Trip Becoming a Reality

"I'm leaving on a jet plane, my bags are packed and I don't know when I will be back again." - OK, so none of that is true :) not sure 747s etc qualify as jet planes, my bags are not packed and I do know when I will be back again.

I finally booked my trip. It has been a long process and the trip has been significantly shortened and changed but I think the essence is still there. I am leaving on the 10th of May, and getting back on the 27th of September.

My "RTW" trip will cover these countries;

• Germany (11 - 18 May)
• UK (18 - 24 May)
• USA (24 May - 14 August
• Canada (see time in States)
• Japan (15 - 29 August)
• Australia (30 August - 17 September)
• Egypt (18 - 27 September)

In Japan I will be doing an Imaginative Traveller tour starting on the 15th of August and in Egypt I will be doing a Contiki tour starting on the 19th of September. If you are keen on any of them, please join me. :)

Oh yes, and I finally found the perfect travel backpack. It is made by a German company called Deuter and has all sorts of little pockets and features. Specifically it is the Traveller 80 + 10 and what I like about it, is that the zip opens most the way around so you can get at things like you would in a suitcase, it has a detachable day-pack, fold-away shoulder straps... and the list goes on. I can not wait to get started. :)


If you have comments or suggestions please get in touch. That's all for now.:)

Lost in Translation

I am just busy trying to work out my daily expenses in order to get an estimate of how much foreign exchange I will require. And in doing so I somehow got to the homepage of the first hotel I will be staying in. Have a look at the pages below, I think either English is a much more succinct language or they grew tiered of translating :)


Currencies I will require on my trip:

• Euro (EUR)
• Pound Sterling (GBP)
• US Dollar (USD)
• Canadian Dollar (CAD)
• Yen (JPY)
• Australian Dollar (AUD)
• Egyptian Pound (EGP)

(I have included ZAR price for the last 12 months as a link)

Obsession with Optimization

If not an obsession, then I have a passion or fixation for optimization. To get something as small or as fast as possible. I hate to see any kind of resource be squandered; money, water, space or even CPU cycles and it brings a smile to my face to see that someone has solved a particular problem efficiently.

To that effect I almost gagged when I got an email which had a 30k signature image of the companies logo in a bit of colour. The width and height of this image is indicated below.



As a comparison, the standard Google logo is only just over 7k and over three times the area.

This same wastefulness can be seen in web pages. The worst page that I have seen in a while is that of South African cellular services provider MTN. Their landing page weighs in at over 80k and has barely over one screens worth of content. I have listed a few pages and their respective sizes below.

• MTN 80k


• Microsoft 20.7k


• Cell-C 14.3k


• Squid Cache 8k


• Vodacom 5.3k


• Google 3.2k

Now granted you should also take the images and other media into account when comparing the relative sizes of web pages, I have only looked at the HTML here. Also these pages vary in terms of their content and indeed their function, but the point I am trying to make is that when designing anything for mass consumption there are a lot of things that need careful consideration, not least of which the size of your content.

Why do I care about these things? Maybe it is because I come from a bandwidth starved country, maybe I am a little bit crazy, but to me it is like seeing bits drip out of a digital tap. Surely you would want to make sure you are not wasteful. Make sure all your designs work as efficiently as they possibly can while keeping in mind that a good solution today is often better than a perfect solution tomorrow.

This might be why I find some of the TED videos so inspiring, go and have a look here.

Me, a Domain Squatter?

Squatting in South Africa has always been a bit of a problem (still is) and you obviously also get squatters in the digital domain. People who buy domain names in the hopes of selling them to the big corporates for a pretty penny. Most times there are panels that you can approach to resolve the dispute over a domain name, but in some cases "first-come first-serve" rule is applied and you can only hope that you are the first.
Only two weeks into owning the blum.co.za domain I have been approached to sell it. I do not know to whom, but a hosting company in Munich has offered me $1 500 for the domain name. I suppose it is for hinge giant www.blum.com. In any event I have told them that I do not wish to sell it(for any less than $15 000) and I believe I have a legitimate claim on the domain since it is my name :)

Update: It has been a week since my ridiculous offer and no response. I must say I am glad to keep my domain, but I was warming to idea of making some quick cash :)

Community Overload

As you might have noticed I have recently started blogging and looking at all the other services people use to stay in touch. These are the community sites and services I currently have accounts for;

• FaceBook - massively popular community site, I am here
• Flickr - photography site, check my pics out here
• Twitter - micro blogging site, follow me here
• Blogger(of course) - you guessed it, you are already here:)
• Gmail - the best free email solution :)
• Skype - chat application that can make landline calls and send SMS messages, phone me here
• Zyb - site that allows you to back up your phone contacts and attempts to create a community based on that information, find me here
• Remember The Milk - site to manage todo lists and your calendar, looks to have a nice iPhone app as well
• TripIt - I am still playing around with this, apparently this site will manage your travel itinerary, I am here
• Digg - site to discover and share content from anywhere on the web, I am here
• delicious - social bookmarking service, I am here
• FriendFeed - site that aims to bring together all others to consolidate and sumarize them, find me here
• XBox.com - official XBox-360 site, find me here
• www.xbox-360.co.za - South African XBox-360 community site, their leaderboad can be found here
• www.xbox360achievements.org - site listing helpful hints for XBox 360 achievements
• iTunes - Apple's application to overcharge for music
• Mozy - site that allows you to back up your data to the web
• not to mention all the retail sites Amazon, eBay, Kalahari, Take2, ...

I hope they all have rock solid privacy policies :)

The Big Trip: Getting Ready

As some of you might know I am planning to go on a 6 to 9 month trip around the world. My lovely sister got me a great book for Christmas to get started. It is called "The Big Trip" and gives quite a few handy hints on what to look out for when planning a longer journey. Among the growing list of things I still need to plan are;

• VISAS
• Forex
• Vacinations
• Luggage
• Insurance
• First Aid Course + Kit
• Some Tickets
• Some Accomodation
• Basic Timelines
• ...last but not least where I want to go :)

To blog or not to blog....

I would never have guessed that blogging is so much work. Well it is not like I have gotten around to do any actual posting yet, but I am talking about the setup.

1. How do I make it looks good? What template do I choose? Do I have to make my own?
   Unfortunately I do not posess the greatest artistic ability, in fact my drawings have been likened to those made by those done by baby chimpanzees, the only difference being that you can identify what they have been drawing. So templates seemed like the best option. btemplates.com has one of the most comprehensive set I was able to find and some of them look truely astounding. I was looking for a template that looked clean and elegant and above all did not take 5 hours to load. I liked;
   
   
   • Grungy
   • Black Splat
   • Nitelife
   • and many more...
   
   But with all of them either images did not display properly or they took to long to load or they did not render properly and even with the template there was still a lot of manual setup work to get it going...so in the end I decided to go for a default template which I could replace when and where I found the time(most likely not for a while). Taking the engineering view of function above form.


2. Content, where does it all come from?
   There are tons of tools that will help you publish your content onto blogger and other similar sites. Most notible or clean looking is Windows Live Writer, but there are tons of applications for every platform. A list of a few can be found here. But as with all things there is still real work to be done.


3. Statistics and Services
   I have signed up with Google Analytics which is a free tool that can supply you with some pretty detailed statistics. And finally I added this blog to feedburner here.

That is about all I could manage, I still need to add some widgest, put up reading lists and blogs I enjoy so check in every now and again as things grow...

P.S. If I am missing anything vital/interesting in the setup of the blog, drop me a line or leave a comment. Thanks.