Little Black Guidebook

Does your Valentine love to travel? Or, do you need an excuse to treat yourself? Here are some treats I love in price order.

Chocolate Walk – We tried to take the famous Paris Chocolate Walk, but our stupid Italian train conductor decided to take a 3 hr coffee break and we missed it. If you happen to be taking the ultimate romantic trip to Paris this Valentines you could sign up for the real thing or invent your own.

Take your sweetie on an adventure of your own, sampling chocolates from the local shops and seeing a little more of your home-town. In Fairbanks, Alaska we have a tiny little downtown, but even that has a smattering of coffee shops and a little chocolate shop called the Fudge Pot.

Lush Travel Shampoo – I wish I had enough of this to use all year round, it makes my hair smell wonderful and takes the place of both shampoo and conditioner liquids when I travel. (Amazon or Lush $9)

This jersey cardigan is just weighty enough to feel like its wrapping me up cozily on a flight. I have one in black which I love as an airplane cover-up, night-time wrap, and scrunchable cardigan which never wrinkles. (Anthropologie $98)

Wanting to capture memories together screams: “I Love You.” Loud and Clear. I used to think that having my phone be my camera, video camera, music player PDA, etc. etc. etc. was great until I realized that once its battery goes dead I can’t do anything. Now I’m looking for small gadgets that do things well. I’m looking at this Flip HD camera for low-tech, high quality video capture of our upcoming trips together. This one captures 120 minutes of HD goodness at a time and dumps onto any device with a USB port. (Amazon $193.94)

I recently lost my iPod Video on a flight back from Mexico. After being mad at myself for a couple days for my carelessness I began to get excited because this would be my excuse to finally get an iPod Touch. I love my Nokia N95 phone, but I feel a little pang sometimes when I see an iPhone. Of course their battery life and general international pain-in-the-***ness keeps me from getting one, but I’ve been wanting to get an iPod touch and start using some of the nice apps and touch-screen goodness for awhile. Of course Alaska Airlines had to go and crush my dream by finding my iPod in my seat pocket and next day airing it to me. I didn’t even report it missing! That darn airline, they are too nice to their customers. Oh well. I’ll just have to wait. And I was so happy to read this post on iPhone/iPod Touch travel apps. *sigh* The list should also include the Tripit app, which as an avid Tripit user I’m dying to use.

I had a friend ask me to type up these instructions for staying in touch on the cheap for their boyfriend who is deploying to Iraq this week with no laptop, but just an iPhone. Basically it is the method I use for most of my international travel.  I don’t have an iPhone, but this method works for any unlocked wi-fi enabled phone. Hopefully someone else will find this useful. I’ll have to post a follow-up after they have been using this method for awhile.

For US to Iraq -
Method 1. Him computer, you computer
Simple enough. For folks back home to reach him in Iraq, they need to download and install Skype software and you can talk to each other as long as you both have an Internet connection and a computer with Skype installed. This allows him to cancel his cell-phone plan (early cancellation fees waived for military) and save that cost while he’s away.

Method 2. Him cell phone, you computer/cell phone with Skype installed
We want this to work without him needing a computer to receive calls.  The first thing he will need is an unlocked mobile phone. In the United States, some carriers will unlock your phone if you ask. I’m not sure if AT&T will unlock the iPhone, but there are ways to jailbreak it yourself. Whenever he arrives in Iraq he can buy a local SIM card (the tiny, interchangeable chip inside the phone that actually lets you connect to a particular carrier; they’re sold at mobile phone stores and kiosks for $2 to $25, depending on the country) and make local phone calls and send text messages without paying exorbitant international roaming fees. The best type of SIM card to get is the kind that allows unlimited incoming calls.

Every SIM card has its own local number associated with it. Fortunately Skype also lets you call out to mobile phones and land lines (with SkypeOut) so you can call him with SkypeOut and it will ring on his Iraq # on his iPhone. Iraq is inexpensive to call this way, but not free like the first method (calling computer to computer). It costs $ 0.372/minute from a US computer or a US cell phone with Skype installed on it to call an Iraq cell phone.

So, here’s how a call to him would work:

You dial his Iraq # using Skype, and it rings on his iPhone at his Iraqi cellphone number.

Cost to you: $0.372/minute. Cost to him: zero.

This system lets anyone with Skype, reach him, at a minimal cost to him (just the cost of the SIM card assuming he gets one with unlimited incoming calls). All he needs to receive a call is a cell phone signal.

Cost to you: zero, cost

Method 3. Him cell phone with Iraq SIM card or computer with Skype, you any US cell phone or landline
We also want this to work without you needing a computer as well so if you’re having that really bad day and need to give him a ring (assuming the 12 hour time difference and his military duties don’t have his phone turned off), you can. To do this he needs to purchase a SkypeIn number that has a U.S. area code so his friends and family can use normal phones to call him using a local number to reach his computer. ($60 a year or $18 for three months) He can also forward his American cell phone number to the new SkypeIn number by calling AT&T before he goes and giving them the new SkypeIn number. He can then go online and set the Skype software’s preferences to forward the new SkypeIn number to the new Iraq # associated with the new SIM card he buys in Iraq.

SkypeIn has a relatively low fee. ($60 a year or $18 for three months)

So, here’s how a call to him would work:

You dial his regular American cell phone number, which forwards to his SkypeIn number, which, in turn, forwards (via SkypeOut) to his Iraqi cellphone number.

Cost to you: zero. Cost to him: $0.372 miniute.This system lets anyone, anywhere, reach him, at a small cost to him. All he needs to receive a call is a cell phone signal.

Of course if this were another country than Iraq you would be paying like $0.021/minute to France for instance and this whole method becomes a lot cheaper and more attractive than the alternative (phone cards at pay phones).

Calling from Iraq to the US -
If he wants to call home, he’ll use a slightly different and far simpler system. Tell him to download Skype for the iPhone while in the states (and data is cheap), be in range of a wi-fi signal and make SkypeOut calls to anyone he wants to for $0.021/minute, or for free if the person is online and logged into skype.

I like to think of myself as a very put together person, especially when traveling. But when I have a lot of details to take care of, and don’t want a bunch of printed out confirmation codes weighing down my luggage, I’m left thinking, “There has to be a better way.” I usually create my own little black book out of a Moleskine notebook for long trips, creating my own little guidebook and leaving the thick Lonely Planet and Fodors behind. This isn’t usually worth doing on little weekend trips though so when I stumbled upon the website TripIt I though it might be a useful application for a frequent traveler.

It’s dead simple to use and it keeps you organized – all you have to do is forward confirmation emails to them when you purchase airline tickets, hotel reservations, car rentals, etc. Tripit pulls the relevant information out of the emails and builds an organized itinerary for you. You can send emails in any order, for multiple trips, whatever. It just figures everything out and organizes it.

I have used it since  the 1st of the year and its already saved my bacon once. I accidentally booked a hotel room for the day of my meeting rather than the night before. When I looked at my itinerary, it was organized chronologically so I saw, flight arrival Friday night, meeting and check-in at hotel followed my flight home on Saturday, then arrival home followed by check-out of hotel on Sunday. Something was off. I shifted the hotel reservation to the night before the meeting and everything was fixed. Yeah, it would have been no problem to do this at the hotel after they could not find my reservation for the night and I could have talked my way out of any change fees or price increases, but it would have added stress. I give Tripit a big thumbs up for ease of use and practicality. I don’t use it for the social networking features as much. I did find it interesting that a friend and I would both be in the Seattle airport at the same time and could stop and grab coffee. This is something I never would have figured out without Tripit, but a really minor feature.

You don’t even have to register to start using it. Just take any travel email and forward it to plans@tripit.com. Within seconds you’ll get a confirmation email back.

I recently had the unique opportunity to migrate from Blogger to Wordpress easily with some help from someone who knows how to do these things. It was a chance to edit the blog as I used to have a lot of posts about preparing for law school and other things that aren’t part of my life at the moment. I’ll still leave my old blog up at blogger, so those people who find that info useful can still access it. The process of migrating from Blogger to GoDaddy hosted Wordpress was a tad confusing so I’m posting this to help anyone else who may be considering it.

1. Get a domain & hosting – there are a full set of instructions on becomeablogger.com as an easy set of 10 free videos.
2. Install Wordpress – There has been a lot written on how to do this so I won’t go into this here. Either google how to do this, follow the becomeablogger.com videos or have somebody do it for you. For me, the main barrier that prevented me from doing this a long time ago was this intimidating step. Serendipity struck when I met Johnny B. Truant who setup wordpress, installed my plugins and theme and everything for me FOR FREE. His free promotion is now over, and he’s now charging a very reasonable $39 for this. The guide I linked to above has instructions on how to do this, but it is so much easier to farm this out. Then you just login and it works like blogger with a dashboard and everything ready to go. Less than an hour of your time and its all set up and beautiful. He has a separate website for his blog setup service.
3. Move over your posts and comments – This is the perfect time for me to start over so I’ll be editing out a lot of my old content. I’ll leave it live on the old blogger space. There is something to be said for starting over, but I have some items that I want to keep. To actually do this just go to www.yourblog.com/wp-admin/tools.php then Import. Select Blogger from the list and enter your login information. Hit the magic info and it brings over all your posts and comments. I did manage to delete 4 posts that I didn’t mean to when editing through the old ones to refocus the content.
4. Fix all your internal links. If somebody clicks on your old website post links you want them to go to the post located on your new website. To do this: Login to Blogger. Go to Settings. Select Publishing. Click the top link, “Custom domain.” They will try to sell you registration here so you have to go to Advanced Settings. Save your new address. Now all your links will transfer automatically to your own domain, but you’ll need one more step to transfer your blog home page over. Make sure you do this AFTER you transfer all your posts.
5. Transfer your Google hits by redirecting direct visitors. Login to Blogger. Go to Layout. Go to Edit HTML. Place the following code anywhere after <head>: <meta content=’0; url=http://YOURNEWURL.com/’ http-equiv=’refresh’/> This sends visitors to your blog homepage directly to your new address.
6. Transfer your subscribers/feed – Sign up for a FeedBurner account. Set up a feedburner feed for your new blog. Login to Blogger. Go to Settings. Go to Site Feed. In the Post Feed Redirect URL box, enter your new FeedBurner address.

Total cost $80 for a year of hosting an domain registration plus $39 if you have Johnny set you up (highly recommended). Total time spent, including editing out old posts 4 hours. Minimum amount of time needed to get up and running, 1 hour.

We have a planned tech-refresh cycle at our house. Rather than impulsively buying the iPod, digital camera, cell-phone, or computer that we crave as we used to do, we plan these purchases and buy them at specific intervals based on how far technology has advanced and how well our current tech meets our needs. We used to buy a new computer every time the game that we just bought no longer met the minimum requirements for memory/hard drive space etc.. Now we buy a more expensive computer, but keep it longer, usually 3-4 years. My laptop was on its last legs after 4 years and was getting so frustrating to use that I basically didn’t use it except to download photos off of my digital camera. My blogging slowed/stopped, I lost touch with friends, hadn’t updated Facebook in months, and basically had to buy a new one.

I travel 150,000 miles a year and hate to lug my 7+ pounds of current laptop, not including chargers or other accessories. Most of my flights are over 3 hours in length so battery life is important and only 2-3 of them are international trips so the seats don’t usually have chargers. Like the engineer that I am I tried to quantify my laptop buying decision to help my naturally indecisive nature. I wrote down all of the characteristics that were important to me, ranked how important they were on a scale of 1-5, then ranked how well each option met that characteristic and multiplied the two then added up the total points. It went something like this:

Some of the Characteristics:
Light Weight (worth 4 points)
Cost (worth 2 points)
Long Battery Life (worth 5 points)
Reverse compatible with Windows XP (worth 5 points)

Macbook = 5*4+2*2+5*5+4*5=69 points
Dell XPS = 4*4+4*2+3*5+3*5=54 points

I was totally floored when I ranked all of the options and ended up having the 13.3″ Macbook come out on top. I resisted, I went and looked at my numbers to see if I could tweak it and get the XPS Dell that I thought I wanted to come out on top, but then I stopped and realized that I was defeating the purpose of the ranking system in the first place, to take emotion out of the decision. So I took the plunge and am now the owner of a 13.3″ Macbook. Ack, “what have I done?” was the sensation as soon as I hit the final purchase button.

What will my geek/nerd/tech guy friends think?

That just cost me how much?

Oh my God, my laptop has a glowing Apple on it! Can I find a sticker thick enough to cover that?

And once the laptop arrived I continued having questions:

How the heck do I right-click?

Where is the Home button? Or the End button for that matter?

How in the world do you get the cd to eject? Uninstall something? (Drag to trashcan!)

After a week, the Mac still didn’t have a name. I definitely decided that she was a SHE and not a he like Fred, Fred Jr. Freddie and Felix before her. I hated not having a native copy of Microsoft Office installed and didn’t understand gestures.

Then, after that first week, things began to click. I discovered how to right-click, how to Home, End, uninstall, eject, and a bunch other things. I discovered how everything was designed to go so well together and what a difference that can make. And, as you’ve probably noticed, I’m blogging again.