A Golf Blog

Sabre Reports Earnings

Yesterday, Sabre announced that earnings were up 165 percent, yeah! But for the fourth quarter, Sabre lowered their earnings estimate to 17 to 21 cents a share. This was a bit lower than Wall Streets expected estimate of 22 cents.

Net result, Sabre’s stock was down 12 percent on heavy trading, bummer!

Something’s friggin’ broken.

We Have a Winner

Dave Fox, travel and humor writer extraordinaire ran a contest. He’s just back from leading a tour through Greece and the contest was to guess how may gyros he ate while there. He ate 22.

I won – now I get a free copy of his award winning CD The Fox That Quacked: Essays from Planet Earth. Even if you didn’t win, you could buy one here.

Mobile Technology Luddite

I watched things unfold the past couple of days after Tim Bray posted a piece on what he was looking for in mobile technology. A good phone, Bluetooth would be a bonus. And, if it came with a camera, that’d be OK also. Email wasn’t a high priority and neither was browsing the web.

Well, judging from the reaction, there was no middle of the road. Jeremy Zawodny pretty much agreed with him as did Geoff Arnold. So did I – come on people, I’m still using a Samsung SPH N200 on the Sprint PCS network. (I do have a killer rate through an agreement between Sprint PCS and Sabre – also have 5 different phones on the plan) To be honest, I don’t know what I need and was hoping for some sage advice from those in the know that’d help keep me from making a huge mistake.

Now, I don’t know what Tim’s expectations were but from the reactions to his post, you’d have thought that he poked Robert Scoble and Russell Beattie in the eye with a sharp stick.

Whew, I guess we're still waiting for some direction from the experts.

You know what, I can't wait to meet these people.

Updated - broken link

Channel 9 Guy

Microsoft has their own version of the Travelocity Roaming Gnome. Channel 9 guy does Disneyland and Legoland. I have to admit, he has more personality than the roaming cone.

Yellow Ribbons

Awhile ago, I posted a piece about our trip to San Antonio for our son’s graduation from Basic Military Training. Although I had seen yellow ribbon magnets on vehicles, I never really paid much attention until our trip to Lackland Air Force Base. We bought several – this is the one on my ride. Mandy has 2, one yellow and one red, white and blue.

I was interviewed by Camille Ricketts of Knight Ridder in Washington, DC after she picked up a comment I made to a post in the Beacon, NY Dispatch. This is the article she wrote on those Yellow Ribbons.

Early Voting

Mandy and I went yesterday afternoon after work and voted. We’d heard about increased turnout for early voting and we were not disappointed. It was crowded but thankfully, we only had to wait 30 minutes.

With all the interest in this year’s race, next week Tuesday is going to be a madhouse. If you can vote early, I’d urge you to do so.

Cloud Travel

Every now and then PubSub.com turns up something interesting in its search for references to either Travelocity or Sabre. This morning my aggregator, NewsGator, turned up an interesting post from a web site called Cloud Travel.

The post talked about how travel agency roles are evolving – perhaps into that of a travel concierge.

This looks like a pretty good source of travel information.

Mobility Needs

Tim Bray at ongoing has nailed it. A good telephone, Bluetooth, and high-speed flat-rate unlimited data. I know I’m due for a phone upgrade.

So, any suggestions?

Google Cheat Sheet

Did you know that Google has a cheat sheet?

Comment Spam

I would have never thought A Sabre Geek blog would become the victim of comment spam. It started this morning and not only did it creep me out, it made me feel dirty – my gmail audio prompt was going crazy. I was getting gibberish type email as comment posts to blog entries. They originated from IP address 205.134.161.24.

I use Type Pad as my blog tool and I’m happy with it. It’s simple, straight forward, and reliable. I know that comment spam is keeping them on their toes and I appreciate the work they’re doing to keep as much as possible out of the blogs.

In reading through their FAQs on comment spam, they said the reason for it was to improve web site positions in search results – they said it’s done through links. Well, I have Type Pad strip out html so harassing me with comment spam won’t result in any links. I guess the spammers don’t know that so I wound up blocking this IP address.

My blog doesn’t get near the traffic that Dave Winer or Robert Scoble get. Dave’s Scripting News site does not allow comments – no problem there with spam. On the other hand, Robert’s Scobleizer does – wonder how he deals with it?

I think I’ll go take a shower.