Wednesday, April 08, 2009

Widgets of Distinction

For whatever reason, I've been working on widget that will allow Palmmgt to syndicate all our vital, life saving data across the Internet via all the other Internauts out there. Actually, I know the reason-- after listening to a Hooman at U of Maryland on the subject I thought I'd look into it. He was right-- it's as geeky as it gets. There's enough coding, scripting-- JAVA, XML, Flash, RSS, html to make you want to reach for a regulated beverage and search the phrase "booty dance" on Youtube.

It might make you feel impulsive and gun crazy, fueling fantasies of protracted crime sprees, kriss crossing the nation from one bank job to the next, hard drinking, hard driving, hard talking and hard to imagine ways to forget all the widgets, midgets and eyeballs that fidget on this Internet. Of course, I entertain these ideas fully know that bank robbing just isn't done the usual way these days. Adventure, grace and brass balls have all been teased out, like genetic modifications in mice, deep inside some University lab, fully funded by public and anonymous private sources for the patient right. Ounce for ounce, Bernie Madoff, makes Willie Sutton look like a door man, to say nothing of the paradoxical journey of Patty Hearst. No, like most others, it's a nasty business these days, which somehow makes coding Widgets seem more tolerable.

In spite of the turtle's pace of change to the value proposition of all this XHTML, maybe the devil you know, hiding in your widget code is better than the devil that could be lurking just outside your door, waiting for you, like Tonya and the Symbionese Liberation Army to stomp you in your nuts or your gurl, as they flip through your wallet for something of value. That's a leatherback sea turtle at Playa Grande, Costa Rica by the way. They have been around since the sun itself, without usernames or passwords. We urge all visitors to Playa Grande to watch out for and stay away from Turtles eggs, stay off the beach at night, and to come learn about Playa Grande as a sea turtle nesting ground.

Speaking of "Gun Crazy", David Graf and Lauren Becker's six bank robbery crime spree came to an end today according to the news on Long Island. The loving couple stole up to $10,000 dollars to pay for heroin. I know-- romantic, right?

Speaking of something of value, it's not easy to decide what to put into the widget, or if it's even worth 4 minutes it takes to plan it. I don't know, I'm not Bill Gate's limo driver giving dictation into my Zune, like Grand Funk Railroad on an 8 Track. This stuff is like pasta, or something more smelly: you chuck it on the wall and find out later what sticks and what just stinks.

Thursday, April 02, 2009

Palm Tours to Focus on Singles Travel 2 Costa Rica

Palmmgt.com is considering and kicking around the idea of hosting "singles tours" to Costa Rica's Pacific shores, which will include beach front rentals and a wide variety of activities, including surfing lessons, golf, horseback riding, volcano tours, hot springs, night clubs, spa days, wildlife tours, sport fishing, hiking, biking, sailing, ATVs, casino gaming, and even bird watching (believe it or not, it's one of the most popular reasons people come to visit Cost Rica, the most biologically diverse place on earth). Yeah, there's plenty to do for folks who are not paired off, but sitting on a few weeks of vacation time to use up.


So the challenge is to reach singles with the offer-- Singles Tours to Costa Rica, without forking over thousands of dollars to click ad companies, so 1000's of "employees" sitting in some Estonian internet bang can sit there and click our links until their fingers fall off and we cleaned out. I can't knock their business model, it's just that we don't really get what we pay for-- reaching all those singles, recently dumped by their significant others and looking for somewhere to vacation that is not some thinly veiled booty tour to some walled in resort in the Caribbean that is geared up to get them to buy too many drinks. The average cruise is priced that way-- they give away the space with the expectation that the guest will drink $100's of dollars worth of hooch in order to break even. Hile there are plenty of places to drink like a new parolee and party like a rock star (the old school, Keith Richards, wake up in your own barf kind).

Boozed based blotto tours are really not Palmmgt's focus but some people do come to the Tamarindo area for the wild club-night life (with its active drug culture); so while we can offer those "Blotto tours", we are really looking to reach people, single or not, who want activities based tours-- whether it's health and fitness based, "multi sport" based vacations, which amount to an exercise boot camp situation, or nature tours to volcanos, rain forests, hot springs, horseback riding, PGA golf or sport fishing.


Tear ass, horseback rides on the beach aside, to that end, we are having some experimental landing pages built out and set up, which are pretty funny-- see,



For some reason, there's been a rush of wedding requests on Playa Grande. Seems like beach weddings are becoming more popular.