Just a quick update whilst I’m at work. Just a recap of what has happened over the last week. On the Tuesday – a friend at work took me to Australia’s Next Top Model Final at Luna Park. Not much of a fan – it was an excuse to get over the whole of the previous week. The audience just consisted of women – all dressed up – in heels and makeup. I had tissues falling out of my pockets from the flu. Thursday I had lunch with a few mates at Tsukasa on Crown St. Nice little place – the food wasn’t so bad either.
After that – it was more planning for my trip. The cities have now been decided and the time in which we are staying in them. I had been trying to use google calendars to plan the trip – but it got a bit messy – especially since my mate doesnt really see the benefit of doing it that way – so instead – back to using excel spreadsheets.
So the list of cities / towns / islands / destinations are Copenhagen, Athens, Santorini, Myconos, Bari, Naples, Pompeii, Rome, Florence, Cinque Terre, Genoa, Nice, Marsielle, Lyon, Bern, Paris, Brussels, Antwerp, Rotterdam, Den Hagg, Amsterdam, London.
Now that is a LOT of places to get to in 6 weeks. Up until Paris – everything is pretty much booked. I didn’t want to really lock ourselves into anything – but its Summer over there and so I guess its safer that we have somewhere to sleep than at a bus shelter.
I might put up a schedule of where I’ll be and when – since it’ll jog my memory later on so I can at least write about it.
One of the main reasons I want to travel is photography. I guess I’ve spent a long time deciding exactly what I want to do – especially in terms of backups of my photos. The cheapest and most reassuring way is to back up all the cards onto harddrives. Now I am also a bit iffy about using internet cafe computers to do this. I’m worried about viruses killing my drives once I plug them in and also key loggers which can really be created by anyone and easily run on systems which arent very well secured. So I decided to buy an Eee PC. The cheapest one I could find – 4G – at $328. I’ve installed XP on it – which took about 48 hours to copy just the contents off my SD card onto the HD during the installation. But its all installed now and running very well. It’s less than a kilo and fits into my daypack quite easily, and I guess now, I can copy all the photos over and can SEE them appearing on the external HD’s (I’m bringing 2 with me, one for my pack and another in Nick’s pack). It also means that I will be able to more comfortable with logging into sites and blogs without the worry of people tracking my details (it still is possible though).
Also purchased over the weekend, a GorillaPOD – the DSLR zoom one – it holds the extra weight – although I still think I might need to purchase a pistol head or ball head for it – since as well as it grips – if i need to readjust the frame – its a huge nuisance. I believe I’ve got most of my camera gear sorted, and the rest is really just clothes.
Last night – had my first Salsa lesson @ http://www.ilatindance.com/. It was very intimidating in the beginning, but everyone there is really friendly and willing to learn – so its a bit harder to look like a fool (then again, I was concentrating quite hard on getting the steps right). Overall it wasn’t as bad as I imagined it to be. So quite possibly there might be more lessons in the future – I was just amazed at the talent of some of the people there.
Wedding on Saturday – I havn’t had one in a while – so it’ll be something to look forward to.
Long couple weeks ahead, because my boss wants to push for, and so do the users, another version of the app, before I head overseas. Its very possible to get it done – just a bit worried at testing.
Need to pick up the camera a bit more! since it seems theres a lot more writing than usual!
Written by Milton Lai