By William LaMartin, Editor, Tampa PC Users
Group
I have recent, first hand knowledge of how useful the Internet can be. In May, my son was graduated from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA. The computer, along with information from the WWW and mapping programs, made our trip there much easier to plan and execute.
To begin with, plane reservations were needed. From the Editor's choice of useful WWW links page at our site, I visited two Travel sites specializing in plane schedules: The Trip.Com at
http://www.thetrip.com/ and Southwest Airlines Ticketless Travel at http://www.iflyswa.com/cgi-bin/buildItinerary2. Both sites allow you to choose departure and arrival cities and days of travel. They then provide you with a list of flights available, their prices, restrictions for discount fares, types of planes, etc. After finding the round trip flights that were best for us, I could have made the reservations online but chose to do that part by phone--just in case the person on the other end knew something that the Internet didn't. We then made rental car reservations by hookup from the airline.Next thing on the list was somewhere to stay. We combined AAA with several sites on the WWW. From the TPCUG Travel section, I used Hotel, Motel & Bed & Breakfast Directory at
http://www.travelnett.com/. Since we prefer Bed & Breakfast Inns, I also used Bed & Breakfast Inns Online at http://www.bbonline.com/, which is in our Newsletter's June Links and soon to be added to the web site.We fast found that Charlottesville was full to overflowing, being a one business town—the University of Virginia. That led us to Staunton, Va and to the Belle Grae Inn featured in this month’s Internet picture of the month.
Once I knew where we would be staying, I could crank up Street Atlas USA 5.0 and have it calculate the best route from Dulles International Airport to the Belle Grae Inn in Staunton and from Staunton to UVa. I printed out the maps and took them with us, including a detailed map of Staunton—something that AAA doesn’t carry. To be on the safe side, I also brought the Delorme GPS TripMate unit, the Street Atlas USA CD, and my laptop.
The next thing on my agenda was to get information about graduation at Virginia. For that I went to the UVa site at
http://www.virginia.edu/. They had thoughtfully provided a link called Final Exercises 1998 at http://www.virginia.edu/~major/finals98/ . Here were a schedule of events, maps of where visitors could park, a detailed map of the immediate Lawn area where the graduation exercises would take place showing the seating plan and where the procession would be. Nothing was left to doubt. If you go there now all this information will be gone, replaced by video clips of the final exercises, including speeches by Christopher Reeve and the Governor of Virginia. I have found Virginia to be a very "wired" university. When my son applied, I recall it as one of the few universities that offered an online application form.After graduation, then what? A job! My son went through the usual job interviews on campus, but the job he finally took was found on the Internet. He went to Yahoo at
http://www.yahoo.com, searched for "jobs"; something called "Career Mosaic" popped up at the top of the screen, he entered more information, and eventually found several companies that specialized in placing programmers. After considering several openings in far-flung places, much to my surprise and pleasure he chose a position in West Palm Beach.After a job, what’s next? A place to live. Back to the Internet. He found the site Rent Net at
http://www.rentnet.com, called me on the phone from Virginia to set up a NetMeeting, and we viewed apartment complexes in West Palm that were close to his planned work site. All provided detailed specifications, floor plans, photos, and location maps. Some even provided a video tour.I give the Internet an A+ this past month. u