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First there was Ponoko, then Shapeways, and now I have just discovered Spoonflower, which is the one I am most excited for if only because it appeals the most to my crafty textile background.

Awesomeness!

I was reading the TripIt blog, because TripIt is so awesome and I almost wish I traveled more so that I could use it more, when I came across JohnEckman.com. I like the idea of this action stream thing he has going on. Apparently I must be living on a rock to not have seen something like that sooner. I’m going to investigate the options for wordpress. And what would be the best thing to use to have blurbs saying ‘just read title-of-interesting-article’ like this one titled How a lottery winner spends his multi-million dollar jackpot. If anyone has any suggestions, I’m all ears!

When I was backpacking in SE Asia I remember having a conversation with my friend/travel partner about how cool it would be to be able to send postcards to our friends and family with photos of on our little adventure. I sure wish Hippopost had been around at the time because it would have been so totally perfect! Hippopost lets you upload a photo, which it prints onto a postcard and mails for you, for free (it’s advertising supported).

I tried it yesterday and hope to see the fruits of my labour next week.

A lot more, even, in this post over at Lifehacker.

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.

About three weeks ago I signed up for yet another free email address at zenbe.com. My friends know me as the one with about seven hundred email addresses and are sometimes paralyzed from not knowing which of the seven hundred email addresses they should actually use to actually contact me. I really thought that once I got my gmail account, I’d settle down a bit, but then came along Zenbe.

The first sign of love is the fact that my first name plain and simple was not taken. With gmail, I was scouring for an elusive invite for months for the precise reason that I wanted my name without crap after it. I guess I just wasn’t cool enough to get an invite before June 2004, and I was choked when gmail wouldn’t give me my first name plain and simple and I had to settle for dot first letter of my last name.

So now I have this lovely email address with Zenbe, I need to actually start using it. But it’s hard. I commend them for even going forth and being the new free email on the block, going against well established giants like hotmail, yahoomail, and gmail. I see all the lovely features they boast, all wrapped up in a very pretty package of calming colors and lotus flowers, and I want to use it… And they make it easy to import your calendar and email contacts and everything… But something is still holding me back. Moving is hard, even if only digitally.

It was Bruce Byfield’s talk on blogging just for the joy of writing at the Vancouver WordCamp that sums up why I should be writing here in this blog. I’ve been trying a number of different things, trying to make topical blogs because apparently it’s supposed to be all about the niches, but I’m getting the feeling it’s not really working for me.  I’m interested in a lot of things and I want to be able to blog about them all, and not have to pass on it because it doesn’t fit with the blog’s topic. This blog is all set up and just sitting here, so I’m going to try and reclaim the space and just give this a whirl.

The other day I spent the day putting together a photoblog. It’s something I’ve wanted to do since… oh… 2004? Maybe earlier? I actually got really frustrated trying to decide what platform to use that I almost didn’t end up doing it at all, but I decided it doesn’t have to be perfect, just functional.

Even though wordpress isn’t meant for photoblogs, I found a plugin that I thought was great that makes it easier to use wordpress as a photoblog. I really liked yapb, and I wanted to use it but it still required me to make my own template, and that’s something I’ve been trying to do for a few weeks with no success.

Then I thought about using pixelpost, and even went as far as installing it on my server. But then I just decided I would feel much better using wordpress because it’s so flexible, I’ve got a good idea how it works and I know it can do what I want it to, and it’s got such a large community that it’s pretty easy to find answers to questions and so on.

Although why isn’t it easy to find a good photoblog theme? I don’t know. I ended up going with Grain, which has tons of neat little features built into it, and I really like it, the only thing is I really wanted a lighter colored theme, I find Grain too dark. Originally I tried to modify it, but I guess I just got overzealous and it ended up being too much. Oh well, I still might. I should, in fact. But for now at least I have a place to post photos and that was my main goal. Let’s hope I can keep at it. I really should, considering I just bought another new lens for my camera. I don’t feel like I deserve it, but I can’t help it because it’s so much cheaper here in Japan than it would be to buy it back in Canada.

Anyway, while scouring the web high and low for a nice wordpress photoblog theme, I came across this list of the Top Ten Best Photoblog Themes and Templates. Lots of nice themes there, but nothing that was exactly what I was looking for. I’m too picky, I know.

I’ve spent a good chunk of the day learning about the basics on how to put together a wordpress theme from scratch. I’m hoping to make a nice theme for a photoblog, something I’ve tried to do a number of times in the past but have never been satisfied with my attempts. Anyway, I did find one really useful tutorial on making wordpress themes that I started working through.