If you want to get a nice, exotic holiday, at a good price, it might help to try to organize it yourself. There are offers on the internet, which are significantly better than what your local travel agent could offer, and if you invest a little bit of time, you can easily save several hundred bucks. There are a number of sites to find cheap offers for almost anything – from airline tickets, to hotels, to all-in-one packages.

As an example of how good internet offers can be, I found an airline ticket from Rome (Italy) to Maldives and then back to Frankfurt (Germany) for 316 euro (including taxes, see the screenshot). Truth be told, there are specific dates for this offer and there is a significant layover (8-9 hours) in Colombo (Sri Lanka), but this is still a very good price, nevertheless. I was actually able to find a trip with shorter layover (around 2 hours both ways) for just 350 euro.

I also found an online offer for a beach villa in a resort on Maldives, where you get an all-inclusive package for the price of full board – a really good deal, having in mind that the difference is around $100 per day if you compare the regular prices.

Where to look for offers

I look for travel deals mainly in two “families” of sites:

A Bit of Background

I bought a TV set in the autumn (Philips 46PFL5537K/12). It is a LED TV, with 3D (not that this matters), built-in WiFi, Smart TV, etc. The specs looked great and the price was quite acceptable. The picture, as a matter of fact, is very good – and thank God, because this is probably the most important thing about a TV. The software, however, is bad. Really bad. It appears as if it supports some standards, it appears to have some programmes and channels , but everything is so slow, clunky and poorly designed, that it doesn’t seem to be worth the effort. Without getting into too much details (and I am not familiar with them, simply because I lost interest pretty quickly), I’ll just say that the media player built into the TV was not satisfying for me (it doesn’t support any kind of subtitles in Cyrillic, for example) and I decided to get an external one. I quickly started leaning towards WD Live, probably the best choice if you compare price and capabilities. It didn’t take long to decide and order it. Whether because it was around Christmas or for some other reason, it turned out that this model is not available anywhere. And no deliveries were expected shortly. Pretty amazing how you can order something online, from Amazon UK, for example, but you cannot get it from a local Sofia store, most likely because the local distributor is too lazy to make an order. Anyway.

Looking for an alternative, I decided to try the Raspberry Pi (or RPi for short) of a colleague. I took it for a weekend, installed RaspBMC, connected it to a TV via HDMI cable and voila! It was working pretty well – several movies, pictures, everything was flawless. In exchange for 35 Euros (plus a couple of other things, see below) without VAT (if you heard the rumor of a $35 RPi, it is Europe after all ;)), I could assemble a media player, and a pretty good one. Additionally, Raspberry Pi (or RPi for short) is a fully functional computer, which you can use as a server – I read that some people host their Wordpress blog on it. Most RPi images are Debian-based (including the official Raspbian and RaspBMC, which I prefer), so you have a bunch of packages ready to install.

An article by Joel Spolsky reminded me of my introductory management class at the University. There is (only) one topic I vividly remember from this class – theories of human motivation. Basically, there are two (well, three if we have to be exact, but the third one applies mainly for Asia). The difference is mainly in the assumptions about people/employees:

Theory X

This theory assumes that employees are lazy, dislike work and would avoid it at any opportunity. Managers should not trust employees and micro-manage them at all times, to make sure they actually do something useful. Employees are going to work only when forced to do so, they should be blamed for any misstep, and their only interest in the job is money. __

Theory Y

This theory assumes that people are willing to take initiative, when given the chance to do so, be self-motivated and do more than is expected from them. Under appropriate conditions, people would acknowledge responsibility and commitment for themselves, feel the need to achieve goals for the sole purpose of feeling satisfied by their own achievements.

Warning: This is an advertisement. But worth watching :)

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Nine days (21 May 04:30 – 29 May 22:00), 5300 kilometers (see the map), 6 European capitals (Berlin, Amsterdam, Brussels, Luxembourg, Ljubljana, Zagreb), 2 beer capitals (Radeberg/Radeberger, Freising/Weihenstephan), 6 more European cities (Dresden, Leipzig, Mainz, Stuttgart, Munich, Bled), Mazda CX7, three friends – priceless!