwriting”
  We kick off HATCHfest Music with our groundbreaker and mentor songwriters joining together to interact with young HATCHfest attendees to share their stories and lessons learned while pursuing a creative profession.
• 4pm
  Design & Technology Panel: “Is Innovation dead?”
  Innovation has become the catch word for the 21st century. But what exactly is innovation, really? Our panel of HATCH mentors who represent a diverse range of perspectives will explore the very nature of how we innovate and why innovation is important. Hear what NASA industrial designer Evan Twyford, toy inventor Joe Wilcox, interaction designer Manuel Lima and video artists Scott Pagano and Robb Pope have to say about what makes an organization or a process “Innovative.” Find out how we can be more creative, and how play leads to innovation.

Thursday

• 11am
  Cross-Discipline Panel and Discussion: Marketing for the Creative Professional
  This will be a panel event, comprised of local professionals that will be available to field your questions on understanding and mastering the power of the media in promoting your art business.
• 1pm
  Music Panel: “The New Music Curators”
  The art of music discovery is drastically changing. Traditional gatekeepers like radio, Rolling Stone and MTV are losing their significance, and consumers are lost in a diverse landscape of fragmented and unending media choices. Thursday’s Music Panel at the Innovator’s Lounge explores the increasing importance of curation in music. You are invited to listen to our esteemed group of mentors who will share their experiences in how musicians will be discovered in the new paradigm. The panel consists of Ashley Capps (founder of Bonnaroo Music Festival), Sean Moeller (founder / producer of the Daytrotter blog) and Nate Douglas (Chief Curation Officer for Paste Magazine).

Friday

• 11am
  Journalism Panel: “The New Media Landscape: Challenges and Possibilities”
  The Journalism discipline’s panel, on Friday, April 17, will welcome the public to a fast-paced, in-depth discussion of “The New Media Landscape: Challenges and Possibilities.” Our panel of veteran professionals from print and broadcast to online media, moderated by Journalism discipline coordinator Jon Elliston (see bio below), will share perspectives and ideas on the sea of changes in mass communication, from the decline of print media to the rise of the Web and other multimedia platforms. Underlying the discussion will be ways to survive and thrive as journalists amidst the information revolution, and new opportunities for collaborating with citizen journalists.
• 3pm
  Design & Technology Panel: “HATCHfest Mentors Discuss the Creative Process”
  The creative process is a noble beast. Some days ideas bubble up fully formed and other times nothing seems to work. Our panelists give a candid perspective on their own challengest and triumphs as creative professionals and how they make their art. Discount tire coupons.

Saturday

• 11am
  Design & Technology Keynote: Manuel Lima
  Network Visualization in the age of infinite interconnectedness
  VisualComplexity.com (VC) is a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. With over 600 projects, the goal is to glean a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web. This talk will leverage the existing pool of knowledge from VC to convey a current portrait of network visualization. It will illustrate some of its current trends and representation methods, and explore the reasons behind the recent outburst of interest in the field, while focusing on the key challenges of mapping complex networks.

The girls and I had a ton of fun at this circus last night. For those of you who would like to check it out, there is another show today. Check it: Runaway Circus – Asheville

Sarah Kate’s reaction at the show

Local Asheville artist and fellow geek Wylie Fisher wanted to get a bunch of his art up on walls. I managed to get a couple paintings in trade for beer. What a deal! The girls and I hung them up this morning.