By this Author: Peter

Ok, so we would have liked to actually see this plane being flown by now, but in the meanwhile have a look at this video of a rehearsed evacuation.

Came across this via The BOOT.

As an anonymous poster there pointed out though:

lucky for them they had

1. No luggage
2. No Kids
3. No old people
4. No people on fire
5. No sinking plane in water
7. No hysterical people
and most importantly, Everybody understood what to do.

Still, it's a fairly impressive routine to watch.

Photo: © James McNamara

In 1850 there were over 150 glaciers in the park, today there are a couple dozen. It is estimated that the final glacier will melt in the next few decades. As a result, The National Environmental Trust of Montana is asking for suggestions for a new name for this national park.

Any ideas?

You can send in your suggestions to RenameGlacier.org and go in the running for a $250 gift certificate to REI.

Via Treehugger

Today we added another 6 languages to our budget accommodation section. Users of the site are now also able to browse the accommodation listings in Russian, Japanese, Chinese (traditional + simplified), Portuguese and Swedish. If you happen to speak any of these languages we welcome you to have a look and see how accurate you think they are!

Russian
Swedish
Portuguese
Japanese
Chinese (simplified)
Chinese (traditional)

We are also currently working on creating translations for the blog labels, which would mean that if you run your blog in Chinese, your entire blog could look Chinese, including dates, headers and navigation elements. If you speak another language and are interested in helping us with this translation work, let me know and we'll send you a file to translate.

I found out yesterday about microformats, a standard set up to enable easy sharing of content from websites.

One of the main examples is their hCard format. Many of you might already be familiar with vCards, a format used to share your contact information with other people. Apple's Address Book will open the file and automatically add a contact. hCard takes this a step further and allows users to 'Save a contact' when viewing their profile on a website. Depending on what information is provided, this could include their name, phone number, website, location you name it.. In our case, we have some of that information available for many of our users. Considering the implementation of hCard implementation is quite simple, I went ahead and added it to all Travellerspoint member profiles.

Firefox 3 is expected to have microformat support embedded, but till then you can install this FF 2 Add On that will do the trick nicely.

After installing that Add On, navigate to a Travellerspont member's profile, for instance mine. You will see the 'hCard' icon in your toolbar light up to indicate that it has found some contact information. Clicking on that will give you some options of things to do with the data.

This is not a change that will immediately seem useful to many of you, but I'm convinced that over the next year or so it is going to become a standard way of gathering contact information.

Now you can upload files in gif and png format as well as jpg.

Both these formats can be particularly useful when designing a blog. Most photographers will work with jpg, so it won't affect photo uploads a great deal. But when saving graphics, both png and gif have certain characteristics that make them preferable at times.

My Mac saves screen grabs in png format, so this makes it easier to upload them to Travellerspoint if I feel like it