anoisette.com

Maybe admitting I don’t own an iPod makes it blasphemous for me to call myself a geek, but I don’t and I’m not apologizing for it. I just haven’t succumbed to the hype yet, but I’m slowly being suckered in.

While there are those who like to keep their gadgets separate, I’m the exact opposite. I travel light and when it comes down to having to take an mp3 player, camera, cell phone, gps, etc. I will just leave them behind rather than fill up my purse (in fact I’m happy when I don’t even have to carry a purse). So to me an all-in-one iPhone sounds sweet, but what I’m most excited about is the possibilities for aps from a device that takes pictures and has a GPS. I haven’t read whether pictures can actually have location info encoded right in to them automatically on the new iPhone, but I’m sure that functionality is right around the corner… I have been waiting for so so so long for a camera that will automatically tag photos with location info. I think geotagged photos are a lot of fun and anything that could make the process automatic would be so awesome.

I’d love to be able to have a mobile photo blog… But it could also be so useful for all kinds of things. For example it looks like the best way to find an affordable apartment in the West End is good old fashioned pavement pounding. But I know from experience that an intense apartment search can quickly result in information overload, and it doesn’t help if you’re targeting apartments in a very small area in terms of differentiating apartments from each other. I can just see possibilities for an ap that would let you take a picture of the building, somehow automatically assign it the correct address based on location and just leave you to enter in any notes you may have such as the price of the rent, whether you were able to reach the landlord when you called from out front, etc. That could also totally work for people cruising open houses. Then you’d just get to come home and check out a nicely organized list showing all the places you visited on a map and you could run them through Walk Score or do what ever else you needed to do.

Or… omg something like that for scouting wedding venues. That uploaded to a big local wedding venue site. Because everyone in my circle knows how I am tearing my hair out looking for a wedding venue…

I just like maps a lot. Maps with lots of useful information and ways to easily effortlessly add more useful information to them.

I was just catching up on my blog reading which has been neglected this past week when I just found out about a great new service called Offbeat Guides. I was surprised by a lot of the negative comments in the TechCrunch post, but I agree with the one commenter who questionned how much travelling those people do.

I don’t consider myself a jet setter world traveler by any stretch, but 2007 saw me on 4 different continents so I’m no homebody either. And I have to say that the traveler in me see this as an exciting product, and more than an exciting product I see a vision of what travel guides should be.

One big problem with travel guides is that they are basically out of date when you buy them, and to really plan a trip you have to spend the time reading the out of date travel guide and then spend the time scouring the internet for some updated current information. And that is basically what I ended up doing a lot during my trip to SE Asia. For a longer trip especially, where you are making up your trip as you go along, having the ability to instantly print off a guide like that would save so much time. I’d rather pay $9 and print out a PDF at a net cafe on an island in Thailand than have to spend a few hours searching wikitravel and other sites to figure out what there is to see and do in the next place I’ve decided to visit. That way I can spend less time on a computer and more time on the beach. And let’s face it, if I just wanted to spend time on a computer I could just stay home.

Another example was when reading another out of date travel guide I found out about some cool art museum in Geneva, Switzerland. Decided to hit it up the next day, only to get there and find it closed for renovations. Wasted the morning and then had to scramble to figure out what else was nearby that I’d like to check out. After that experience I’ve learned to try and google stuff the night before and try and find a website with updated operating hours for a place I want to check out. But internet isn’t always readily available and sometimes it’s really expensive and slow, and most of all sometimes in the evenings I Just want to relax and not be furiously trying to make sure my travel guide information is up to date.

Or there was the time I went to Bali. I had picked out a guesthouse recommended by my Lonely Planet guide in the town of Ubud. The guide said this guesthouse was very busy and full of travellers, which I thought was perfect because I was traveling alone and staying in a busy guesthouse is the best way to meet people. I got off the bus (at the wrong spot no less) and spent a grueling hour walking around the town with my heavy pack and trying to ignore local touts yelling ‘room here! room here!’ and trying to figure out the lay of the city and match it to my map and find the guesthouse. Eventually I walked for the second time by the place where it ought to be and asked someone only to be told the guesthouse had closed. At that point I walked down the street to some random guesthouse to inquire about a room, they showed me a lovely lovely one that was unfortunately out of my budget (awkward and embarrassing). Left and walked in to another random place where I ended up staying but being the only person there for the first night. A crappy experience that could have hopefully been avoided with an updated travel guide.

Another customization option that sounds great to me that was mentioned is special needs, for example if you’re a vegetarian. This is huge for me when I travel, travel guides pretty much never have much in the way of vegetarian restaurant suggestions and every time I travel I spend a good chunk of time on the internet researching restaurants to check out and looking on google maps to figure out how to get there. In fact this is something I’ve often thought there is a total lack of on the web, solid information on restaurants with vegetarian options. I don’t need to eat in strictly vegetarian restaurants when I travel, but I’ll definitely choose one with vegetarian options over one where I’ll be stuck eating a lame salad.

Anyway, it made my day to read about Offbeat Guides and watch the video interview with the founder (which I’d link to but in 5 second attention span couldn’t figure out how to link to on blip.tv). I love that people are coming up with awesome ideas and implementing them despite all the possibilities for failure. And I can’t wait to get my beta invite so I can check out the service myself.

i keep thinking that what i ought to do is pick one thing and do it do it do it to build skill at it. like photography. take pictures every day. or knit, knit every day. i used to knit almost every day on the subway when i was making my socks. but since i started the noro scarf, i haven’t been coz it’s not as portable. anyway. so i keep thinking i need to pick one thing and just practice practice practice so i can be good at something. i dunno why i want to be good at something, but i do.

problem is, i can never just pick one thing. so i bought that new lens for my camera, and took some photos. but now it’s been really grey and rainy and i’m not feeling inspired to take pictures. instead i feel inspired to learn illustrator. yesterday a torrent of ideas came tumbling (into?) out of my brain and i sketched them down in my notebook and decided that learning illustrator would be the best way to turn them into something good.

but when i thinking about drawing (i used to a lot a lot as a kid), i feel that photography could help me become better in illustrator. photography is developing my eye, my style. and that will translate to art i may create in illustrator.

so maybe it’s all good in the end?

yesterday morning i got a little into blog surfing, where i just end up finding a whole bunch of new blogs and sites by clicking links and clicking links and just enjoying finding new things. lately i’ve been reading a lot of personal finance blogs and that’s how this link clicking started yesterday. but i ended up getting really disenchanted, the blogs became more and more money oriented and how to make money blogging. it just got to be too much. so i made an important realization. i’m not interested in having a lot of money (despite what my interest in reading books about millionaires might seem to indicate). i’m just interested in being financially independent so i don’t have to work at a job i hate.

that is maybe one of my life pursuits.

why do i feel the need to throw in the maybe? maybe it’s because i’ve been in japan too long. maybe is one of the favourite words of the japanese. in fact, i’ve been told that if you use maybe a lot, it’s a sure sign that you’ve been in japan too long.

so this morning while making my usual rounds of blogs i went to check get rich slowly, one of my daily reads. unfortunately for some reason i got a 404 error for the usual url of getrichslowly.org/blog, so i directed my browser to go to the domain root of getrichslowly.org, which i basically never go to. but today i was surprised to notice a link for the authors personal blog at foldedspace.org so of course i checked it out, and was rewarded by finding some thoughtful entries that struck a chord with me considering my recent bout of reflecting on what to do with my life.

it’s hard getting back in the swing of writing and trying to keep a blog. yesterday i found myself thinking that maybe i should just stop and figure that blogging just isn’t for me, and i’m more of a blog reader than a blog writer.  i guess the reason i won’t let myself give up on keeping a blog is because i’ve done it for so long that obviously it’s something that i can do and enjoy. i just need to find my voice right now. tap tap tap. testing, testing, one two three.

the first blog or online journal i can remember keeping was at scribble.nu in 2000. the site died and i lost all my writings with it. i then started writing at livejournal, a fair bit of my stuff is still there although it’s mostly late adolescent angst that i’m actually kind of embarrassed about. i jumped back and forth between livejournal and experimenting with blogs hosted on my personal domain using first greymatter, then moveable type, and then blogger and wordpress. then i moved over to diary-x. and then it died and i lost all my writing. i tried to find a new home but was unsuccessful and stopped writing. and here i am today with wordpress again. writing is like anything else, the more you do it, the easier it is. so i should just do it. because everyone has something to say.

the knitting on the hat is done, i think. i just have to close up the top. but instead of doing that this morning i spent the morning trying to work through chapter 5 of ruby on rails for dummies and pondering my life and life goals and thinking about maybe starting a personal finance blog? and reading fashion designer blogs and then about the state of generation x/y.

i know. i am all over the place. maybe what i should blog about is how to find my place in this world! but i was thinking that blogging about how i can’t find my place in the world will just make the problem worse. the answer hasn’t come to me, and i can’t count on it coming to me anytime soon. in the meantime i gotta get my act together and just pick something and go with it already. life is passing me by while i spend all my time thinking about what to do with it.

on a more hopeful note, i found pfash.com, a fashion site built with ruby on rails. maybe seemingly unrelated things can make sense together after all.