Archive for the 'World' category

An easy “Top 5″ list

Thu 26, July 2007 9:10:20

We should have some priorities, right?

Ok, we have to start somewhere, so we made a short list of the places that we *absolutely* must go:

These might be pretty obvious (if feels like everybody has already been there…), but still, no self-respecting world traveler can go by without visting these ones, right?
So, these are set in stone - for the rest, we welcome your suggestions…

National Geographic Travel Abroad Travel Phone

Tue 10, July 2007 20:53:58

What a great idea - a cell phone that you can use almost everywhere, always pay the same and have free incoming calls (no expensive roaming charges). That’s exactly what National Geographic is proposing - they teamed up with a company called Cellular Abroad to offer this service and I think it’s a cool concept.
I was checking the product site, and they even rent them, in case you just need for a short period. I did find two negative points though:

  1. Not every single country in the world is covered
  2. The phone itself isn’t very sexy ;)

Still, this is probably the best solution I’ve seen so far to always stay reachable and not spend a fortune. I could seriously consider this for the trip. Is anybody aware of alternatives of this type?

Running out of time…

Mon 25, June 2007 23:51:31

Global warming, climate change, whatever you want to call it, is hot (pun intended) news these days. Coming from a South European country myself, I usually joke with my Dutch colleagues that global warming is the best thing that ever happened to The Netherlands – the weather is getting hotter and sunnier every year. Which is great, considering that the climate here is pretty much a gray and depressing affair most of the time. I usually start with “we should pollute some more, it’s great for tourism!” and then go on about how the best idea right now is to buy property in the north of Denmark or Finland, since in a few years it will be the next tropical paradise :)
Actually, this is no laughing matter, and we all know it very well. The negative effects are pretty obvious – draught, floods, raising sea levels, you name it. But for us, the world-travelers to be, it also means that for some places, we are running out of time. In just a few seconds, I could think of three examples of places that either won’t be there, or will be dramatically changed in a few years by climate change, or the action of man in general:
- The Maldives are sinking
- The Tibetan glaciers are melting (well, they are *all* melting actually)
- The Three Gorges Dam will completely change the Yangtze
Just three simple examples, I’m sure you can find more.
It’s an uneasy feeling – knowing that you either see it really soon, or you’ll never get the chance…

Things are shaping up

Thu 21, June 2007 0:05:21

We did a massive update today. The blog is finally taking shape, both in page structure and content. Hard work, I have to say… my dreams at night are filled with killer Javascript functions and monsters made of CSS declarations 8O We sincerely hope that it is all worth it. The passion for travel keeps me going ;)

IE6 officially sucks

Sun 17, June 2007 19:14:47

Everybody knows this already, but sometimes I forget it. Every once in a while I’m reminded on how really, really bad IE6 is.
I’m spoiled by Firefox, and that’s what I use for web development. When Cristina tried it on IE6 at work, the site looked absolutely awful. All kinds of layout issues creeped up. At least IE7 is not as bad.
Another lost weekend with hacks and workarounds.. pfff…

The only bit of good news is that Apple release Safari for Windows, so now it’s a lot easier to test on it too. It looks perfect - cheers to the Mac people!