Picture me, on the couch of a budget hotel, laptop on lap, connected to wifi at $5 per 50 megabytes, surfing the web with images disabled (to save bandwidth), checking my email, paying off my credit cards, checking my bank account balance, cellphone in hand, calling Sprint to cancel my cell phone service, calling my bank and credit card companies to let them know I’m traveling.

I have to admit that paying for internet access by bandwidth is a little frustrating. I don’t want to run out in the middle of doing something important, so I take every available precaution to limit my usage. With Flash blocked and images disabled, I can get a lot done, but I do miss wandering around on Google Maps. And I haven’t had a chance to check up on blogs in over a month.

Stephanie and I found a rare cafe with free wifi where I was able to update all my container ship posts so that when you click on the image you get an enlarged version of the same. Check it out. I also spent some time wrapping my head around latitude and longitude GPS formats, so I went back and cleaned up what I’d posted to be a little more standard (with links to Google Maps in the degree-decimal format). Unfortunately the cafe didn’t have power outlets or public restrooms, so our time there was short-lived.

One minor setback. The satellite modem was held up by customs because I’d listed the value at $1,500. Apparently anything leaving the country with a value over $1,000 needs some additional export control form. I’m not even sure what the thing is “worth” since it was just a rental. Kicking myself right now for not putting down $500. And of course it was Friday night when I found out (it boggles the mind that I even got the notice, mailed to the budget hotel, which I’d entered as my return address, on the last night we were staying here), so I have to wait to do this on Monday. What else do I have to do, right? But it still burned me—especially because I was so good about shipping it back the very day we arrived in New Zealand. C’est la vie!

Update: Called New Zealand Post on Monday, explained the situation, they told me to fax the details to them. So I had to find a place to send a fax, and conveniently found one near where we’re staying. They released it for shipping on Tuesday, so hopefully it won’t arrive too long after I’d planned.

Pulling up anchors is a nice analogy for how it felt while we were on the ship. Even though I “cheated” by bringing a satellite modem with us, it seemed like we were between worlds when we were en route. We had no address, no phone number, no job, no face-to-face contact with anyone besides the crew, nowhere to go besides the ship. So I found it funny that our first order of business after we found a place to stay in Auckland was finding a SIM card for our cellphones.

Let me back up and say that I did some research on international cell phones before we left, learned a little bit about the various GSM bands, and eventually found a sleek GSM quad-band flip phone online for only $40. It was branded AT&T all over, but it was unlocked. I got a gray one, Stephanie got a red one. We threw them into our bag of electronics without so much as turning them on.

Suffice it to say, I was completely ignorant of the world of SIM cards. Does a SIM card come with a phone number? Are all SIM cards the same size? Do they cost money? How do you add minutes/dollars to it? Thankfully we got a little coaching from Jeoffrey on the Cap Cleveland, who has SIM cards for every port (so he can call home). We even bumped into him at the mall, and he accompanied us to the Vodafone store to show us the ropes.

SIM card and cell phone

A pre-paid SIM card does come with a phone number (we now have NZ phone numbers), SIM cards are all the same size, Vodafone’s SIM cards cost $30 NZD, and we add money to the card (aka “topping up”) by buying “top ups”, which have a code that we text to a customer service number (for free) to add to our account. We both started with $20. It appears to cost 89¢/minute to make calls with it, which seems outrageously expensive, but when we call international landlines, it’s a $2 flat fee for up to 60 minutes, which seems outrageously cheap (for all calls over 3 minutes). Go figure. Text messages are 20¢ a pop.

Originally, we figured the phones would be most useful for the two of us to coordinate with each other if we were ever off doing separate things. That may eventually be the case, but so far they’ve been most useful for the types of things they’re useful for at home—calling family, calling local businesses with inquiries, and receiving calls from people who are trying to coordinate with us (while we’re out and about).

We are currently at 15°14’54.77″N 75°15’12.63″W, somewhere between Jamaica and Colombia, en route to Cartagena, Colombia. We should be arriving there tomorrow afternoon. I am posting this (and anything else that begins with GPS coordinates) using a Wideye Sabre 1 BGAN Terminal (or in layman’s terms: a satellite modem).

When we started planning this trip, I had resigned myself to a month without access to the internet. It sounded like a badge of courage when people asked me, “So, does the container ship have wireless?” and I answered: “Nope.” The last time I didn’t have access to the internet for 28 days straight was probably before I had access to the internet at all.

I’ll admit, I am weak. I did some cursory looking into satellite phones, Iridium and such. But they were just blindingly expensive. And I didn’t want to make calls, I just wanted an IP address! Eventually I stumbled upon Inmarsat’s BGAN, which stands for Broadband Global Area Network. Unlike the various satellite phone options, many of which only guaranteed coverage on land, BGAN covers the whole planet, continents and oceans, with the exception of the poles. It was almost too good to be true.

Inmarsat BGAN satellite coverage map

Continue reading…

Given our upcoming trip, I wanted to get the word out to my extended family (parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and even some close second-cousins) that Stephanie and I would no longer be living at our current address. Instead they could reach us via email or follow along on our blogs.

I liked the idea of doing it by postcard—something memorable that they could put on the fridge—but I assumed there probably weren’t many container ship postcards to choose from out there. Which meant only one thing: I’d have to make my own.

I’d recently stumbled upon Postful, a neat web-to-mail service that generates real physical mail and postcards from the web (for a nominal fee plus postage, of course). I was eager to have a reason to try out the service, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity. They don’t do international postcards (yet), so this test was limited to my US-based family.

For the message on the back, I figured I’d just embellish my Big Adventure post with a few contact details and then be off to the races. However, once I’d crafted the perfect message, I got the following inscrutable error message: field text will overflow. Translation: too much text to fit on the back of a postcard. Ok… Unfortunately there was no indication of what a reasonable amount of text would be, or where the text was getting cut off. I made at least a dozen revisions, trimming a phrase here, a sentence there, and each time, the same error. It was a little frustrating.

Eventually I pared the message down to a mere three sentences plus contact info, and the text was accepted—115 words using 639 characters—at long last with a nicely rendered version of the back of the postcard. Now that I knew what I had to work with, I was able to further tweak the text to use the space more effectively.

My Grandmother might be confused by the concept of “Snail” mail

The final step was to enter or upload addresses. They offered a convenient CSV-upload option, which gave me a reason to get everyone’s contact info in one place. I uploaded the file, and voila, 16 households were about to get my “junk” mail (all for only $9.44). I also had one sent to myself just to see how long it took, and what the quality was like.

I placed my order on August 1, and it arrived in San Francisco roughly a week later, on August 10. The print quality was good, but the paper wasn’t exactly postcard-stock. It was lower-gloss and a bit thinner than your typical tourist fare. But still, it did the job, and looks mighty fine on our fridge (while we still have one).

Our container ship postcard

Recently my 4 year-old cellphone broke in half. Thus I was faced with two choices:

1. start a new two-year contract, costing more per month than my current plan, to get a basic, albeit heavily-rebated cellphone
2. buy the cellphone for its full MSRP of around $160

I kind of think of these as “taxes”. Carrier lock-in on one hand, or price-gouging on the other. Both of which I wanted to avoid. The guy at the Sprint store suggested that I check around Craigslist and eBay for someone selling their old phone.

Sure enough, someone on eBay was selling a Samsung A840 for $10 + $7 shipping. It was used, yes, and there’s always a risk that someone is selling stolen phones (though I’m guessing that’s more a problem with iPhones and Blackberries), but the seller, Legacy Wireless, seemed reputable. So for a mere $17, I got a new phone (well, new to me) without having to start a new contract.

At the San Francisco WordCamp today I got to see Richard Stallman give his free software talk and then perform his crowd-pleasing St. IGNUcius bit. I don’t usually do this, but afterwards I stuck around so I could get my picture taken with him.

Source: iFixit.com: iPad Teardown

I found this photo to be unexpectedly beautiful. Without any context, it seems to be an art piece, a reaction against consumerism, the curtains pulled back on the Wizard of Oz. It’s none of the above intentionally, and yet the more I thought about it, the more I realized how nicely it encapsulates several themes in tension.

First is the irony that someone, somewhere (presumably on the other side of the world) painstakingly put together this piece of groundbreaking technology, only so that someone, somewhere on this side of the world could take it apart.

Second, for a device heralded as the second-coming of top-down/canned/mainstream media, to see its “unraveling” exhibited on a niche site that exists solely to take hardware apart and show you what’s inside, is something that’s hard to imagine without the decentralized, user-generated, distributed nature of the web.

Third, it’s amusing how the act of disassembling something powerful (almost magical), in a way emasculates it, knocking it from a pedestal its creator works so hard to preserve.

I’m not embarrassed to say that these are the vi commands that I’ve been getting by on forever. In the order that I learned them. Thus they are probably a fair representation of the bare minimum one needs to know to survive in the wild and woolly world of vi.

Anyway, I just learned three more at work this week.

That should hold me for what, another 10 years?

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