A few years ago I purchased airline tickets to Maine to visit family at what I thought was a decent rate. A week later I happened to be looking on the same website that I bought them on and noticed that the same exact flight was fifty dollars cheaper! A week after than it was another twenty cheaper still!

If you’ve bought enough airline tickets you have probably experienced the same effect. Airline prices fluctuate, and unless you follow it for a while on your own, you’ll never really know when to buy and when to wait… until now. I Stumbled Upon the website FareCast.com which predicts prices to and from most U.S. cities based on it’s historical costs over the last couple months.

For example: Roundtrip airfare to Kahalui, Hawaii (Maui island) is as low as $358 for the same week that I was there last year… but FareCast is telling me (with a 75% certainty) that the price will go down, and that I’d be better off waiting. Though looking at the 66-day lowest-price history I can judge that it probably wont go down more than just a few dollars… so instead of risking the loss of a good fare altogether to save just a few bucks, I’d buy right now… with confidence!

I’m going to keep an eye on a few fares to see how accurate this thing is… but it seems to make sense, and since it has relatively transparent data for the last two months, I feel I can trust it more than the wild guessing system that I used before this.

There are several reasons why I’ve never been fond of the idea of taking student loans while I was trudging my way through my community college. I’m not big on racking up thousands of dollars in debt. I can’t live on campus and eat cafateria food, so the cost of living is actually higher than being at a university. The timing sucks at junior college for engineering fields.

What do I mean by timing sucks? Look at it this way. Standard degrees, like communications or English, require the IGETC (Intersegmental General Education Transfer Curriculum) when transfering into a University of California school. This includes the minimum 60 units of tranferable courses with at least a 2.4 GPA — which I think is damn low. It has several sections which include English, arts & humanities, social & behavioral sciences, physical & biological sciences, second languages, and math. It’s emphasis is on a broad education spread thinly over many subjects.

The college of Engineering requirements at most schools (my dream school, UCSB, included) ask that students forgo the IGETC and focus on Math and Physics — along with a few English courses and General Chemistry. The problem with these math and physics requirements is that now that there’s a lack of funding for UC system schools, which have impacted admissions, I cannot get them to even look at my transcripts until I’ve completed three semesters of calculus and physics!

So here’s the breakdown of where I started, where I’m at, and where I need to go. I started with college algebra and then took trigonometry. This semester I take precalculus. Next I work on calculus I and chemistry I (each 5 units), after which, due to prerequisites, I can start on my physics I class. So I’ll be taking physics I and calculus II and chemistry II (each 5 units) concurrently, then calculus III and physics II (each 5 units) together… then I can finish with physics III (5 units). And to top it all off I have to, somehow, fit another English class (3 units) and two Spanish (each 5 units) classes into it all. Oh, and physics II and III aren’t always offered every semester, so I may have to wait a semester or two if they don’t have it when I’m ready.

At least two and a half more years here — if not three. And that’s if everything goes perfectly as planned. This sucks.

And all the while I’ve been holding down jobs, odd or otherwise, in order to fund my little habit of madness. I’m not fond of working full time while taking 15 units of classes… and I get overly bored and feel no sense of accomplishment if I’m only taking 6 units and working part time. So I’ve finally decided to suck it up and take student loans. My only concern is that I’ve made decent money the last several years, so it’s going to be hard to prove that I need them. By not working (or at least deducting EVERYTHING when I do my taxes) I should be able to convince them that I make nothing. We’ll see.

Okay… my last host sucked… the server was so damn slow that I didn’t want to write blog entries, and I’m certain that if it was that slow, you guys wouldn’t have wanted to read them either… so I’m switching over to my own hosting company: bluecollargeeks.com. It appears that a few things have broken during the transition, like the language settings, and my header images.

Once I’m done with the Blue-Collar Geeks’ website, I’ll come back to this one and get it back to 100%.