For anyone who may be trying to track down friends or long lost relatives in Brazil, here's the Brazilian "people search" site. Type in a name, get a phone number and address (if of course they're wealthy enough to have a phone).

Brazilian Phone Directory

] The Atlanta Time Machine website is dedicated to
] examining the history of Atlanta, Georgia by comparing
] vintage photographs of Atlanta with much more
] contemporary images shot, more or less, from the same
] perspective of the original photographer.

Atlanta Time Machine

] Who knows how many specters haunt the historic Hotel
] Union Square. Concierge Tom Steele says guests like their
] accommodations so much that some never check out.
]
] Most recently, a young Scot traveling with his
] grandmother confided to Steele that a female ghost
] appeared to him in Room 207.
 . . .
] On the other hand, guests often request 207. Some at the
] hotel connect the mischievous ghost to Lillian Hellman. A
] boozer, a lover, a fighter, the volatile playwright was
] not one to go quietly into the night. (She's said to have
] propositioned a young dinner companion the night before
] she died at age 79.)
]
] It is said that much of Hellman's glamorous and
] celebrated affair with mystery writer Dashiell Hammett
] played out at the hotel when they visited. Hellman is
] thought to have inspired Nora Charles in his book "The
] Thin Man." Before Prohibition, guests entered the hotel's
] bar by means of a slide on Powell Street. Lively days --
] so lively that present-day guests report bodies sleeping
] it off in hotel hallways. Of course, on closer
] inspection ... no one's there.

Heh, I found out about this ghost story *after* I'd checked out. I'd been in room 207 of this hotel all last week, while in San Francisco for the GDC. Alas, no ghosts, though I did have some unusual dreams on a couple nights (a very specific but unknown-to-me male character kept showing up).

Then again, I was sick with the flu for much of my time in SF, so even if any ghosts would have been trying to wake me up, I might well have slept through it! ;)

Ghost in Hotel Union Square in San Francisco

] QPX provides all of the information required to book and
] ticket any itinerary directly in a carrier's inventory
] system

I've bookmarked this site along with orbitz and Yahoo Travel, as a very comprehensive price search site. It indexes every airline except for Southwest, and it also has a very cool graphical display. You can choose to show each flight on a bar chart, so you can quickly see departure and arrival and connection times. You can also sort by price, schedule and other factors, as well as getting advice on price differentials if your departure times are flexible by a day.

To my knowledge, orbitz still has the best multi-day search (3 days before and after), but the ITA display has been invaluable to me for checking tight connections through a variety of airports.

Airline Tickets: ITA Software

] To manage their schedules, Mishkin has printed out a
] spreadsheet and posted it on the refrigerator in their
] Altadena home. A green line shows his work schedule; a
] yellow line shows his wife's.

This is a link to the L.A. Times article about Andy and his JPL co-workers, and how they're adapting to the "space lag" of living on Mars time.

Workdays Fit for a Martian

] Tolkien's High Elvish language, Quenya, was inspired by
] Finnish. Tolkien taught himself Finnish in order to read
] the Kalevala, a 19th-century compilation of old Finnish
] songs and stories arranged by Elias Lönnrot into a linear
] epic poem and completed in 1835 and revised in the
] mid-1800s.

Tolkien's Elvish was based on a language from the "Viena Karelia" region, near the Finnish border. Which means that that area of Finland is now on the list of, "places that Elonka is going to travel to someday." ;)

If you're really bored, and would like to see a complete list of places I've already been to (along with my rules for "what counts as a country"), check here:
 http://members.aol.com/elonka/allcountries.htm

Elonka :)

Finland and Tolkien's Languages

] Very large island jewel in the proximity of Auckland
] (Northern Island), off the Great Barrier Island and
] near Port Fitzroy. Uniquely accessible due to its own
] private airstrip. Excellent virgin, native forest and
] wildlife.

All I want for Christmas -- is my own island. :)

Just USD 5.2 Million!

The World of Private Islands

Very cool. If you have QuickTime installed on your computer, you can click and scroll for a 360-degree panoramic view from the top of Mount Everest.

All of the view, none of the oxygen deprivation. ;)

Mount Everest. 360 degree panorama from the top

] The Old Faithful WebCam sends a new real-time photo of
] Old Faithful Geyser approximately every 30 seconds.

It also displays the prediction for the time of the next eruption, which is usually accurate +/- 10 minutes.

Old Faithful Geyser WebCam - Yellowstone National Park

] Meeting Facilities
]
] * Over 9,000 square feet of meeting and banquet space (column-free)
] * Capacity to accommodate 10 to 350 guests
] * Approximately 3,000 square feet of ballroom space

In the Salon article (http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/04/15/acidus/index_np.html),
they were reporting several hundred attendees at the "Cease & Desist" lecture?

Interz0ne question: Radisson Hotel Atlanta Northlake Meeting Capacity