When you travel on a vacation and have people back home excited about your trip, souvenirs may be required for your return. Oh the obligation to get everyone you know a little something so they can share in the enjoyment of you taking a trip.

There are the unique items that you can only buy at the special landmarks. They are the valuable items you cannot find elsewhere, and provide the special feeling that only you can value.

Then there are the items like puzzles that are sometimes imported to the landmark and marketed to the tourists. Recently I saw an imported puzzle of the skyline of New York that was for sale at a New York souvenir shop.

After packing it in the suitcase that barely had enough room to fit the puzzle let alone the other unique souvenirs and getting it home, I found that the manufacturer had a website.

On their website they featured skylines of many other cities, some that I also traveled to. Their prices were half that of the shop. Because it was an out of state purchase, there was no sales tax either. Shipping was inexpensive and the puzzles arrived quickly and undamaged.

If you don’t mind the slight difference in how you get the product, but that you actually get it home, it’s an easy way to bring souvenirs home. If packing space is tight, you can buy the items at the landmark and ship it home, hopefully safe and in one piece.

If you want to save even more money, forget traveling to the landmark and instead checkout the online marketplaces where you can buy the items. But if you did that, you wouldn’t be traveling and accrue all the sentimental memories that visiting unique landmarks can bring for years to come.

On long flights that last several hours or more, movies were once shown on big screens with audio coming from an earphone jack. It was like a movie theater yet very narrow. You didn’t have a choice of the movie you were watching. It was either watch the movie or partake in some other activity that you brought on board with you.

Today, you don’t see big screens on airplanes anymore. Have the airlines got that poor that they stopped movies too? On some planes there are small screens on the back of each seat, even in coach class. You have control over what you watch (or don’t watch). Besides the new releases, there are television shows to sports, broadcast, and premium channels. So no, they’ve found personalization of entertainment to be profitable.

If you don’t mind watching a small screen the size of a portable DVD player, it’s a great time waster until you land. You can catch up on that movie you never saw in the theater and won’t have time for when you land and return to the regular busy life with no movies.

This new technology does include live television, which requires a satellite connection. Recently, on a flight across the country, there were issues with the signal. It was disappointing that one could not watch television for free, but could instead pay for a movie and watch it. Hopefully it was truly a technical glitch and not a gimmick to get more revenue from the passengers.

If you have a travel partner, invest in an audio splitter that can take the audio source and allow more than one person to listen to the movie. You can share the movie together.

If you forgot your headphones, that’s not a problem. You can buy them for $2 along with your movie and alcoholic beverage. But you can’t buy a splitter.

Making a phone call across the country or to another country was once an expensive and quick experience. You needed a good reason to speak to the other party or you were just wasting money. Like the commercials on television, the fewer words and therefore fewer minutes on the phone saved you money.

Calling cards helped reduce the cost per minute and helped to make calling long distance from anywhere possible. Mobile phones started including long distance in their plans, but still charged you for airtime minutes.

With high speed internet, VOIP has become popular. With low cost plans to call anywhere in the world, the changing technology isn’t as big a barrier as it use to be. Because voice travels from computer to computer, paying multiple carriers for the use of their lines from one point to another is no longer necessary.

With services like Skype, you can chat with voice, text, and video all at the same time, anywhere in the world. You do need a microphone and webcam as a regular telephone cannot be plugged into your computer. The technology still lacks clear crisp quality, similar to a cellphone in a weak signal area.

Skype provides a computer to phone dialing for a fee, but could be a cheap alternative to many long distance calls.

If you are worried about customers making long distance calls to your company, you can use online services that will provide local numbers in area codes and forward your calls to landlines or VOIP terminals. They provide the capability of routing the number to different (or multiple) numbers as desired.

Water is everywhere. There are oceans, lakes, rivers, streams, and ice throughout most of the world. This summer, we’re seeing many areas under drought. There were suggestions to conserve water which were ignored or not taken seriously. Now there are mandatory conservation efforts in place.

There has been a suggestion that people get virtual grass. Astroturf could end up in many front yards soon as an alternative to water guzzling grass that one is dedicated to keeping alive and green if just installed.

If you don’t have a yard to keep looking attractive in front of your decreasing valued home, and enjoy plants instead, you have an easier time conserving water. Don’t buy vegetable plants and you won’t need to water them. Problem solved.

The idea of virtual plants is an interesting solution as well. You can have as many plants online as you want. They can turn different colors (hopefully not the dreadful brown) and require different levels of care. You can even set your desktop to look out onto a a virtual patio of plants (some which could be dying from the lack of care).

In the web world of cats and dogs that exist only in cyberspace, plants could co-exist. Actually, these pets could help with the care of plants and trees. Attracting insects such as bees to pollinate your plants can be just as easy or difficult as it is in real life.

Including the real life issue of diverting water to places can be a public service lesson for everyone affected. When turning on water in real life, one will be reminded of all the effort it took to get that water to their tap for their use.

It’s not a matter of conserving water, but also of understanding why we don’t have a constant supply of water. In this civilization, water means life to both humans and plants (as well as the virtual pets).

Form spam has been around for some time now. Ever since the first person found that they could automate the submission of content on a form and get it displayed immediately, form spam has been an annoying inconvenience. Actually, before that time when a human could just spam a form. Automation has made it much easier to continue an attack over days, months, or even years and has made the issue more noticeable.

Guestbook and forums have received the brunt of spam data. Inserting links with the hope of enhancing the link count to a particular website has been one goal. Other times, it’s plain entertainment to see if reverse engineering a form can reward oneself with a gem (also known as hacking).

Viewing the form fields and testing what data can be entered and how the form responds to the data is one common method. Does the content submitted get added to publicly viewable webpage? Can you add links and images, formatting, and hidden content?

Captchas have been used to prevent automation. The hope is that humans won’t be motivated to enter captchas for every attack.

Usually the attacks come from a number of IP addresses that are often referred to as spam bots. Online databases keep track of such IPs and one validation that the IPis a bot can help prevent further attempts from the same IP address. Occasionally, they will try a new IP address and the effort of blocking is repeated.

Preventing the number of entries within a time period can help prevent a overly active bot, but can also hinder a legitimate and overly active human posting in a forum.

The attacks are also common on contact forms. Many contact forms have vulnerabilities with how they handle the to and from email addresses. A simple carriage return within a to or from field can cause havoc on email headers. Once compromised, there is no limit to the number of emails that one can send.