6 posts tagged “travel”
so busy as of late that i haven't kept up with posting or reading. i am swamped, officially, although it is paying off.
New York Magazine presents: What if 9/11 never happened? Not in the conspiracy sense, but in the history can go a million different ways sense. [via]
The US ranks among the lowest in the world in acceptance of evolution. Next you'll tell me that dinosaurs were real.
Fifteen of the most important websites of ALL TIME! I could quibble with some of this (like the implication that napster's current 500,000 paying subscribers have anything to do with its all-time relevance, or friendsreunited, which can't be that important since i've never heard of it), but it's a pretty solid list of the pretty solidly obvious. But man oh man, they're missing a huge one. If they only knew. [via]
Having worked in customer service (over email and a one-time phone call that ended with the other guy saying, "this game is the only fun i have in my life. please fix it"), I can sympathize with these guys. But I've also been the caller, haven't we all. [a different via]
no chance i can effectively comment on things like this right now, but i think about them. I need jobs that revolve around thinking through things like this. I've got one this summer but it's over in a week. [via]
i've always trusted the us news & world report college rankings, but i've read a couple of arguments against it lately - mostly here. similar to the above article about gaming digg, you can game the usn&wp as well. the washington monthly rankings take a different approach to college rankings. personal anecdote: i didn't take a friday class my junior or senior year of college. i later learned that the school had only in the last ten to fifteen years begun to have friday classes, as their existence - wait for it - factored into the algorithm.
this is sorta funny; i'm only linking to it cause a lot of people are ending up in new york these days.
a wifi router that includes 160 gig drive, itunes, bittorrent & ftp. i very rarely use bittorrents, but it strikes me as a huge leap forward. i see down the path to totally on-demand cable, where content comes from all over instead of through huge traffic, and you'll buy youtube videos for a penny (or a cool grand, following hyperinflation), sopranos episodes for 1 to watch or 3 to save, movies on similar prices, and you can manage what you want to pull down from the web from your pocket or laptop. hell, price could go up or down depending on how often you watch something. the point is, now that anyone can get or contribute content so, so easily, (insert your local cable provider/isp/cell phone service here) has less and less control over the market. my hope with net neutrality is that there now that we can bypass the "lay cable all the way around the world" phase with satellites, can't you see the harvards and stanfords, as well as the gates and bransons and buffetts of the world, fronting for a satellite to provide information to the people? i definitely can. hell of a tangent but something i've been wanting to write out for a while. carry on.
ben casnocha's observations on travelling and such. pretty amazing guy who's taking a year off between high school and college to travel. and he started his own company, about four years ago.
from get rich slowly, ten secrets of success by john paul getty.
ibid, how to raise a family on one income. unsuprisingly, many of the techniques for saving money are techniques for living sustainably.
and finally, how to protect your search information - i'm not sure there's an organization i like more than the electronic frontier foundation. [via]
This is a really, really pretty long essay about the experience of traveling abroad and reflecting on America, but it's really fucking good. Here's an excerpt, but you really should read it in context.
Only once have I let loose with this theory, because it's generally not my business. In Livingston, in a bar, one of my cobackpackers started up with the whole "I'm so glad to be away from all that shit, all that wholesale corporate shit, all that unthinking consumption, all that overly aggressive American culture, all that Bible thumping and fast food and 9-5" routine, and I was drunk and talky.
I set down my beer, and gestured for the guy to lean over.
"I've got a hunch about America, dude..."
"What's that?"
"...You're doing it wrong."
Divebars. Jukeboxes. Allen Iverson. Beerball. Super Mario Kart. NetFlix. LiveFuckingJournal. The way my girl looks in that skirt.
An aversion to whitehats and fast food might be a reason to leave the country, but it's no reason to bash it. To fail to find a place for yourself in the USA might be a failure of fucking imagination, but it ain't a failure of the culture to provide. I dunno... I've given up on thinking that I can really tell anyone else what should be going on in their head - but when I go from America to Guatemala to America to Guatemala, the virtues of our ways of doing things are pretty self-evident. Guatemala is a sucky place to be born. Without qualifiers. A lot of people come down here and backpack around and go back to the U.S. or Europe talking about what a great place Guatemala is, how nice the people are, whatever. They're wrong. I think they're even objectively wrong.
What was the highlight of this past weekend?
Perfect time to ask, since I was about to write how I haven't been writing here because I was on vacation.
I went to Texas this weekend for the annual Mo Ranch getaway. My ex-girlfriend from high school and I are still pretty good friends, and in fact I'm pretty good friends with her whole family and another family they are friends with. To make a long story short, these two families used to be spread across the country, and so they decided that every year they would get together at Mo Ranch (with one exception, the year we all went to Cozumel) and make sure they saw each other at least that one time per year. Now, they all live in Texas, and all but two of them in Austin, so it's a little easier, but the tradition goes on.
I can't tell you how thankful I am that 11 years after Anna and I stopped dating (we, in fact, stopped dating almost immediately after the first Mo Ranch trip), I'm still invited on these outings. My family doesn't get together like this to hang out and enjoy each other's company, partly because I'm not sure we enjoy each other's company enough to do something like this. Three generations of two families, at a beautiful spot three hours west of Austin along the Guadalupe River. Plenty of food and drink and other entertainment, plenty of catching up and philosophising. The weekend was short, too short, but I am so thankful to have been able to go.
So what was the highlight? Other than the event as a whole, I'd have to say talking to Hannah, Anna's five-year-old niece. I have a four-year-old niece of my own and seeing Hannah is a glimpse into Celia's near future -- so I can only hope she is as smart and well-spoken as Hannah is (Celia is, no doubt). It's amazing to talk to kids always though, and see how they see things, and what's in their minds. I don't reallyt foresee myself having children, so I'm glad to have the experience of other people's.
What's the oldest digital camera photo you have on your computer? When is it from? Let's see it!
Whoops, this is sideways. It's kinda intriguing that though, so I like it.
This is everything I own, minus two backpacks worth of stuff that went with me, November 16, 2004, the night before I moved to Thailand.
This is kinda easy.
In May of 2002, I met up with two friends who were five weeks into some international travelling. They had been to Southeast Asia and I met up with them at SFO, from where we would go to Costa Rica and Belize.
Five days into our trip, we were moving from Monteverde, up in the central highlands, to Malpais on the shore. It was one of those long, exhausting days, of buses followed by sprinting for ferries followed by ferries, more buses, and then the which-hotel's-it-gonna-be dance of every new town. we settled in to our room, and went to the beach.
while we were there, some kid used a key to break into our room. I know this because he also did the same to my neighbor, who was asleep in the room at the time. he got everything - my wallet and money belt, including plane tickets, passport, atm and credit cards, license, and about $600 in cash and another $500 in traveller's checks.
But that's not the worst part of the story. When I went to Grupo Taca's office to get my ticket to Belize replaced, I was told I would have to buy another ticket and they would reimburse me -- despite the fact that I had less than $500 available to me at the time and foreseeable future. (Lesson learned -- it is not necessary or advisable to travel with so much cash). Long story short, I broke into a mixture of tears and anger, yelling furiously in Spanish at this poor Tico toeing the company line. I must have gone on for fifteen minutes before I have up. And as I walked out, the one chance to get revenge on them crossed my eyes. I went to their five gallon water cooler, opened up the nozzle, and left. I hope the place flooded. I'm sure it didn't, I'm sure I embarrassed myself, and I'm sure that even though it was the worst, I learned a lot from it. Namely not to be such a fucking sally every time life deals you a moron.
