My alternative laptop

There it is - my alternative laptop. The Nokia N800 Internet Tablet, with a foldable Freedom Universal bluetooth keyboard (folds to half it's length). I've added a pen to give an idea of scale (it's a one-meter long pen, though - naaah, just kidding).

I spent an entire weekend trying to follow instructions on how to install the driver for the keyboard, but they are now working nicely together.

The screen has a terrific resolution which makes a big difference in terms of usability. There are dedicated buttons to toggle in and out of fullscreen mode, and to zoom in and out as well. The habit of reaching for a mouse is unlearned quickly thanks to the combination of the fullsize keyboard (with important shortcuts) and the touch screen. There is also a choice of two styles of on-screen keyboard: my favourite is the larger of the two - it takes up nearly all the screen and allows you to thumb the keys easily, or even quasi-touch type.

The built-in browser is Opera, but it's possible to replace the rendering engine with a Mozilla one. I've done this, and now I can use Ajax-based websites very easily, including Google Documents - an important part of out planned travel software solution. And of course it works well for blogging too. The next blog entry I write here will be from the N800.

As for memory, I plan to spend some money on MicroSDs. My camera takes Memorystick Pro Duo and the N800 takes SD. So the most convenient way of transferring from one to the other (for the purpose of viewing, blogging, or uploading to Google Pictures) is to transfer MicroSD cards from one to the other by means of MicroSD-to-SD and MicroSD-to-ProDuo converters. I guess it beats hauling a hard disk around with me. I'll have to keep an eye out for a convenient microSD container to hold a large number of them together. They seem particularly fragile and easy to lose.

It's not a laptop, and there's no point in pretending otherwise. It'll seem slow and hard to read compared to the normal laptop experience. But it comes in at less that 500 euros including the keyboard, can (and will!) be carried in a jacket pocket, and also runs skype. An excellent travel communication and journaling kit, all in all.

Speaking of communication, I've just bought a SIM from a new Irish service called MaxRoam which will keep the phone bill way down both for ourselves and anyone who wants to contact us. I'll blog on this later this week.

What could possibly go wrong?

Plenty...Go straight to Katie White's entry on this Freakonomics blog entry.

But what the hell. We can deal with it. Right?

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.)