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An easy “Top 5″ list

Rui — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 08:10:20 +0000

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:

Machu Picchi in Peru
Potala Palace in Tibet
The Great Wall of China
The Taj Mahal in India
Angkor in Cambodia

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

Rui — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 19:53:58 +0000

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:

Not every single country in the world is covered
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…

Rui — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 22:51:31 +0000

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

Rui — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 23:05:21 +0000

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 We sincerely hope that it is all worth it. The passion for travel keeps me going

IE6 officially sucks

Rui — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 18:14:47 +0000

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!

World for Sale is ready - I think…

Rui — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 23:19:16 +0000

I wasn’t happy with the first version - big, chunky map, way too big for the page. And I never really liked the Mercator projection anyway - since when is Greenland the same size as Africa???
So, back to tons of Javascript and CSS (again) and I cooked up a draggable version, a la Google Maps - looks a lot cooler. And I discovered the Winkel Tripel projection - much much better.

I even got inspired by the new iPhone interface and it can spin by itself if you accelerate it fast enough. Geeky