Tag: tips Posts

As much as I love travelling to new places, you’ll often hear me complaining about how much I dislike the process of travelling – the airports, customs line-ups, security line-ups, crappy airport food, turbulence, jet-lag and many more. For new travellers, these things are somewhat exciting in their own right, but after a while they grow old and tiring. With that in mind, I was recently reading Anthony Bourdain’s travel tips via a link on Facebook (most of which are great) and thought I would follow up with a point-by-point comparison of some of my tips. The first thing I do is I dress for airports. I dress for security. I dress for the worst-case scenario. I don’t purposefully dress for the airport, but I do make sure I have comfy shoes that are easy to remove, as that’s typically the biggest pain nowadays (other than removing your belt) while […]

I started my long-term travel adventures in January of 2011, almost 2.5 years ago. Looking back, I really had no idea how the airline systems worked: I wasn’t really collecting any sort of air-miles, didn’t know how to fly for free, nor was I trying to get to any type of elite status (I didn’t even really know how to be honest). After 2.5 years though, I’ve finally hit my travel groove. So lately I’ve been dedicating efforts towards taking advantage of some of the cracks in the system to make the most of my travel adventures and to fly for free around the world as much as I can going forward. Here are some of the tricks I’m using. Using Rewards Cards To Earn Free Flights Or Vacations Everyone who travels often should also have at least one travel rewards card – not only do these also let you […]

If you travel outside of North America you’ll quickly realize just how different we do things with regards to power. First, power in North America is typically around 110V, but can range from around 100V all the way up to around 125V. In Europe and many other parts of the world, a voltage of around 220V is normal. In the old days, prior to intelligent power adapters, if you plugged a device designed for 110V into a wall socket wired for 220V, you could pretty much kiss that device goodbye as it would likely fry with a puff of smoke. The same goes for razors, hair dryers, curling irons, etc. You probably won’t destroy your device by plugging a device designed for 220V into a power socket wired for 110V, but your device likely won’t work at all. Intelligent Power Adapters Nowadays most commercial power adapters are dual voltage, meaning […]

I’ve been a ‘world traveler’ for almost two and a half years now. Back then I hadn’t really been away from Canada for very long before, and the thought of spending multiple weeks, let alone multiple months, in a foreign country was a pretty strange idea. Now the idea of loading a backpack up and heading to a new country feels about as foreign to me as doing a load of laundry. If I saw a plane ticket somewhere for a good price, I could probably be at the airport in three hours, ready to go on a new adventure. One of the pains of being away for an extended period of time though is figuring out how to accomplish many of the things you normally do at home (such as paying bills) while away. It’s not as easy as it sounds, and there are lots of different tricks I […]

A friend of mine on Twitter posted a question today asking if anyone had done any world travel, and if so, what they thought of taking a laptop with them. Since I just got back from four months of world travel, I thought I would write an entry detailing my experiences with backpacking with a laptop. I spent the majority of my time in the city of Buenos Aires in Argentina. I brought along my 13″ Macbook Pro, which is valued at around $1,500 in Canada. There is actually a lot of petty theft in Buenos Aires, so I avoided taking my laptop out for the first six weeks or so. But eventually that became tiresome – what’s the point of bringing a laptop to a foreign country if you can’t use it? I actually imagined what would happen if someone were to steal my laptop while traveling. The cost […]

I’m only about a month away from leaving on my big adventure. First stop is obviously Buenos Aires, and then over to Ireland to drink one of these bad boys with Andy. After that, I really have no plans, other than to hit Serbia sometime around July. I also have some family that’s visiting China in August, so I may hit that as well. So, if you were slowly making your way around the world, where would you go? What would you want to see?

One of the obvious problems with going away for a whole year is figuring out what to do with your mail. While many services and companies these days offer paperless options, many still do not. I know first hand that if your VISA bill gets returned to sender, the very first thing the VISA company will do is put a hold on your card until you get a proper address again. So it’s important to have your mail end up somewhere. I briefly debated asking someone in my family to look after all my mail for me. The idea there would be to simply use one of their house addresses as my address, and have them toss my paperwork into a box. The main reason I opted against that option is because I really don’t want to inconvenience anyone by having to look after my mail for a year. Also, […]

Based on a suggestion by Raul, I’m going to talk a little bit about my entry into photography. I originally got into a photography because I wanted a hobby that exploited my creative side without all the trappings of the math and science I typically deal with in my day job. Photography to me has always been a bit of a release, a way to unwind and simply see only a small portion of the world at a time. It’s like turning the power off and noticing your ears are ringing — it represents a way for me to unplug from the world for a period of time. I picked up my first digital camera in 2000. It cost me $1000 at the time, and compared to cameras nowadays, didn’t really take great photos. That being said, it completely changed the landscape of photography for me, since the incremental cost […]

I finally got around to finishing off a little project of mine at home. As everyone knows, I take a pile of photos. So many in fact that I have a hard time finding places to store them all. In the old days I would just make a DVD every few weeks and be done with it, but now that my digital camera is 10.2 MP, I can easily fill up a DVDs worth of photos in a few hours. Of course, I don’t need to keep all of these, and routinely I don’t. But for the ones I do want to keep it’s getting hard to manage them all. About six months ago I picked up a 320 GB external drive to use for backups and started using that. Now that I have time machine going as well, that drive is pretty much full. There are various off-site storage […]

I’ve spent a great deal of time in the last few months trying to understand how search engines work, and how sites get indexed. In my last article, I recommending that the XML Sitemap generator for WordPress should be installed on sites to help with search engine crawling. On this site, Google has gone from around 400 indexed articles (about 20%) up to around 1600 articles (about 80%) for my website — a substantial increase, entirely due to the sitemap. I want to write briefly about WordPress title tags in the context of search engine optimization. Most default WordPress blogs are configured to output the blog name first, followed by the article title (for example, reading an entry called “Things to do in Vancouver” on the blog MyBlog would have a title that looked like “MyBlog – Things To Do In Vancouver.” There are several problems with that approach. First, […]