$189 is the cost of the best all-around adventure pack on the market right now.
I got mine yesterday from Mike Kloser himself. He packed it for me. Adjusted it for me. … And then made me chase him around the mountains of north Idaho for 12hrs continuous to test it.
The pack did great. I’m a wee bit exhausted.
Mike was testing 40 miles of the 400 mile Expedition Idaho Race coming up in a couple of weeks. I tagged along.
There are too many features to list. Watch the video on the site if you might be interested in getting one for yourself.
Hipmunk has by far the best interface for seeing what flights are available. Sadly, however, I’m finding the actual results worse and worse over the past few months. The best deals are not showing up.
Only a couple of hours free in Munich, I went straight to the Deutches, my first visit since 1976.
The Deutsches Museum (German Museum) in Munich, Germany, is the world’s largest museum of technology and science, with approximately 1.5 million visitors per year and about 28,000 exhibited objects from 50 fields of science and technology. …
Astronomy, mapping, weights & measures, musical instruments. I loved the full size wooden tower – 50m high – an amazing technological advance in prehistory.
Certainly the evolution of technology: phone, typewriters, computers … is fascinating. (They had neither an Apple 1 nor Apple 2 in the collection, an unforgivable oversight.)
The history of photography included pictures from 1850 of excellent quality. Digital photography was introduced in 1982, but was not affordable until 1996.
The history of agriculture fascinates me too. How did early man figure out how to turn grass into maize?
A full size replica of the Cave of Altamira in Spain surprised me. It’s one of the two best sites ever discovered for drawings and polychrome rock paintings of wild mammals.
I don’t begrudge giving Steve Jobs a big chunk of my limited income. But why can’t Apple design decent wireless headphones?
Yeesh.
I may be driven to try these – Outdoor Technology Bluetooth Tags ($70 – $80)
Making Bluetooth headsets “cool” is the mission of Outdoor Technology, a southern California-based active sports and lifestyle accessories maker. To this end, they have unveiled OT Tags, their stereo Bluetooth headsets which function like conventional one-ear “business” headsets but look like and are music headphones in the earbud style — mating the style of wired headphones to the convenience of wireless. …
Ultra-modern airport in Dublin is a superb … shopping mall. I spent 20 minutes walking through shops carrying near identical over-priced product just to get to my departure gate. Do many travelers make impulse buys out of boredom?
I assume they do.
By contrast, the Geneva airport needed a serious renovation … in 1995. How can one of the richest cities in the world have such a crappy airport?
For the first time ever in an airport, I saw a fellow going from rubbish bin-to-bin collecting recyclables. Do homeless people (aside from me) live there?
… But I experienced a magical incident in the Geneva airport. Confused hovering over a ticket machine, trying to navigate my way by train to the centre of town, an elderly German gentleman appeared my shoulder. He quickly got a ticket (from another machine) and delivered me to the departing train. … With specific instructions on how to get to the Hostel.
By the time I’d lifted my suitcase on board, he was gone.
I write from City Hostel Geneva, one of most enjoyable in years. UPDATE: By the end of my 2-day stay hostel staff had bungled my reservation, the washing machine flooded and the promised long term luggage storage turned out to be a myth.
Geneva is ranked as the fourth most expensive city in the world, though. I find it surprisingly run down and disorganized. It’s not my 4th favourite city in the world.
I’m organizing to travel to Corsica for hiking next.
Internet service providers are normally sneaky, or downright evil. One of the most hated industries.
But SHAW in Canada is garnering a wee bit of praise in the Tech community for this:
“We’ve created a non-cap kind of regime. If you’re always going over, we’re going to ask you to go into a package that really fits you.”
The immediate result is that the download limits on existing plans will at least double, so that high speed jumps to 125 gigabytes from 60 and Extreme to 250 gigabytes from 100 at the current price.
The company will also offer a number of new plans that provide choice in download and upload speeds, as well as increased data limits, including two unlimited options.
Those will become available next month, with new additions rolling out over the next 16 months as the analogue to digital TV upgrade happens and capacity is created.
“It should provide sufficient choice for our customer” …
Those packages are still way over-priced. But it’s the right direction.
The BIGGER issue is whether or not SHAW and the other Canadian oligopoly carriers will be able to convince the new FREE ENTERPRISE Conservative government to stiffle competition …
Newt is the kind of two faced, lying slimeball who formerly thrived in the GOP. But he seems to have lost a step or two. He sounded befuddled on the Hannity show Tuesday. Romney and Newt are dead in the water on Health Care, in any case.
I’d love Sarah Palin to get it. That would be hilarious.
As of now, I’d vote for these candidates, in this order:
Pawlenty is new to me. But I found him quite winning on the radio. He speaks well. The hard right don’t like him. That’s a good sign.
Mitch Daniels won’t even reply to Hannity’s request for an interview. Now that’s a Republican Maverick.
The USA needs a massive economic correction. Obama is not going to do it. Ron Paul would. Daniels or Pollenty might.
Some seem to think that Charlie Crist would be the second coming of Reagan. I don’t know him. But he sounded on Hannity as untrustworthy as Romney. Stay out, Charlie.
Rick Santorum was worst of the interviews I heard, a tongue twisted stumble bum.
… By the way, I’ve always assumed that Sean Hannity (rhymes with Insanity) was another Big Fat Idiot clone. But he’s OK. Dogmatic, one-eyed, but consistent, at least.
Rush and his ilk get their (encrypted) talking points each morning from the Fox News / Republican / Military / Industrial HQ, then drone those ad nauseous for the day. It’s boring.
… a private company that provides global Wi-Fi services at more than 125,000 325,000 Boingo hotspots worldwide – including hundreds of airports, thousands of hotels, and tens of thousand cafes and coffee shops. …
Though signup is seamless, canceling the service requires a call into customer services. …
It works. But there are some deceptive billing practices. At times you THINK you are logging into your Boingo account, but in reality it’s some ‘premium’ partner. … At the end of the month you find you’ve been billed extra. Without warning.
UPDATE:
Baochi from Boingo responded instantly to this post. (They really do have superb customer support.)
Due to complaints like mine, Boingo has improved the notification that you are going to get DINGED for an extra (unknown) amount. It now looks like this:
The premium locations that incur additional charges are available by default. … Perhaps they should be OFF by default, and only turned on by two or three clicks.
Certainly every month Baochi gets complaints from customers charged more than their expected monthly total. Most cannot recall clicking on any premium locations. They were in a rush, and didn’t pay attention to that text.
If you travel, you could get good value. … On the other hand, since Starbucks went free, I’ve not needed a paid subscription. And don’t plan to get one in future. Starbucks has a strong WiFi signal 99% of the time. Many Boingo hotspots cannot stream a YouTube video.
However, Boingo’s now released a brilliant FREE service that I recommend for everyone.
A FREE app that helps you find and locate FREE and Boingo hotspots at thousands of locations worldwide.
Every time you open up your computer in a new location, the app will tell you if there’s free Wi-Fi available.
Brilliant.
After testing it the past couple of weeks in California and Nevada, I’m getting about 70% false positives. The app says there is free WIFi … but that’s not true. I’ve deleted the app on my laptop.
__________________________
For example, in the case of Starbucks (log-in required) it gets it wrong.
screen grab
I have to find the Starbucks log-in page. And log-in, as usual.
I love libraries. And spend a lot of time in them, everywhere I travel.
But as government monopolies, most are slow to innovate. In all you can spot outdated technologies and nonsensical policies.
The painfully slow introduction of digital media is the most conspicuous example. Librarians like to pretend they offer digital video and books … but to actually access those files can be a nightmare.
Libraries will be somewhat defunct, you see, once digital media is ubiquitous.
I’m pleasantly surprised to report that Signal Hill Library in Calgary, recently re-opened after renovations, has been vastly improved. It’s bright, welcoming and the electronic media access has been upgraded considerably.
Rick McCharles 