Looking for other categories?  No? Wanna see the latest on dodoskido?

Hongyun and I have been struggling with fatigue, but nevertheless, we've been having a good time here in Holland. Our first day, we spent in a daze since we had hardly slept on the plane. We just wandered a bit and The next day we spent walking around the central Amsterdam area where all of the action and tourists are.

We also visited the Van Gogh museum which was rather nice. Did you know Van Gogh only painted for 10 years of his life before he went insane and shot himself? I knew he didn't have a good time of things, but I had no idea he imploded so horribly.

The Rijks Museum was a rather big disappointment. They only had a small portion of their collection available while the main museum is under construction. At least Rembrandt's Night Watch was on display.

The following day, we went out of Amsterdam to Zaans Schans to see functioning windmills. We saw one mill in action that was making peanut oil....a sight to see indeed.

Today we went to Alkmaar in the north of Holland for the cheese market where they've been doing large scale cheese trades for about 650 years now. There's an interesting process of quality inspection, weighing, and loading the truck. We're uploading the photos now, so you can check them out.

After the cheese market, we took a train down to Rotterdam to see some post-modern architecture and boy did we find some interesting buildings...again, the photos will speak for themselves when they are uploaded.

Now we're just resting and uploading as much as we can until we head to Venice tomorrow.

Tots! (bye in Dutch)

Well, we're about 5 days from our departure date to Europe and making last minute preparations. As you already know (I think), we've decided to go sans laptop for this trip. What? No computer at your every beck and call? Preposterous you must be shouting by now. I think so too, but we decided against it since a laptop would comprise about 20-25% of our total gear weight limit of 40lbs. I still think we're a tiny bit over without the beastly machine, but at least we're not lugging a whole computer and what not around.

This presents a few problems in and of itself. First is that we will need internet access. Sure there will be Internet cafes just about everywhere, but we know those are about as safe as carrying your money around in a clear plastic bag floated by helium balloons behind you. I'm sure most are perfectly fine, but I'm not really in the mood to take a chance with my private info.

So what to do? Well, in this day and age, plenty. We're bringing a USB thumb-drive-ama-key-fob-ama-flash-amajig that contains a bevy of widgets:

1. Portable Apps - a nice suite of apps ready to go for your USB thing
2. KL-Detector - a free keylogger detector.
3. KeyPass - a password keeper app (yes, you should put your passwords into this app BEFORE you leave home)
4. LockNote - a notepad that uses AES256 encryption to lock up text...we're going to keep backup copies of our info on here...just in case.
5. TrueCrypt - a drive encryption mechanism that will keep data safe in case it gets lost.
6. Mouse Only Keyboard - a tool that will allow you to construct passwords by choosing letters and symbols on screen instead of using a keyboard. Sure it's slow, but it is much safer.
7. Neo's SafeKeys - a variation on the on-screen keyboard theme.

I'm also thinking of bringing my PPC-6700. Eventhough I won't have EVDO access, it still has built-in wifi that should work with public wifi connections. The cool part comes when I login to my home PC via logmein from the phone. Since there are no keyloggers on my personal phone and the logmein traffic with my home computer is encrypted, we should be pretty safe. A little paranoid you say? Yeah, but at least my data will be safer for the most part. A little geeky elbow grease goes a long way.

Big Ups to The Great Geek Manual for point the way for us paranoid geekswho want to roam the earth.

Now that I've actually decided to bring my Rebel XT (along with two new lenses - 50mm f1.8 & 28-200mm f3.5 and up) on our Europe trip, I figure I'm going to need something to carry all of this junk around in. At first, I thought, hey, I'll just buy a camera bag. After I did the research and went around to all of the camera bag manufacturer websites, I settled on the Tamrac 5765 (pictured to the left there). It's a nice size, can be used as both a hippack and as an over the shoulder type deal, and it's not too flashy.

When I went to order it at amazon, it was out of stock so I got on the wait list for it. Then I thought to myself...hmmm...what if I reused one of my old messenger bags as a camera bag? I had been using of them as my adhoc camera bag with my "Inner Mongolia Hat" as the camera holder. It worked well enough, but I'd like something a little more sturdy and actually protective for this trip.

I figured, I'd get some foam and some plastic sheeting to do bulk up the protective qualities of the bag and it seems, according to this ad-riddled, yet informative how-to guide: Tech ARP - DIY Camera Backpack Guide, that I was right. This guys uses cardboard and bubble wrap to do the trick and I can see why that would be a good way to go (since the cardboard is a flexible, it can smunch down if necessary). Luckily for me, there is a TAP Plastics store in mountain view that sells scrap plastic pieces. I went over there today and got two pieces of scrap to use on the bottom of our backpacks to give them some form on the bottom and help prevent "stuff-leak" in the event of a tear or a brazen attempt at slashing the bottom of the bag.

I figure I'll get this little project done this weekend and plan out my camera bag so I can stop by TAP and pick up some plastics next week.

(By the way, this photo has nothing to do with the Italian Riviera...just thought it was funny).

So far we've got:

Hotel Aalborg in Amsterdam July 02-05 ($420)
A friendly student that graciously offered us a spot to sleep in Munich at the StudentStad July 06-09 (free, woohoo!)
Locanda Acquavita in Venice July 11-14 ($460)
Cinque Terre Residence in Vernazza ($800)

Now we have to figure out how to get to Greece from Italy (looks like a train to Bari, then a boat over or some sort of over night boat from Rome if that exists). Then we need to find accomodations in Greece (picking an island is very difficult) and some place to crash in Dublin too. I hope couch surfers come to the rescue in these two places because it looks like it'll be tough to find a couch surfh in Venice or Rome.

It seems that all of our travel reservations have gone up in smoke. Well, the reservations are still there, but the email confirmations have disappeared. I think gmail really doesn't want us to travel this summer so it has gone and deleted all of the email that had anything to do with us paying for our plane tickets. 3 or 4 in all.

It happened when I labeled them "Travel Reservations" figuring it'd be a good idea to have a quick way to take a look at them. The next morning I went to look something up and they were gone. Hmmm...curious. I decided to search for them using the much touted "search" feature in gmail. Nada. Hmmm, how about the trash folder? Nope, try again. SPAM folder? Nope, not their either.

"WTF?" I'm thinking to myself at this point. I start trying to remember the places I bought tickets from. American Airlines for the Dublin to LAX flight, Northwest (I think) for the LAX to Amsterdam flight, and Aer Lingus (maybe) for the Athens to Dublin flight. Without the confirmation numbers though I'm screwed. Then I remembered spending a while to debug problems with our networked printer at home and had printed everything so we were saved.

Phew...and being the obsessive backup-er that I am, I keep Windows Live Mail Desktop (yes that's the name of the app...and yes, I hate the name) running on my desktop PC at home at all times, quietly sucking down all of my Gmail all day and night. When I got home yesterday, I found that I had not only a hard copy (mental note: print EVERYTHING out), but also a copy of all of the emails sitting in WLMD (not to be confused with the president's WMDs). I could not have imagined a day when Microsoft saved my ass from a bungle over at Google. The world has truly turned upside down.

So last time, Hongyun and I visited the topic Cameras for Europe, we were wavering between going all out with the Canon HV20 (aff) (nice, but pricey) and going relatively lo-fi with a pair of Kodak cameras.

Well, we decided to get the Kodak V705 (aff) and see if that would fit the bill, then grab the V610 if we need to. So far the V705 has been phenomenally popular with us. I've used the panorama feature a few times and am planning to take as many panormas as I can now that it's drop dead simple. Here, take a look. Here's another one that shows the carnage of the 880/580 freeway debacle in the bay area.

I'm not even sure we're going to grab the V610 at this point since super zoom probably is not going to be necessary. I'm still considering taking the Rebel XT with some lenses with me, but only if we get a lot of couch surfing hits. But honestly, the thought of carrying around a large camera around my neck or a camera bag does not appeal to me.

On the subject of bringing a laptop, we've decided not to. Wait, what? I'm not bringing a laptop with me to Europe? The guy who brings his laptop to the can so he can keep reading blog postings about how everyone has screwed themselves by not reading their mortgage documents? Yep that's right...I, the eternally net-tethered one, am not going to bring a laptop. I'm hoping the withdrawl symptoms will subside a few days into the trip.

This doesn't mean, however, that we'll be sans technology. I'm considering getting some sort of backup solution so we can offload the memory cards for safe keeping. I've looked at a bunch of solutions both cheap and pricey and I think we're going to for one of the higher quality (read: not so cheap) ones. The Epson P-4000 (aff) may be the right little one for us. Why? Well for several reasons. It has a nice big screen, so we can actually verify that our files have arrived properly. It also plays DIVX files, so we can bring along a few movies for the down times when we're too pooped to party. The plan is to be able to hook this up to a PC when we have a chance and upload photos to our home storage system and flickr for safe keeping. Obsessive? A little, but it's a sound disaster prevention policy in my mind.

Also, there is a rebate on this little bad boy which brings it in just under $400 including shipping and no tax! After we get back, I'd probably just sell it off for near what I got it for and we'll get our money back.

Camera Strategy for Europe