Many folks take the internet for granted and they happily open up their browsers and go hunting for cheap online fares. What you don’t know and not always astute to is the ways browsers and websites interact with each other and they can paint a different picture when it comes to pricing.

Airline fares accurate? - use of browser cookies

For example, let’s say you went to these online airfare checker sites and they are many of these and you decide to look up fares but have not decided. You will most likely see the fares change with each day. However, the question is, are the fares a reflection of the market movement in prices or because the website knows you through your cookies when you come and visit the site.

You won’t be surprised at the alarming way that Google is able to track you when it comes to pushing ads to your face. Say, you went to an online ecommerce store and you surf around the net, you will most likely see the same ad show up time and time again. These are all done through the cookies.

In the same way, websites that offer you deals on airline prices will most likely be able to tell if you are revisiting the site from looking up the cookies that is embedded to your browser. Remember cookies are not a bad thing, they are a way to enable websites to hold your last session and as such and can be used by websites (safely) to provide you with richer user experience. However, the airline fare checker sites can leverage this knowledge to push ‘new prices’ to you based on how frequently you have visited the site. They will also consider the fear-mongering trick of how late you leave the ticket towards your flight date to push higher prices. Heck, airline, hotels, cars and other businesses have been doing this for years!

So how to overcome this ‘shadowing’ that airline, hotel price checker sites use? Very simple, just open up a new browser and do the same search again. I usually have Google Chrome, Firefox and Opera on my Windows 10 machine. I can also delete the browser history which will also clear your cookies cache, check with the browser that you are using. Just today, I saw a price hike from a company (who I won’t bad mouth) from the yesterday’s prices and then I did the same search on another browser and lo and behold completely different prices!

Brought to you by
Jumpdates ThinkTank Labs.

Tags: air fares, airline fares, browsers, cookies, hotel fares, price hikes

There is a lot to be said of determining personality traits by the actions and behavior of people and nothing can be more true by observing the way they drive.
Here are a few (and sometimes amusing) ways to sum up people’s personalities

Driving and Personality

1. The impatient and restless driver
Almost all of these drivers can be seen being provocated at the slightest hint of a traffic jam or someone who cut’s in, slow or appears to be causing traffic jams. Unfortunately, these kinds of people always seem to be in a hurry and have no time for others.

2. The over-cautious driver
These people like to stay to themselves and rarely say much during a conversation and their driving is a reflection of that. Since they like solitude, going out to the open road seems a terrifying experience for them since they have no choice but to wrestle with their external surroundings. They take extra precaution to stay zealously close to what is in front of their nose as opposed to the whole environment. Their driving is unappreciated by other passengers.

3. The cool driver
You can imagine what type of personality that this driver possesses. These people are generally young and have little experience on the road. Experienced drivers will know how important it is to drive safely no matter what the personality. They are almost always not the ones that you would go into the car with since you will likely be holding tightly to your seats and giving sighs of relief from hairline misses with other cars. As you can guess, these people are probably the talkative types and loves to impress especially their opposite sex.

4. The analytical driver
These personalities are likely to belong to more mature people and often the one that you find the most comfortable being a passenger. They are not the talk of the town or go out to impress, they are very grounded, maybe boring but always grounded and gives good advice.

In the same way that you can extract personality traits through people’s driving there are other behavior characteristics that you can derive from many other activities. It’s usually a result of the fact that one cannot ‘fake’ their actions or behavior over a particular area of expertise. Take for example the people’s differences when it comes to how they handle their crockware after eating. For example, do they immediately wash up or do they leave it on the side. Do they move the other crockery out of the way without washing to do their own. There is a lot to appreciate in those types of behavior alone.

Next time when you go out on a date, try to observe their behavior in their driving, eating or doing some kind of activity, it can reveal interesting things about the person you are dating.

Tags: behavior from activity, driving and personality, driving personalities, find out person

The Rio Olympics of 2016 are filled with excitement as we see great feats of skill, strength, endurance and determination. We almost find ourselves in the same shoes as the olympian who crosses the 100m line to break the world record or the frustration of the high jumper who hits the bar on the third time.

Reach greatness in your own field

I find it particularly fascinating to watch the short interviews that take place after an event, it reveals their thinking and often the purpose of why they go through such enduring hardship to reach the top. If we take mankind as a whole, we have excelled at being the masters of our world and we have a deep craving for progress and what lies ahead. This is so true for anyone who competes for a medal in the world cup.

Maybe to a lesser extent, we all have a deep sense of purpose and achievement that we strive for and the perception of how we internalize these feelings can propel us forward or keep as stagnant. We can associate all the athletes that participate in the Olympics have gone through gruelling exercise and constant practise along with much sacrifices to reach the pinnacle of their sport. Why do they do that? To many of us we cannot imagine being subject to the same constant routine day after day to just to get the satisfaction of having 1 billion people or so watching you hold your medal.

If we take that same philosophy of thinking to heart and apply it to our daily lives we should theoretically also achieve greatness in our endeavors. But many will forgo that desire to be ‘great’ because the ‘struggle’ and ‘sacrifice’ is far too much to bear in the pursuit of that goal. Nevertheless the sense of high achievement and greatness has never come without a price. But I would say to those naysayers that when you are living the dream and greatness the slog and effort that one tends to think is not the way one thinks. In fact, if those people did not ‘enjoy’ or feel ‘fulfilled’, they would not be able to maintain the path they put themselves through.

The ‘euphoria’ of living your dreams propels one to a new level of thinking where the tasks does not seem like tasks at all but inches them towards glory.

Jumpdates ThinkTank Labs

Tags: feelings, goals, learn from greatness, rio olympics, success

One can find tons of information related to the subject of finding the ideal partner. In fact, you will find many articles written about this subject on this Jumpdates blog. With the divorce rate on the rise and more people choose not to marry, these are obviously not encouraging news for anyone who want to settle down.

Married couples - east and west

The problem stems from our lack of appreciating the complexities and nuances of personalities that make up an individual. Of course when we go dating with the person, we generally don’t always see the negative side of things as both are trying to impress. This is one of the reasons why the West generally do not understand how the East can marry someone without having met them as the so called ‘arranged marriages’. The Jumpdates ThinkTank Labs have conducted some research on this subject and have come across some insightful trends and patterns that can explain some of these explicable differences.

Although we understand the nature of ‘arranged marriages’ and some may be critical about it’s practice but it is safe to say that the length of marriage would be determining factors for the match.
On the face of things it looks like the East has an upper hand on the longevity of the marriage over their Western counterparts. One should ask why this would be the case.

There are marked differing ideologies related to marriage when we compare the West and the East. Firstly, the communion of marriage between two persons in the East have a wider encompassing reach amongst members of the families. That is to say, the extended families do not move away once the marriage has taken place, in fact, they become an integral part of the future of the coupole. On the opposite side, the Western values are different where a sense of ‘space and independence’ is granted to the couple by families even though they will be still part of their lives. There are advantages and disadvantages to both of these differing family ideals and we will only touch on a few.

When couples of the East generally have trouble adjusting and coping, they can almost always turn to their family members for support. Also, in the Eastern culture, families tend to live together in a bigger household, if not, then not very far from where the couple would live. The advantage of this setup is that couples who are green in the understanding of marriage and cooperation will get a good dose of wisdom, daily checks to make their marriage successful.

The West as we know have a very different viewpoint of how marriages work and the focus is always on the couples to work things out without much outside help. As such the tensions can be high between the couple and without any obvious close support the marriage can deteriorate. Generally marriages in the West happen at later ages unless families have been an integral part of both the couples. It is difficult to say which is better than the other since they both garner human qualities which the other party would not necessarily possess. For example, the couples from the West can be more self-reliant, independent, strong and more driven to pursue their own dreams. Couples from the East may have a cooperative ability to solve problems and can be less self-preserving and look to a wider group for progress.

You the readers can decide what values can be picked from the two different cultures. Maybe a balance of the two can provide a more healthy and a longer lasting relationship.

Tags: arranged marriage, eastern marriages, marriage east & west, western marriages

One of our employees called Bill was telling us about an interesting event that occurred whilst visiting a barber shop that led to many conundrums.

Typical barber shop - place of many conundrums? image courtesy clintonbarber.com

This was his second visit to this particular shop. As he was entering the barber shop a little boy of about seven beat him to the door and inside there was the same barber who cut his hair over a month ago and gave Bill the hi-five. Meanwhile the kid approached two ladies sitting down and seemed to know them and then went to the barber’s chair to sit down to have his haircut. Bill thought he would wait, plus there were three other barbers there and they seemed to be finishing off haircuts to the customers there.

Bill sort of pointed to the kid while looking at the barber as though he was going to get the hair-cut first and proceeded to sit down on a bench facing the barber. After about 5-10 mins. one of the barbers about 2 seats down had finished and Bill thought there was a chance that he would have his turn now. It turns out that this barber didn’t even exchange eye contact with Bill and went to the back of the shop. Bill’s first conundrum was whether there was some kind of mistake and whether the man had just gone to the back for a break. Bill waited and the man came back and just sat with his other barber friend. Bill’s second conundrum - the barber must have assumed that Bill wanted a haircut with the barber that greeted him with a hi-five. Bill also concluded that various customers liked to have their haircut by selected barbers and he would not want to offend anyone by taking the customer away. So Bill didn’t say anything and made the decision to wait.

About 15 mins. elapses and two women with a kid walk into the shop and asks the barber whether he would cut the child’s hair. The barber looks at Bill and speaks in Spanish, Bill replies that he doesn’t understand Spanish and the barber asks whether Bill was going to get the haircut. Bill simply nodded without thinking and the barber says that it would be after Bill but he turned around and saw a free barber and asked him whether he could cut the kid’s hair. Some of our astute readers might have picked up the cue of what was happening here but Bill was unaware of what was going on as he already felt that he ‘belonged’ to this barber. So the new kid gets his haircut by one of the free barber. Here is another conundrum - maybe Bill should have spoken out and asked why they were getting a haircut after him but Bill assumed that he needs to honor the barbers code of conduct. After all, he didn’t know any better.

After about 30 mins in where Bill was becoming increasingly impatient as the barber seemed to be taking so much time, two guys walk into the shop. They seemed to know the barber that was supposedly going to cut Bill’s hair and asked about getting a haircut for his friend he was with. He (Bill’s barber) called out to another free barber and asked whether he could cut his hair. Around this time the woman who seemed to be related to the kid that was having his haircut came and sat near Bill. The conundrum started to sink into Bill and he looked at his clock and made a decision that if the barber went beyond another 5 mins. he would simply walk out of the shop. His frustration was that not that the other people were getting his haircut but the barber seemed to take a lot of time over this kid. It was nearing 40 mins. when Bill was about to walk out of the shop but luckily the barber just finished.

So a very interesting conversation ensued as the kid got of the salon chair and the barber pointed to Bill to sit down. As he was doing so the ‘mother’ of the kid was having a conversation in Spanish. Bill got the jist of this conversation when the barber seemed to imply that Bill was with the mother and the kid and she swung her head and the barber gave a big sigh in surprise and patted Bill on the head. Bill knew that this was a mistake on the part of the barber to assume that Bill had come into the shop with the kid. Bill now wondered how the barber was going to behave but the barber did not provide an apology or say anything about the matter. Bill finally got his haircut and measured on his watch how long the barber took to cut his hair compared to the previous kid that he did. Bill’s time was 28 mins compared to the kid before him which took 45 mins. Maybe the barber wanted to speed things up knowing that Bill had waited patiently all this time.

The readers may want to get involved in this episode of conundrums. There were many possibilities and both parties maybe to blame for Bill not getting his haircut in a timely manner. Maybe the waiting game was not a big deal in the culture that the barber grew up in. What would you do and why?

Tags: barber shop, conundrum, misunderstanding