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Ten Cheap Vacations

Cheap vacations can still be relaxing, fun and whatever else you want them to be. Unlike cars and shoes, vacations don't get better according to price. Give up that expensive resort if you don't have the money, but don't give up your vacation. Try one of the following ideas instead.

1. Visit your friends. The key here is to have friends with spare beds that live in interesting places. You've probably had friends tell you to come and stay a while, so why not take them up on it? I'm hoping my friends move to Hawaii.

2. Caretaking vacations. Someone in California, Costa Rica or Colorado wants you to stay in their house while they're away. You'll have to water the plants, and maybe watch the cat, but you'll get to stay in a beautiful home. You may even get paid. To learn more caretaking opportunities, visit the Caretaker Gazette online.

3. Outdoor vacations. Outdoor adventure doesn't need to be expensive. Just stay close to home, and use your imagination. On "Tom Sawyer Day" we hike up a river for hours, then build a raft from dead trees. Then we float on it back to the car. It's cheaper and more fun than a guided river trip. Where can you hike or bicycle for free?

4. Treasure hunting. Take a trip to a ghost town or beach with a metal detector. In Arizona an old Mayan Indian showed us where to find arrowheads, semi-precious stones, and ancient pottery. Treasure hunting is cheap, and you might find something valuable as well.

5. Cheap beach combing vacations. What's more relaxing than sitting on the beach with a drink? Restless? Start collecting seashells and driftwood. Bring a metal detector to find more valuable things. There are beaches in Florida where you can camp in your RV, and cheap motels on or near the beaches in Michigan.

6. Stay home. Make a list of sights to see, and things you've always wanted to do that are within an hour of home. Spend a weekend or a week checking off your list. No expensive hotels or long-distance drives.

7. Shopping trips. Cheap vacations don't normally involve shopping, but they can. Visit flea markets and rummage sales in some scenic corner of the country. Have a shopping adventure for less than a day at the mall.

8. Hotspring vacations. Hotsprings in many parts of the United States are free or inexpensive to use. Camp in an R.V. or tent to keep it really cheap. Spend nights around the campfire and days soaking in hot water. My personal favorite is a beautiful place in Arizona (106 degree water), with hiking trails. We paid the $30 annual fee and stayed more than a week.

9. Greyhound bus travel. Taking the bus is an alternative to expensive gasoline if you're traveling alone, and the trip itself is sure to be an adventure. Pick a nice place within a day's ride, pack a bag and go.

10. Camping vacations. In Florida we stalked alligators and watched a dozen other forms of wildlife. Every night we sat around the fire with new friends from England and Texas. We escaped winter there for eight days in our van. There were hot showers, and the campground was free. Camping can be the cheapest of cheap vacations.

Steve Gillman hit the road at sixteen, and traveled the U.S. and Mexico alone at 17. Now 40, he travels with his wife Ana, whom he met in Ecuador. To read their stories, tips and travel information, visit: http://www.EverythingAboutTravel.com

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In The News:

Google on Tuesday hauled out a tool it last used nearly a year ago to warn users infected with the "DNSChanger" malware.

Microsoft has taken its Google Street View-like service Bing Streetside offline in Germany after German citizens expressed their worries about how Microsoft handles requests for blurring of images, the company said on Tuesday.

Physicians who use social networks to share clinical experiences risk violating patient privacy. A niche industry of private social network providers has cropped up to address the desire to communicate.

The U.S. Department of Justice said Tuesday it was looking into the unauthorized access of a website server in its statistics wing, after hacker group Anonymous claimed to have collected and released 1.7GB of data from it.

Lenovo's net profit for its fiscal fourth quarter grew by 59 percent, as the world's second largest PC maker saw continued growth in sales across both mature and emerging markets.

An often-repeated concern that the U.S. Patriot Act gives the U.S. government unequaled access to personal data stored on cloud services is incorrect, with several other nations enjoying similar access to cloud data, according to a study released Wednesday.

Facebook is to settle a class-action lawsuit in California that accused it of appropriating its users' likenesses for its Sponsored Stories advertising feature, according to a court document filed Tuesday.

Touchscreen laptops and tablets with the upcoming Windows 8 OS will be priced higher than their non-touchscreen counterparts, Dell's CEO said on Tuesday.

Businesses can now remotely control enterprise mobile applications developed for Apple's mobile platform with the latest version of Soti's MobiControl Software Developer Kit for iOS, announced Tuesday.

SAP is buying cloud-based e-commerce vendor Ariba for US$4.3 billion, the companies announced Tuesday.

Verizon Communications on Tuesday became the first service provider to say it will use Alcatel-Lucent's upcoming 7950 XRS core routing system, which will bring the French-American equipment vendor into the carrier core routing business for the first time in about a decade.

Having managed and rescued dozens of projects, and helped others do so, I've noted that there is always one critical success factor (CSF) that has either been effectively addressed or missed/messed up.

Dell on Wednesday reported a drop in profits for the first quarter, weighed down by a revenue decrease and slower sales of consumer products.

In its third day of trading, Facebook's stock is still in a slump, taking the shine off the frenzy that led up to the company's initial public offering (IPO) last week.

CIOs face a common set of thorny challenges these days, namely the pressure to deliver innovations even as they seek to cut or hold down spending, according to an array of senior IT executives who spoke on Tuesday at the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Besting a record set by Yahoo in 2009, the research arm of Microsoft have deployed a new technique for quickly sorting large amounts of data, called Flat Datacenter Storage (FDS).

A Florida VoIP carrier has filed a net neutrality complaint against a Georgia utility and broadband provider, after the utility accused the VoIP firm of theft of service for using its network to deliver voice service without paying for it.

Brocade this week said it added hardware-based support for the OpenFlow software-defined networking (SDN) API and protocol to its NetIron and MLX series 100Gbps routers as part of a broader SDN strategy.

Hackers claim to be just days away from jailbreaking Apple devices running iOS 5.1.1, the latest firmware release for iPhones and iPads, letting users load applications from outside of Apple's iTunes App Store.

Microsoft said that a skew toward more exploits on Windows Vista can be attributed to the demise of support for the operating system's first service pack.

The nation's space efforts entered a new chapter today with the launch of the first commercial vehicle to the International Space Station.

The price bar for PCs keeps dropping, with chip maker Via on Tuesday announcing a US$49 APC computer with a customized version of Google's Android operating system.

Preparing for the eventual widespread conversion to IPv6, the Nmap Project has updated its namesake security scanning tool so it can scan IPv6 networks using a variety of novel techniques.

Alcatel-Lucent is set to give Cisco and Juniper another run for the money in core routing 10 years after its initial attempt failed.

A new variant of SpyEye malware allows cybercriminals to monitor potential bank fraud victims by hijacking their webcams and microphones, according to security researchers from antivirus vendor Kaspersky Lab.

Sony on Tuesday showed a digital media hub that uses Wi-Fi to connect its PCs, tablets, smartphones and PlayStation game consoles, a product that it hopes will be part of its comeback.

Advanced technologies such as HAMR could mean disk drive capacities from 30TB to 60TB by 2016, according to a new report by IHS iSuppli.

Google said Tuesday morning that it has closed the deal to acquire Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion

YouTube and German music royalty collecting society GEMA have appealed the outcome of a lawsuit filed by GEMA against YouTube, in which a German court ordered YouTube to inspect the titles of uploaded videos to filter out potentially copyright-infringing content.

Google has finally closed its acquisition of Motorola Mobility, and will now start working on new devices while keeping Android open, it said on Tuesday.

With the world's largest social networking website, Facebook, going public it is quite obvious that comparisons with Google will crop up. We have collated some figures and here is a list of numbers comparing the two giants.

Trusteer expects malware used to attack several German bank sites to be reconfigured for banks in other countries

Former OMB intelligence chief Michael Daniel will take over as the debate over CISPA, for example, heats up

Sidecar, a born-again startup whose founders hail from Internet media services company RealNetworks, Tuesday is launching an eponymous app for iPhones and Android smartphones that's designed to make it easier for people to share videos, photos and more while talking on those devices.

A pair of Microsoft-backed industry groups applauded the ultimatum European Union antitrust regulators issued to rival Google over alleged anti-competitive practices.

Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) said Monday that its application system for new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) has reopened, more than a month after it was brought down because of a software glitch.

EMC has acquired Syncplicity, an enterprise file-management service provider, for an undisclosed sum.

A judge at the U.S. International Trade Commission has determined that a Kodak patent asserted in a complaint against Apple and Research In Motion is invalid, Kodak said on Monday.

The security vendor Trusteer is warning banks to look out for a sophisticated Trojan capable of emptying the account of an online customer.

Named late last week to replace Howard Schmidt as the top White House cybersecurity adviser, Michael Daniel is a 17-year veteran of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and has been its intelligence branch chief for the past 11 years. But he has stayed largely under the radar, even in the cybersecurity community.

Traditional mobile phone plans are now on the wane in the U.S., but the country's biggest carriers are still bringing in more money and leading the world in revenue, according to a report based on first-quarter results.

Schools in the U.S. will need broadband speeds of 100 Mbps per 1,000 students and staff members by the 2014-15 school year in order to meet a growing demand for Web-based instruction and a skyrocketing number of student-owned Web devices, according to a new report by a trade group representing state education agencies.

Voyager Mobile, the startup that had planned to launch last Tuesday but said it was delayed by an attack on its website, went live on Sunday with an unlimited voice, text and data plan for US$39 per month.

The Supreme Court on Monday declined to consider the petition of Joel Tenenbaum, a former doctoral student at Boston University who faces a fine of US$675,000 for illegally downloading 30 songs.

As Avaya continues its transition from a hardware company into a communications and collaboration software provider, it is going through some growing pains, including a shakeup of executives and uncertainty around a potential initial public offering that's been rumored for months.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has hired Paul Ohm, a privacy advocate and critic of current online privacy practices, as a senior privacy adviser for consumer protection and competition issues affecting the Internet and mobile services.

Salesforce.com, which has placed ample emphasis on its Chatter social networking application, will actually begin providing real-time chat functionality as part of an imminent upgrade to its family of cloud-based software, according to a company document.

The Nasdaq computer system that delayed trade notices of the Facebook IPO on Friday was plagued by race conditions, the stock exchange announced Monday. As a result of this technical glitch in its Nasdaq OMX system, the market expects to pay out US$13 million or even more to traders.

There are many ways you can use Twitter to help build your business. For example, you can track trending topics, leverage Web analytics, and tap some 50 million daily users.

International medical vendor Mediq was expanding in a big way by acquisition and needed a standard email platform across its business, but the project's cost and the complexity of doing it alone was so daunting that the company called on outside help that costs it less in the long run.

Samsung is blocking a hack of its S Voice digital assistant software that allowed any Android phone running Ice Cream Sandwich to use the app.

Advanced Micro Devices aims to improve the quality of high-definition video and 3D graphics on equipment in casinos and hospitals with its new R-series processors, which the company announced on Monday.

Mobile operators that want help keeping their subscribers happy can get it through a new managed service from Alcatel-Lucent, the company said on Monday.

Malware writers have used Crossrider, a cross-browser extension development framework, to build a click-fraud worm that spreads on Facebook, security researchers from antivirus firm Kaspersky Lab said on Monday.

Now that Google has gotten permission from China's Anti-Monopoly Bureau to acquire Motorola Mobility, the companies are expected to complete their merger by the middle of this week.

IT management executives from large corporations worry most about how to manage employee-owned devices safely and securely, according to clients of the Directions on Microsoft analyst firm.

Silver Peak today upgraded the software for its WAN appliance to handle automated optimization for TCP and non-TCP traffic, 512,000 simultaneous connections for 10 gigabit-per-second (Gbps) infrastructures and support for a bunch of common hypervisors.

IT managers grappling with bring-your-own-device policies can expect to see an explosion in the number of smartphones and tablets used by employees.

The big cable companies know that if they want to stay relevant in the wireless market, they can't do it on their own.

Version 3.4 of the Linux kernel was officially rolled out Sunday, in what maintainer Linus Torvalds called a "calm" release cycle.

Google has "a matter of weeks" to address four antitrust issues identified by European Union antitrust regulators. If Google addresses these issues the case can be solved by a so-called "commitment decision" instead of formal antitrust proceedings resulting in a fine, said JoaquAn Almunia, Vice President of the European Commission responsible for Competition Policy.

Yahoo has agreed to sell off about half of its stake in Alibaba Group back to the Chinese e-commerce giant as part of a US$7.1 billion deal, the two companies jointly announced on Monday.

If the numbers at StatCounter are accurate then the world has a new Web browser champion: Google Chrome.

The chief of AT&T Mobility can't wait for Windows 8 tablets to hit the market because they'll fuel demand for Windows phones.

IBM is offering employees who are nearing retirement a one-time opportunity to take advantage of a program that would guarantee their employment through Dec. 31, 2013.

Europe's top court has ruled that the functionality of a computer program and the programming language it is written in cannot be protected by copyright.

Your boss wants it yesterday, but it better be good when judged by the standards of tomorrow. Your customers want every feature they can imagine, but don't you dare confuse them by giving them all the buttons they want. Your fellow programmers want your code documented, but they just respond "tl;dr" to anything you write.

After all the attention, clamor, and expectations Facebook is now a publicly traded company worth $104 billion. With shares trading at a hundred times earnings, Facebook is under a lot of pressure to increase the profit that it brings in. In other words, now the fun begins.

Microsoft is abandoning the 'Aero' user interface with Windows 8, calling the UI that debuted in Vista and continued in Windows 7, 'cheesy' and 'dated.'

Company claims system requirements will be the same as those of Visual Studio 2010 despite performance increases

The NFL has big stadiums, big players and big games, but when it comes to computer systems, the league's vice president of IT doesn't use the word big.

Despite interoperability trials and demonstrations involving alternative data center fabric standards, a non-standard fabric technology is said by proponents to be at the front of the pack.

Taiwanese smartphone vendor High Tech Computer said on Sunday certain models of its newest smartphones have passed U.S. Customs and are being released to its carrier customers, after the company previously warned of a delay in product shipments because of an International Trade Commission (ITC) order.

So.cl, an experimental research project from Microsoft, that combines social networking and search to promote learning, is now accepting all users interested in joining the site.

Email managers have a lot at stake. After all, the volume of global electronic messages sent via email dwarfs all other forms of electronic communication, including social networking. Since the inception of electronic mail, which, according to some Internet historians, can be traced to a small mainframe app called 'MAILBOX' from the mid-1960s, human-to-human messages have been created, transmitted and stored in electronic format. But early email administrators could hardly have envisioned the complexity of current email infrastructure and the concomitant maze of technical, security, business and regulatory challenges.

Pakistan late Sunday reversed a block on Twitter in the country over material it considered anti-Islam, the country's interior minister said.

Technical problems at the Nasdaq exchange affected the trading of Facebook shares on Friday, the much-anticipated day of its IPO (initial public offering), Robert Greifeld, chief executive of Nasdaq OMX Group Inc., told reporters on Sunday, according to published reports.

Chinese regulatory authorities have approved Google's acquisition of Motorola Mobility, paving the way for the deal to close within the week, company officials confirmed Saturday.

In the latest move in a complex series of patent-related cases, Apple filed a motion in a U.S. district court late Friday to ban Samsung Electronics' Galaxy Tab 10.1 in the U.S.

Apple's plans for a Bluetooth 4.0-based iWallet could be the beginning of the end for the venerable cash register.

An Italian court has upheld a a!900,000 (US$1.2 million) fine imposed on Apple by Italy's competition authority for allegedly violating consumer protection laws, Italian media reported late Friday.

The mobile gift-giving app Karma announced Friday it has been acquired by Facebook. The announcement came shortly after the markets closed on Facebook's first day as a publicly traded company.

The U.S. International Trade Commission issued an import ban Friday on any Android devices from Motorola that infringe one of Microsoft's patents.

The prospect of cyberwar means the U.S. needs to 'rethink every aspect of defense,' says one summit presenter

At any given moment today, on-the-clock employees are updating their social media status, reading feeds and networking on business media sites. Moments can stretch to minutes: A recent study by the Ponemon Institute found that 60 percent of social media users spend at least 30 minutes a day on these sites while at work.

HP is expected to announce a large layoff at its quarterly investors briefing on Wednesday, losing as many as 30,000 employees. But for now, the company isn't talking about its plans.

How well do you know the $100 billion social network? From private planes to petabytes, here are some of the most surprising Facebook tidbits.

Given the complexity of today's applications, it's folly to suggest that the future role of the CIO is less technical and more businesslike, columnist Bernard Golden writes. If anything, it's the opposite -- the business side of the enterprise should embrace technology.

Twitter has announced support for "Do Not Track," immediately implementing it to halt online tracking of users who trigger a setting in their browsers.

The first hours of Facebook's IPO got off to a shaky start today with the share price wavering around the $40 mark, never gaining the astronomical momentum many had anticipated.

Ten Cheap Vacations

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