Technology Platform for the trip

I really don't want to bring a laptop with us. A Sony Vaio is about as much weight as I'd be prepared to carry around with me, but besides being outside the budget, it's also not covered by the travel insurance (max item value 500 Euros). But I do want some computing power (well, connectivity power really) for a number of reasons.

1. To update this blog
2. To stay in touch with folks back home without paying a king's ransom (*)
3. To chronicle (offline) thoughts and experiences during the trip

The solution has finally begun to form in my mind: a combination of Nokia's newest Internet Tablet (N800) and a foldable keyboard (there's no way we're going to use anything buy a 'real' keyboard to type in the thousands of words that 8 months travel will inspire). Thanks to Conor for his back channel advice on the N770 versus the N800.

I've already picked up the very smart Freedom Universal Keyboard, which is a lovely piece of kit and fits a proper keyboard into a space about 1.3 time the size of my wallet. Payday is Friday - I feel the arrival of the N800 may follow shortly afterwards.

(*) As far as normal comms are concerned, when there isn't a wifi network within a Llama's spit, I'm studying movements on Roam4Free.

I'm very tempted to follow up the next month with this, but I think I may exceed my wife's Ryanair-like geek baggage allowance.

Hey Mister Hu , What did I do?

Dunno - I think I got myself on the wrong side of the Great Firewall of China. According to Google Analytics I don't have any Chinese readership (although to be fair, I don't have much of a readership any which way you look at it). And my friend in Chengdu couldn't access this blog. My blog on learning Chinese does however, so it's not some kind of blanket Blogspot firewalling. Maybe my excerpts from a chapter of Collapse did the trick. Hey - if you're reading this from the PRC - let me know!

[Addendum: Paranoid. Severely Paranoid. I checked Google Analytics (properly this time) and I do have a Chinese readership after all. Chengdu and Shanghai both appeared on my map.]

Chengdu, Part Two

Waking up from the Summer months, where not a whole lot of thought or energy has been put into planning...

Just before Skype's recent outage, I noticed one of my contacts had "In Chengdu, China" as his Skype message. I fired him off a note, assuming he was on holidays, looking for any advice or tips he had. I wasn't expecting the reply I got, when Skype came back to life.

I met Erik Wiersma in 2006 when both he and I were presenting at SpringOne in Antwerp. As it happens we were presenting on similar topics so we got together beforehand to make sure we weren't overlapping too much. Eric was working for a company called jTeam in Amsterdam - and as far as I knew he was still there. Not so. Eric has now moved to Chengdu, the main city of the Sichuan province (though only a second-tier city in terms of population with a mere 11 million souls!!) and has set up his own software development outsourcing company. The company uses many of the techniques that have been used here in Europe and on the North American continent so successfully over the past few years: Agile methodology and lightweight frameworks, including the Spring Framework. He chose Chengdu because, amongst other things, the pay scales are 1/3 of those on the Chinese East Coast (but also because of an abundance of programmers - Chengdu was where the Ministry of Defense was situated in the 1960's and there are lots of IT universities as a result). I found the pay-scale difference quite amazing. I wonder whether it has always been this high, or if it is a result of East Coast wage inflation.

In any case, Erik has very generously offered to help us arrange stuff on the Chinese side, and to show us around Chengdu as well. He has also confirmed that the hostel we want to stay in is good and central. This kind of help is really invaluable and it wouldn't have happened without systems like Skype or the kind of virtual networking that is part and parcel of my profession.

Erik couldn't load this blog yesterday and suggested that it might be firewalled. If anyone is reading this from the PRC, I'd be obliged if you could comment and let me know. I'll check out Analytics as well.

A taste of things to come

We all have our ways of dealing with the more tiring aspects of travel. This is how Nina and Sara deal with it. Sara (foreground), when she is older, will be the owner of a great many hat boxes, and will need a veritable army of lackeys to help her move around. Nina on the other hand will be able to go anywhere, for as long as it takes, as long as she has enough books to get her through the experience.

This picture was taken last night on the last part of a surprisingly long trip from Cork to Cagliari to spend the Summer months absorbing the other half of their cultural inheritance.
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In six short months they'll be heading off on their biggest adventure yet, there'll be no shortage of books to bring along (in sharp contrast to the number of hatboxes and lackeys) so Nina already has the edge.

Blimey. We can go anywhere.

I finally got round to doing a bit more research on our visa requirements for the trip. I was getting ready to get wrapped up in documents and red tape, with different hoops to jump through for each border. But I was amazed. The only countries that we need a visa for are the first two on our journey: China and Australia. And while the Chinese visa will require us to travel to Dublin, we can apply for an electronic one, online, for Oz. Nice one! I think if we had tried this 20 years ago, the Irish passport holders amongst us would not have found this so easy.

New Zealand, Fiji, Chile, Bolivia, Peru and Argentina (actually - I'm still waiting to hear back from them) fling their doors open for the Irish and the Italians. Yaaaaay!

(Update: the Argentine Embassy has confirmed that for 90 days or less there's no visa requirement for any of us.)

New Zealand: Slight change of plan

As has happened for other destinations, when we look a bit closer and get down to booking flights, we swap things around. This weekend we booked the Australia-to-New Zealand leg of the tickets, and instead of flying into the North Island as originally planned, we are flying into Christchurch on the South Island. We've heard that the South Island is where it's all at, and that's where we'll get most of the traveling done before the winter sets in. Flights to and from Fiji afterwards will be from Auckland, so we really need to finish up there, rather than start there.

The question now is whether we base ourselves in Christchurch for the month, or try to find somewhere in Queenstown. Decisions ,decisions.

When we move to the North Island, we'll probably be basing ourselves in Wellington.

Review of Chinesepod

A fun and effective method of learning Chinese (oh - and Spanish!)

Review of Chinesepod

Rated as 5/5 on May 18 2007 by Brendan Lawlor

I came across this website early on in my (now 18 month old) efforts to learn Chinese. These guys are perfecting the practice of teaching language online, and having established themselves as the leaders in the business, they've started to use the same technology and techniques to teach Spanish (through the parent company Praxis Language).

I used the free service for the first 6 months - which allows access to their daily lesson podcasts. The next subscriber (US$60 per year) level adds PDFs and online dialog transcripts. I used this for another 8 months or so before finally moving to the premium subscription (US$150 for six months). At this level, you get to use all the great features and toys that come with the site - build up your own vocabulary and test yourself on it, listen to expansions of the dialog that build organically on the grammar and vocabulary that, do tests at the end of each lesson. You can set up your own schedule of lessons, and create an RSS feed of those lessons that iTunes or Google Reader can consume. And other new features are on the way all the time.

There is one further level which I will be trying out over the Summer, which involves daily 10 minute conversations (phone or Skype) with dedicated teachers based in the Chinesepod Shanghai 'factory'.

The teaching techniques used by Chinesepod are well thought out and allow students to concentrate on the topics and techniques that are right for them. The default philosophy of the group is grammar-light, but for grammar nerds like me, their is a grammar section on the way.

This is how online teaching should be done - an excellent combination of pedagogy and web engineering, that I can recommend wholeheartedly to anyone wishing to study Chinese or Spanish on their own terms. Two weeks of free premium membership are given to all new users - no strings attached - so it couldn't be easier to find out for yourself whether or not I'm telling the truth.

LouderVoice Review Tags: chinese, education, language, web 2.0

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