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Gadget Freak

August 3, 2008 timminter Leave a comment
About 10 years ago in-between University and getting a real job I had a plan. I bought a long wheelbase Landrover, loads of maps and drew loads of pictures and diagrams and started planning a trip around Africa. The problem of planning the actual trip through a strange and mysterious continent with various nasties trying to kill you of course took second place to planning what computers and gadgets I’d need, and the most important thing… what the website should look like. Trailing way behind that was the mysterious source of money needed to fund the whole thing. Not surprisingly that trip hasn’t happened so far! Yes, some might say I’m a bit of a gadget freak! I’ll take that as a good thing.39 days to go and I’m off around the world. This will be a pretty amazing trip (arranged with some serious time and energy expended by STA Travel here in Brighton – more on that later) starting off in Mexico, going back on ourselves to Bermuda (don’t ask) then off around South America and beyond ending up in Tibet. I’m going to leave out the full itinerary as only one person so far has managed to listen to the whole thing without changing the subject and I’d imagine the same kind of thing would happen here! (That one person was my sister by the way.) If you really want to know it’s on the itinerary page on this site and there might even be an interactive map later! Now that’s a good gadget!

Now all the plans are in place, the fights are all booked, bribes exchanged and visas on their way I reckon I’ve earned some time to get myself travel gadgeted up. A lot’s changed even in those 10 years from that heady, some would say foolhardy attempted Africa trip. We all know you can’t move for internet cafes in any discerning backpacker\tourist hot spot but get out of those places and your daily fix of facebook can be hard to come by. Here at home, mobile internet is everywhere and anyone can get a web phone and access for next to nothing. Outside your home country, it’s a very different matter with roaming data packages hugely expensive for long trips and typing on a keyboard ment to send “u r gr8 txt me l8r” and “lol” is just silly. iPhone\iPod Touch is a great invention but that wiley Mr Apple really doesn’t want his ipod\phone sales hitting his laptop sales so isn’t going anywhere near offering usb or keyboard connectivity – although we all know it’s so temptingly possible. I’ve searched high and low and even read some blogs about that debate! In the next few days I’m going to try to put together what I’ve found from some pretty extensive research on loads of things from connectivity and power to cameras and computery things. For those of us wanting to send that video you took of meeting Britney on the top of Mount Everest back to base camp before that paparazzi’s huskies get him back to the local Starbucks or for those of us just wanting to use those long bus journeys getting your latest blog or photos ready for upload. I’ll see what I can do!

 

Categories: Pre Travel Ramblings

39 Days To Go

August 3, 2008 timminter Leave a comment

39 Days to go

Before I said yes to this strange and new assignment I thought what on earth could be said that hadn’t been said before and why on earth would anyone want to read someone else’s travel ramblings. Reading about how amazing a time some tanned stranger was having getting in touch with themselves in a zorb or how the local yaks were so accommodating and spiritual up some misty mountain somewhere didn’t seem like much fun to me. Could I write anything that anyone would find vaguely interesting? Would anyone sign up after I exhausted my yahoo address book? How embarrassing if no one I knew wanted to know. To get around all these uncomfortables I thought I’d write a private blog just for me. I guess that’s what they used to call a diary back then. I’ve never had one of those either.

Then STA Exporers came along, alright I admit it, the offer of an audience was all it took! So here is my second first post (actually this is probably about the 6th go, lets just say the other unpublished versions were a bit “out there”, “ravings of a lunatic” spring to mind. OK I’m just getting the hang of this alright! Glad I didn’t press that publish button. Hope I didn’t anyway!)

So what am I gonna ramble about? Well the first thing I thought of when STA Contacted me was probably, “Brilliant I need a massive load of toys to do this, what toys are they gonna give me?” The second thing was probably ”Wow I know, I can write about toys”. Unfortunately the answer to the question about what toys are they gonna give me was “nothing”, not a sausage. So with 39 days to go before we’re off on the travels and not even a sausage to help me, I will be writing about essential (\not really essential at all) techno toys for travelling including shiny flashy things that go beep, websites and other mumbo jumbo. Then hopefully I will have learnt how to type, use the spell checker and not use so many exclamation marks and will start writing about more interesting things using my new toys! Brilliant!

Categories: Pre Travel Ramblings