my thoughts

Just discovered this useful utility, awesomehighlighter.com, which allows you to highlight bits of a page then e-mail the result to someone.
www.awesomehighlighter.com/

I'm thinking of flying to California, and have found a few interesting websites that cover the lesser-known aspects of flying: how to increase your chances at getting an upgrade, or what the seating layout of a plane is. These things are important for me as I'm 195cm tall! Of course these articles are just guidelines rather than fact but they are here as the information provided seems sound. (I will amend this article as I find out more.)

Avoid the bad seats
SeatGuru has fully annotated seating diagrams for all the major airlines, and uk-air.net has a table listing seat pitch for 111 airlines' economy fares.
» www.seatguru.com/
» www.uk-air.net/seatpitch.htm
» www.extratall.co.uk/news_airlines_are_providing_more_legroom.htm

Upgrades & discounts
I doubt that I will be flying business class, but here is an article on how to get discounted business class fares:
» www.philipblazdell.com/archives/001784.shtml

...and whilst not supporting long-haul flights, the MoneySavingExpert flightchecker does have a selection of useful links to various online travel brokers:
» MoneySavingExpert: How to get a flight upgrade
» www.moneysavingexpert.com/flightchecker/

Flight brokers: ebookers | expedia | travelocity | lastminute | opodo
Price comparison sites: travelsupermarket | cheapflights | kelkoo | traveljungle

Premium economy? Does premium economy deliver on its ambitious promise? An article that weighs up the price increase versus the benefits for premium economy. The news is that there is a lot of variation between airlines.
» www.smartertravel.com/advice/advfeatures/advice.php?id=8869&media=print

General tips
Travelocity have 7 general tips to find low fares
» www.travelocity.co.uk/info/info_main/0,,TCYUK:EN|FARE_TIPS,00.html

Have you ever been browsing a website and been asked to register (e.g. telegraph.co.uk)? Bugmenot is a very useful website that may help. You can usurp those compulsory registration requests with anonymous login information from this slightly Machiavellian resource. So much for the targeted marketing! bugmenot.com/

Need to know? Take a look at the wikipedia. It's a very good general resource on every area of human knowledge. There are a few areas that are missing, and if one of those areas happens to be part of your specialist knowledge you can contribute to the project by writing for a topic. I just read up on glaciers, after being lucky enough to walk across one last week, (see the pics!) so now I remember all that stuff from geography lessons all those years ago: moraines, crevasses, erratics... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page The wikipedia is part of a larger project that includes wikibooks, for the publishing of open-content textbooks, which is an interesting concept. There's language courses, maths and physics textbooks, humanities topics, and plenty more... wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page I was looking at nationmaster recently, this is a good source of information on the nations of the world. It goes into quite some depth with its well cross-referenced encyclopedia. Of particular interest to me is the way you can see how closely related languages are, through the language "family tree" feature. Take a look at this page on the Dutch language and see for yourself. www.nationmaster.com/ Update! How could I forget Everything2? It is more informal than the others. Useful. everything2.com/

The Jargon Dictionary has all the terms that puzzled you. The IT world is full of acronyms, Whatis IT provides useful definitions. info.astrian.net/jargon/ whatis.techtarget.com/