1. Skype, Skype, Skype. If you are going international, get an account and prepay for some phone time. Then buy a portable headset and microphone. Whether you bring a laptop with you or go to Internet cafes, Skype will allow you to make calls for incredibly low rates anywhere you can get an internet connection. For me right now, my cell phone costs 50x what Skype does per minute to call back to the USA.
2. Manage servers? Sign up with Pingdom for active monitoring. You can then rest assured that as long as you aren’t getting emails or SMS messages, your servers are working fine. This is a good idea even if you aren’t traveling, but since you might be checking your voicemail less (or never) if you are on the go, moving more communication to email can be very helpful. This of course requires you to still check email but you might be already planing on doing this anyway.
3. A Nintendo DS can help you pass time on long flights and train rides. But to carry less stuff, get a mod card and put all your games on one cartridge. Only games you already legally own of course (wink wink).
4. On a budget and/or want to meet more people? I recommend exploring the options of couch surfing and staying at youth hostels. In either situation you might end up scoring free wifi as a great bonus.
5. Use online apps to help plan your trip and save money. A great list of the 25 best is located at this geek travel guide

Have a safe and happy trip!

It’s 2008. We are all now spewing information about ourselves in every which way. This is great for sharing our lives online and using the internet as a social medium. The only problem with this is that this system begins to break down more with each additional service that you use. And you have to use multiple services, since you have different friends and audiences on each. You have no choice in the matter. What’s worse, they don’t always often almost-ever play well together. It’s like they don’t even care about you.

Even when there are good tools for brining in content from different services those tools aren’t yet perfect. And the same could be said for tools helping you publish content as well. Things are improving in this area but the lack of features in the tools are only half of the problem.

To illustrate the problem let’s pick 3 services at random which have an overlapping feature. I’ll go with three really popular ones: Facebook, MySpace and Flickr. You probably have accounts on 2 or 3 of these right now as you’re reading this. And if you use them at all, you probably post pictures to them. All three of them let you tag these pictures with additional information like who’s in the picture. When you have new pictures you want to share online, you now have to upload them to all 3 services by individually logging into each service and repeating the process 3 times in a row. What a pain.

That’s totally completely broken and ass-backwards from how things should work. The services should get your pictures from you. You should be able to say “Hey Facebook, here are my pictures, add them to ones you are displaying”. And then if your audience is similar you could then say “Hey MySpace, look in the same place”. Now you update your pictures in only that one place — which is hopefully a place you own since they are YOUR pictures. And it shouldn’t just be pictures, it should be your status updates, you’re shared links, and everything you are publishing online to the same or similar audiences. And believe me, the stuff you publish online is going to increase as the barriers to entry continue to lower. Can someone say YouTube?

In part 2 of this series we will talk about current social networks and why some are full of fail.

Check out the article and then check out the tags.

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/07/146201&from=rss

So where am I going with all this you ask. Remember when you where a kid and years seemed to go a lot slower? Well, a new year in your life was a much larger percentage of your total conscious existence. From age 4 to age 5 (probably right around your earlier memories that you can recall) you experienced a total of 25% more lifespan. Now, one more year in your life results in a much smaller additional percentage. Your perception of time is completely based on this.

I think the clock begins to swing the opposite way as we approach death. As you go down to your last seconds of life, and then milliseconds and microseconds, your perception of time will spike to infinity like the limits we learned about in Calculus. You won’t be existing as part of the world we live in and understand now, because you step off that bus and approach infinity, but it doesn’t end.

It just stretches, forever.

(apologies to American Beauty)