New Notebook

Sleeping at Airports ? Guide to Airport Lounges

If you are a frequent traveller, you may have found yourself stuck in an airport overnight. Experienced business travelers will usually find their way to the nearest hotel, but when bad weather or strike action conspire to ground flights en masse, these fill up swiftly, leaving passengers without a bed for the night.

While spending the night in an airport lounge is not the most attractive prospect, there are ways to make the most of a bad situation.

Sleeping In Airports is a light-hearted site full of great travellers tales and titbits of advice for those that find themselves stuck overnight at an airport, whether you are catching an early flight, or become horribly delayed.

Everything is clearly laid out on the opening page.

Click through to a region to select a particular airport, or you can just browse the stories and funnies using the links in the main section.

The entries have been added by people from all over the world, and include advice like the most comfortable or peaceful spot to lay down your head.

The best and worst list is a great place to go to get a feel for what you might read. And after reading about the crowned champion, Singapore's Changi Airport, I think I actually want to fly there just to spend some time in the airport.

Sleepinginairports.com's top five

1. Changi, Singapore: Free Internet access, reclining chairs in designated snooze spots, a luxury spa and lounge so quiet that students visit just to study for exams.

2. Amsterdam Shiphol, The Netherlands: Comfortable chairs and a casino to while away the hours.

3. Auckland International, New Zealand: Few announcements, couches and a mini-theatre.

4. Helsinki-Vantaa. Finland: Showers, couches and Internet.

5. Chek Lap Kok, Hong Kong: Overstuffed chairs, children's play area , courteous staff.

Seating Arrangement in Airplanes

Anyone who has flown with a commercial airline will probably have experienced the downside of flight accommodation. Cramped seats, zero legroom, if only you had known when you checked in that the seat three rows in front offered so much more comfort. Well, now you can.

Seat Guru is the home of this brilliant resource, where you can check out the seat plan for many of the main airlines' fleets.

You will need to know the type of plane you are flying in, which you can find out by calling the airline or your travel agent. You then select the airline from the panel on the left, and select the plane from the pop-up menu.

Here you will see the full layout of the plane, with the pros and cons of each seat clearly stated.

Hover your mouse over the plan to read the pop-up info. This guide notes everything from extra legroom, to proximity to noisy areas, such as the toilets.

You can even find out what entertainment is going to be available on your flight by clicking the links in the boxes that appear when you hover your mouse over Video or Audio.

Armed with this knowledge you can now ask the check-in staff to place you in a seat you know is going to be comfortable, but make sure you get to the airport nice and early to avoid disappointment.

SeatGuru has information about American Airlines, Delta Airlines, United Airlines, Continental Airlines, US Airways, Northwest, British Airways, Alaska Airlines and JetBlue airplanes.

Searching for new ways to search

FileHand Search 2.0 - better than ever and now it’s free!

FileHand Search, winner of a 2004 Shareware Industry Association award for best utility using .Net, has just been upgraded to version 2.0 and offers a number of enhancements including the ability to index and search Outlook data.

The interface has been redesigned but still offers the same fast and clean look of the previous version which displays extracts from found files ranked by relevance to your search terms. It’s a unique display and one that eliminates any question as to whether you’ve found just the file you’re looking for.

Free Search Tools

From the UnofficialMicrosoft Blog

I’m amazed at the number of people who continue to discover Lookout - I figured at this point, everyone who uses Outlook would have found it in a blog or website they regularly read. It’s pretty common that new reviews or posts about Lookout end up comparing it to x1, FILEHand Search, or another tool. I’m not going to get into that again - I wrote a lengthy comparative review some time ago (do a search at Marc’s Outlook on Productivity if you want to read my reviews).

No, the reason I bring this up again is that I encountered a really interesting thought in a post about Lookout that showed up in RSS this morning from the Early Adopter blog:

It’s kind of funny that the top feature of many products (Lookout, Newsgator, etc.) is that they integrate into Outlook. This makes me wonder if Microsoft made a mistake when they went out of their way to make Internet Explorer the OS shell. I wonder, would the world have been better served if Outlook was the OS shell?

Hmmm… now that’s an alternate reality I hadn’t thought of before. How different would things be if Microsoft had gone this route?

A9 vs Google

http://www.onclipevent.com/archives/enterframe/000574.html

Amazon is taking on Google with a new search site called A9. While Google concentrates on simplicity and delivering the most relevant search results in the shortest possible time, A9 is adding the experience face to the process of conducting a web search by providing various facets like related movies and books. While A9 still relies on the Google to provide its basic search results, integrating it with Amazon's 'Search inside Book' feature, has made this into a really powerful...

Filehand vs Copernic Desktop Search

www.filehand.com

www.copernic.com

I tried both these great programs on my desktop and here is some of my analysis

Both program are equally effective in indexing and can index all types of microsoft office files, pdf, text, mp3 and pictures.

Personally, I found the interface of Copernic better and easy to navigate.

Filehand give you results in google type format and you get lot of options per document while in the result window itself

The Preview pane of Copernic wins by a great margin and the way it groups the results is quite intelligent.

There are rumours that even Google is coming up with such a desktop search application. So we can expect some great wars for this market in the near future.