Radio Free Meredith

Words cannot describe how happy this video makes me. I only wish there were some way to strip out the title in the Flash container, it gives things away too soon. :(

(hat tip to watchuwant.tv's "mashup" channel)

You ever take one of those showers where you can just feel the stress melting off your body as all your muscles relax from head to toe?

Yeah, that. If this were the weekend, I would so be hopping back into bed with more coffee, a bagel and a good novel. But it's Friday, so there must be errands completed in the next hour and a half, and laundry done that I have been putting off.

Ooh! But that means on Saturday I can get up, take a shower, and then get into a bathrobe that's all fluffy from the dryer!

(by this point, half of you are saying "Where is the real Meredith and what did you do with her?")

Skype on OS X has the good sense to pause iTunes when starting a call. Thanks for the sensible IPC, Apple!

(Context: couldn't find my cellphone.)

Courtesy foxgrrl, ITA Trip Finder, the best flight search engine ever. It is not pretty. It provides no upselling tie-in deals with hotels, car rentals or cruises. It will not alert you to low fares to destinations you don't care about that you might have missed.

What it does do, and that right awesomely, is provide hands-down the best search interface for budget-conscious international travelers with some flexibility in their schedules (that would be me). Using their "month-long search" function, I can tell them "find me the best-priced flight of each day in a 30-day window for a trip approximately N days long." And it will do that. None of this "oh, we can only do this for the US and Canada" horseshit, anywhere in the world. After about a minute, you get a simple HTML calendar view, with the best price in that period highlighted:



Then, click on any day in the calendar, and you get a list of all flights found for that day and trip duration, sorted by price or whatever else you want to search by:



"But wait, Meredith," I hear you say, "that's got to be a gimmick, they're not actually showing you the real prices with taxes and everything, are they?" To which I say bullshit they're not:



Fare breakdown by leg, full breakdown of taxes, everything I could possibly want in a travel search engine -- including the exact booking codes so I can just call up the airline and say "oh hai, these two flights plz, kthxbai."

ITA, you're perfect. Don't ever change. I love you for your algorithms. Can we live the rest of our lives together like it's still Web 1.0?