How to game Amtrak’s pricing scheme using their return policy
Amtrak really really wants to price their seats like an Airline.
They've set it up so that prices increase as you approach the travel day; this is true of both the Accela "high-speed" train and the normal "lower-speed" trains (only 30 min slower DC-NY). The train is a great way to travel between DC and NY, or NY and Boston. For example, for a seat on an Accela express:
- later today:$221.00 (2163 Acela Express New York, NY 3:00 pm to Washington, DC 5:51 pm.)
- in late April: $155 for the same train.
So, like with airlines, it really makes a great deal of sense to plan ahead. But what if you have some general ideas of when you might travel, but aren't sure exactly until the last minute? With airplanes, you're screwed because of the huge change fee, often as much as the price of the airfare. HOWEVER, the folks at Amtrak are really nice (or inept, you pick); you can refund business class tickets with no fee, for cash, back to your method of payment! So:
1. figure out when you might perhaps want to go.
2. book tickets tentatively
3. later on, cancel the ones that you don't need.
4. Buy me a gift with a fraction of the money I just saved you.
* Important: do NOT purchase round trip tickets. Their system can't cancel one way in a RT booking, and it's never ever cheaper to buy a RT over a one-way fare.
I wouldn't be worried about Amtrak catching on. It's a government-run entity afterall.
Also: if you have an Starwood Preferred Guest Amex, transfer points to Amtrak guest rewards and get a non-capacity controlled one-way on the slow train in the NE for just 3000 points. That's a good value for last second travel.
KindleFeeds, an RSS reader Andrew and I wrote
Check out Kindle Feeds, a cool little app Andrew and I wrote. It lets you subscribe to RSS feeds, and generates a kindle-compliant "book" that you can download on to your kindle. The book has a table of contents and a nice link at the top which will fetch a new version of the book with only new posts. It's really quite easy and you can update anywhere you have cell phone coverage.
In case you're wondering here's a bit of background:
A while back, Andrew wrote this cool application in python that let you store static HTML pages from the web into kindle docs that you could then download at will. (The old version of this was called Bibliorize and still lives up on www.bibliorize.com. But I'm gonna merge the two this week sometime and maybe find a new home for it somewhere.)
This seemed awesome, but had a few drawbacks; the main one that you had to manually add each page you wanted to read. That's a lot of work for a lazy person like me, and not so useful when most of the things I read come from RSS(/atom/whatever) feeds. So, before a recent flight to SF, it dawned on me that the solution was to expand Andrew's app to allow users to subscribe to RSS feeds. Also, this app needed to be able to automatically update nicely, so that no feeds were repeated. Updating OTA was cool, of course. I wanted to remove the need for users to log in on their Kindle, a painstaking and error-prone process. So I spent the six or so hours coding (coding without access to the Internet is surprisingly difficult!). And with a few more hours later, I think this app does all that!
There are a lot of bugs and things to improve though, not the least of which is the hideous colour scheme. We also need to pretty up the handling of dates and make the table of contents a bit more usable. Also we have to settle on a name for it.
Stay tuned!!
First travel post. Seoul!
I'm finally getting around to writing about some of my world travels. I suppose it's fitting that I'm writing this on a Delta flight. Thank god for in-seat power! And for complimentary upgrades to first class!
Where to start? I guess it makes sense to just intersperse 'historical' blog posts, where I reminisce about past trips, with current ones. That way I'll be able to keep sort of up to date while catching up with old stuff.
So here we go!!!! 
In late January, I spent some time in Seoul, visiting Peter and Ken, friends from work.
Here's a shot of the view from Peter's place.Most of those massive apartment towers you see are actually pretty empty. At the time I figured Korea was in store for some serious real estate price correction, and from what I've heard, this is happening. 
I ended up meeting a bunch of cool expats (turns out the expat community's quite small), and hanging out with them well into the mornings. If you thought New York is a town that never sleeps, you really should check out Seoul. The subway shuts down early, but the taxis are so cheap it doesn't really matter.
One of the reasons I love Korea and Japan is that there's one of the few places I've been that is really different but strangely familiar. That contradiction is quite elusive; the closest I can get to describing how I feel is that the layout, plan, and feel of the city is sort of Western which makes me feel sort of at ease, but the culture is very different, and of course, I don't speak the language. I'll try to come up with a good example of this and post it.
One day, I went to Coex, which is supposedly the largest underground mall in Asia:
It was really hyped up, but it was honestly a bit underwhelming. Maybe my being from Montreal biased me (we have a seriously massive underground mall/tunnel complex connecting most buildings in the downtown core -- who wants to go outside when it's -30C ?). All the same there were some things worth noting. For one, the preponderance of western chains was a bit disappointing. Note the Dunkin Donuts. 
At the rate cultures are converging, by the time I'm 60, we'll basically have one homogeneous world culture. Very disheartening. (But maybe by then they'll have some Dunkin Donuts in California!)
But check this mall directory out! Instead of the usual stupid static map that is endemic to every mall in North America, the Koreans have come up with a technological solution. 
The directory is actually a massive touch-sensitive screen hooked up to a computer. Tell it what you want to buy, or where you want to go, and it will give you step-by-step directions to get there. Cool!
They also have a escalator-hand-guide-thing sanitizer-and-ad-display system deployed everywhere. Kinda cool. 
At this point I was starting to get hungry. The last time I came to Korea, I had some trouble finding vegetarian food. But this time, having memorized a few key phrases, I found it much easier. I decided to get a tomato and cheese sandwich along with some fries here, at Kraze Burger. 
Their food was, as they claimed, quite tasty and seemed to be prepared on site. I think it's kind of inspired by In `N Out or something. (Ironically, I later discovered that Kraze is actually a Korean chain, and there is a branch on the ground floor of Peter's apartment. Ha!)
Next up, I wandered out through the convention centre to check out this famous temple that's just across the street from this mall, the WTC, and a few other tall buildings. 
It turns out that this temple used to own a vast expanse of forested land, and sold it to developers (who later built these buildings) for an obscene amount of money. It's now one of the richest temples in Asia. Or so the random tour guy told me.
When I was heading back to the subway, I noticed Timothy's coffee.
Does the logo look familiar? I couldn't help but feel that it was a direct knock-off of Tim Hortons! Some Canadians I asked seemed to concur and said it was probably because a lot of Koreans go to Canada to study English and end up craving Tim Bits. I can't say that I blame them!
The streets are all incredibly wide: 
Since the city was basically totally destroyed and rebuilt in the 50s, it was designed with the automobile in mind. I find the scale of the streets really intimidating as a pedestrian, not because I'm scared of getting hit (like in India), but because the thought of crossing the street seems like a huge endeavour. I like New York and old London's small streets way better.
OK I'm gonna try to keep these short, so people will actually read some of this stuff. But the next post will include my trip to a Korean batting cage, the top of Seoul Tower, a long walk along a newly reconstituted river, and some other districts. Please let me know what you think.