I think there have been two occasions in the past year (one time during our wedding and one time when we flew to Delaware) where someone got made fun of for paying WAY TOO MUCH for a rental car. I almost forgot about my own little tricks when booking our next trip to Seattle/Vancouver next month.

Tip 1:  Use Hotwire

I like to use Hotwire.com for almost every hotel and car rental I reserve.  For those of you who don’t know works, for hotels, they guarantee you a hotel of certain quality for a really good price within a certain area.  For cars, it’s almost similar, except they guarantee you a certain size car for a certain price.  Catches:  1.) You don’t find out what hotel it is or where it’s located until after you’ve purchased.   2.) It’s non-refundable and it’s probably pretty hard to make changes to your reservation.

Tip 2:  Mess with the Pickup Time

Try moving your pickup time to an earlier (or later if possible) time as long as the total duration of your reservation doesn’t cause you to add another full day.  You might get some different rates based on the pickup time.  Even if your flight arrives in the evening, don’t hesitate to adjust your pickup time several hours before your flight arrives.  Just think of it as showing up late to pick up your rental.  You have up to 24 hours to pick up your car after the designated pick up time.

Follow these two quick tips and you’ll be on your way to success.  We saved almost $200 bucks on the car rental with our upcoming trip to Seattle doing this

Figure 1:  Picking up at 12:00pm

Figure 2:  Picking up at 12:30pm

Since it seems like everyone’s got a food blog now, I’m gonna make a post about what I cooked just so I can be cool too.  I searched for “ground turkey recipes” and this is what I got:  http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Kellys-Enchiladas/Detail.aspx

You don’t need an explanation.

BAM!

I picked up this Canon 24-70 f/2.8L sometime in March or April off of Craigslist and there’s a reason why this lens is so popular.  Luckily, I scored it for $950 but had to drive down to San Antonio on a Monday night after work to get it.  I used to run around with a 17-50 Tamron f/2.8 and I think the sharpness of pictures are really noticeable with the L glass.  The colors are definitely more vibrant too.  I find myself doing less color correction. I also use a 70-200 f/4L (non-IS) which isn’t technically mine… It’s Kristine’s, but she doesn’t really use her camera, lol. This lens is completely adequate for most outdoor situations. Forget about using it indoors. At least it’s nice and lightweight – as I’m told a 70-200 f/2.8L is pretty heavy. Anyway, here are some shots.

Update: After changing my theme, I’m realizing that I really need to get a single-column layout if I’m gonna be posting more pictures on here.  This sucks, haha.

I got really excited when I saw this 70-200mm lens on the Houston craigslist on Saturday.  It was even more exciting since we were gonna be in Houston that day.  Finally got a response:

Hi,
Thanks for being interested in buying my Canon EF L 70-200 F/2.8 IS Lens, I will start my email by telling you that I’m currently out of country so pick up isn’t an option . The item is as described , in perfect condition and will be delivered at your home address . Total price will be $850 and the transaction will be made only through eBay because they will handle with all that it has to be done ,the shipping , payment and passing the item in to your property as they have authorization to sign for the item in my behalf . Right now I’m in Italy, just arrived here 3 days ago . Before I left I found a buyer and I had everything arranged . I paid for the shipping and almost sent it to him . But yesterday the buyer that I had asked me to wait another 4 weeks because he suddenly had other priorities and he is out of money for the moment . I can’t wait this long as I’m in the Italy for 3 days now and i really need the money, I am in the moving process , changing the work place and everything … A major issue is that if you want to buy my item you really need to have the money ready for it .
This purchase protection guarantees that the item is exactly as I described ; basically , once delivered , you’ll have 10 working days to inspect it at your home and if you decide not to keep it you will get refunded in no time and they will charge me with the return costs . If the item meets your expectations and you want to keep it you will have to tell them to release me the payment details so I can get paid . If you are interested in this purchase please reply me with your full name and shipping address . After i pass this details to them you will receive an invoice and further instructions as how will you be able to get possession of the item .
Let me know your thoughts .

Warmest regards

In honor of the popular American holiday, Cinco de Mayo, I’d like to highlight Mexican restaurants in the Austin area that I’ve eaten at that suck. (disclaimer: I’m not Mexican)  Granted, a lot of the restaurants here are “Tex-Mex” but I’m not judging on Mexican authenticity here, I’m just judging on whether it sucks or not.  There’s a couple common traits among terrible Mexican restaurants which stick out to me:

1. Overpriced – Nothing else raises the flag more than expensive Mexican food.  If you’re putting ingredients that cause you to charge an arm and a leg, it’s probably not gonna taste like it’s worth what you paid because it’s Mexican food.
2. Weak-ass salsa – If the restaurant you are eating at serves some salsa that you can feed to a two month old baby, the rest of your order that you’re waiting on is probably going to be terrible.
3. Are there other Mexican people eating there? – If the answer is no, it’s probably no good.  This goes for any ethnic food.  If their own people won’t even eat there, it probably sucks.
4. Do you have to pay for your chips and salsa?  – If yes, leave.

Ok onto my list of Mexican Restaurants that suck in the Austin area.  You could’ve probably guessed some of the options on this list

1. Abuelo’s (in the barton creek mall parking lot) – We went here a while ago for lunch one time and I just remember it was overpriced and snooty.  I told myself I wouldn’t come back again.
2. Hula Hut – This place should’ve burned down last 4th of July when it caught fire.  Consistent 45 minute wait for mediocre food.  This place really fits down the same line as Chuy’s since I’m pretty sure they’re owned by the same people, but I wanna say this place is more expensive cuz of the fact that it’s on Lake Austin.  It’s like Chuy’s but add shrimp and a dollar sign.  We saw one table of Mexican guys and they stuck out like a sore thumb.
3. Serrano’s – Again, overpriced, not that great.  Terrible service on our one visit there.
4. The Oasis – Probably the greatest offender of crappy food, but great views of Lake Travis. The food is really crappy.  I remember paying 8 bucks for a weak margarita served to me in a dixie cup while we waited.  We’ve only been once, but I’m sure we’ll be back for the view.
5. Iguana Grill  – Also has decent views of Lake Travis, but I’ve had terrible food on every visit. This was actually the very first restaurant we’d eaten at here in Austin when I was a junior in high school.  My sister had a fly in her enchiladas.  Lovely.
6. Matt’s “Famous” El Rancho – This one I struggle with because the salsa is actually pretty good.  The food is decent and generous and they serve you an egg on your enchiladas (reminds me of New Mexico), but it breaks my overpriced rule.  There’s always a wait as well.  Service is hit or miss.

So that’s my run down… I’m in no way a “foodie blogger”, but these are just places that I complain about if we have to eat there.  All the places I’ve listed will probably be packed today, so you won’t find me at any of them.

I know it’s Saturday and I’m not at work, but I just found the most awesome javascript library ever… People have been asking me to pull off data visualization features that I just didn’t know how to implement.  Well, someone’s developed the tools I need and it looks amazing.    A lot of the data I have is tree-like but I didn’t have anything to visually display it like a tree.  I can’t wait to put this into my work.

http://thejit.org/demos/

I can’t believe it’s been almost four months since the last post. Things just got so busy with wedding planning and work over the past few months that just forgot about this blog.

So the wedding has come and gone. Definitely a little stressful the week of the big day but Kristine really pulled through with all putting it all together. She made the wedding topper herself, she glued the programs by hand, our awesome place card idea was cut by hand, the bow in her hair was made by her, she did most of the invites, and I don’t think I’ve even started to cover everything she did. I did a bunch of the techie things like printing the invites, setting up the place card thing on photoshop, our picture table cards, designing and ordering the koozies, scanning pics and putting together the slideshows, and blah there was just so much to do that I don’t want to think about it haha.

The day before the wedding was just chaos. It snowed all over the state of Texas and it was looking like tons of flights were getting cancelled and people were going to cancel their plans to drive in. It was really depressing. By like 11 the sun was coming out and it looked much better and we just needed it to melt.

The weather on our wedding day couldn’t have been more perfect. It was such an awesome feeling to have our friends and family come in from all over the country. Special thanks to our parents, siblings, bridesmaids, groomsmen, godparents and every one else who helped make our day so amazing.

It was ridiculously difficult to spend enough time with everyone during the wedding reception. Nonetheless, we want everyone to know that we truly appreciated you being there. The mariachis, open bar, photobooth, good food, good music, and Justin freaking Bieber made it the best wedding ever. It’s really hard to put it into words, That’s why we had to have a truly awesome photographer, Stefano Choi, and probably one of the best wedding videographers in the business, Joe Simon. I’m on the iPad so it’s hard to put the links but our pics and video are absolutely breathtaking. We were so glad we picked them. Worth every freaking penny.

A lot of time, effort, and money went into the wedding and we are so glad it is all over. Married life has been a lot of fun and it’s still a little hard to believe that we’re married. Now on to the next steps in life. A house, kids, haha.. Geez. Life is awesome.

I set up some of the family with e-mail addresses on the @maulit.net domain.  Google couldn’t make it any easier.  Plus you have the full functionality of Gmail… most importantly… IMAP!

My two year contract with tmobile finally ended yesterday and I got the mytouch 4g yesterday at costco for 99 bucks after rebate.  I’ve been really happy with this phone because it totally beats out the edge connection I was getting with my blackberry. I’m blogging right now from the wordpress app while using swype and it’s been amazingly accurate. i still suck at typing without a tactile keyboard but I’ll get better I’m sure. If anyone has any good tips, let me know.

I’ve had a little bit of push from my group at work to start learning Python and the Django framework. I’ve been doing PHP for probably over 7 years now and it definitely got the job done for me. Over the past 2 years, I picked up Codeigniter and then the Kohana framework for PHP and it really taught me the point of the MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture. But ever since I started working at AMD, there’s been a few co-workers who’d been raving about Django for a while and I’d never gotten around to really learning it until now when I’m actually being encouraged to do this next project in Django. It’s like 2:40 in the morning and I’ve been going through it and honestly, I’m not seeing any crazy awesome advantage to using this framework over what I used to be doing with Kohana. I don’t see yet how this is gonna be speeding up my application development at all. Okay, so I’ll give it one advantage: setting up the Models in a file and getting the database to create itself and being able to maintain the database and query it through the ORM is kinda cool. The ORM isn’t really gonna be Django’s selling point for me though because I’m probably gonna end up writing SQL queries myself because they just get too complicated to get an ORM to understand sometimes. One downside is the fact I have to maintain this URL routing file to point HTTP requests to a particular view’s function. It definitely allows for flexibility, but I wish there were some default URL routing that I could follow and only use this URL routing when I want to override the default URL routing. Anyway, I’m just gonna keep on trucking with this Python/Django stuff because I’ve heard good things about Python at least and that’s gonna keep me motivated to keep learning.