Journal Archives - Page 6 of 22

Airborne and headed abroad again at long last

April 27, 2013 by Jon Brown 3 Comments

If I had my way I’d visit Thailand every 6 months.

Magic #6

When I came back from my last trip abroad I truly thought it’d be 6 months before I was back over seas. My thought at the time was to start in Japan or Korea and then travel slowly south through China, Vietnam & Cambodia before ending in Thailand or Bali.

Well it’s 6 years, not months, but I am currently at 60,000ft above the Pacific Ocean in seat 59B aboard United Airlines flight 879 bound for Tokyo. Tokyo is only a 6 hour layover though on my way to Bangkok. This trip isn’t exactly what I’d envisioned, but it still feels damn good to be traveling abroad again. People that know me, know I talk about traveling a lot, and that I love it… love it… LOVE IT! That doesn’t’ mean it’s easy to make happen.

Breaking Free to Travel is Hard

This trip was supposed to happen so many times and kept getting delayed for one reason or another. It almost got derailed again in the last month, but at some point you just have to turn away from all the last minute obstacles and focus on the goal and have faith in the universe conspire in your favor to take care of all the trivial stuff that can seem so important in the moment.

I talked about this in 2006 when I found it so hard to slowly extract myself from things I loved, but which at the same time kept me from something else I loved. I guess that’s one of the challenges we all have, right? Two things we really love but that are at least in part mutually exclusive. Back in 2006 while I loved my engineering career and owning a home, it wasn’t conducive the semi-nomadic live of travel my soul craved. For most I think family, friends and society at large train people to follow the cultural norms, and not do something as unconventional as quitting a 6 figure job (that I really liked) that had taken took 6 years of schooling to get, and sell a house that took 6 more years to save for and buy.

I was truly blessed by family and friends who, while most didn’t really “get it”, totally supported me “doing it” because they knew I was listening to my soul. That’s my litmus test for friends by the way, friends support you in finding your best interest and then pursuing it, not what they think your best interest is.

Getting Past the Obstacles to Travel

Once again there have been lots of last minute obstacles to breaking free for a extened trip.

I’d hoped to make this trip in January when my Spark Circus family was in Thailand bringing joy to kids I couldn’t quite get it scheduled and so I decided it would start on my birthday (April 1st). That seemed like a great way to start to kick off being 40! My Mom was even interested in joining me for a bit in Thailand, it was going to be awesome! However we ended up moving house on Maui at the end of March so the trip got pushed off at the last minute by a month.

Elena and I figured we could get settled in the new house and then maybe go to Thailand togetherthis time. Crazy right, traveling together. Well, unfortunatly the new home isn’t working out and we will be moving again. I could have delayed this trip yet again, but at some point one has to just ignore the obstacles and trust the universe to conspire to help us along.

That seems to have been the right choice since just 12 hours before my flight departing Maui we got word from our new landlords that we have a wonderful new home to move into, yay! Elena is going to have to move without me and we’ll probably have to hire movers this time, but at least most of what we own hasn’t even been unpacked from moving last month (we both hope to not move house again for a very long time — also I might have finaly been convinced I should buy house again, this time on Maui though).

I am of course sad not have Elena and/or my Mom traveling with me but I immensely thankful to both of them for there love and support that makes my wandering possible (I love you both). Also I’ll likely need to return to Thailand in about 6 months and that’ll be a better trip because this one is mostly about taking care of bussines.

Traveling with purpose

This is going to be a short trip with purpose and my current travel plan is limited to Thailand. I am of course already daydreaming about popping over to Burma or Cambodia for a week. Not both, just one and it’s just maybe for now… unless I find a way to extend my trip a couple months, LOL.

FWIW, I’ve always wanted to visit Burma and it’s gotten substantially easier to visit recently. I want to get in before it gets touristy (which is already happening). Time is running out so that’s probably #1 if I can make that happen.

I’ve also long wanted to see Ankor Wat though and I’d like to visit a friend I made while visiting Chiang Mai years ago that now lives in Phenom Penn (Mike also runs a super cool company would should check out called 17 Triggers).

As I said this trip has a purpose, that purpose is to get some major, and long over due, dental work done in Chiang Mai (I’ll detail that more in another post). Until I know exactly how long process is going to take the rest of the month is unplanned.

Finally this trip is yet another test run for working while traveling.

Nomadic Tech Work

For those that don’t know, when I got back from my second big trip abroad in 2007 I changed careers. I couldn’t see a career in Civil Engineering ever allowing me to satiate my ravenous hunger for travel. As a self-employed web developer I have the ability to quite literally work anywhere the web reaches. The logistics of working everywhere the web reaches however are not trivial.

It took a few of test trips like this to Maui before Elena and I were confident we could move our permanent home from Idyllwild, CA to Maui, HI without disrupting our business lives. That was wonderfully successful.

Working while traveling is one of the keys to modern nomadic living. If you don’t figure out how to make a living while traveling, you’re limited to traveling for as long as you can save up for while you’re not. It’s like trying to control ones weight in an endless binge and purge cycle, it’s just not going to work nor is it healthy.

You can expect a bunch of blog posts about working while traveling coming soon too.

Tokyo Arrival Below…

A personal computer genealogy

August 28, 2011 by Jon Brown Leave a Comment

Peter Liu got me thinking about one of my favorite subjects, one’s personal history with computers. So I decided to take my comment on his blog post site and elaborate some.

My very first computer was a Sinclair ZX80. I’ve long thought it was a Timex Sinclair 1000, but based on my mother’s memory and the timing I’m pretty sure it was a ZX80. Back then there wasn’t really much commercial software to speak of so to play with a computer you had to program it yourself. It was also before hard drives which meant storing your work on an external casette tape recorder for storage, the same cassette player I used to listen to my very first audio cassette tape (The Best of the Beach Boy’s if I recall correctly). The first real program I ever wrote, at 8 or 9 years old, was on the ZX in BASIC with the help of my mom. The program took took a list of spelling words and scrambled all the letters and then printed them out to create word scrambles for her students. Later I made it into a game so that one typed in what they thought was the right word, unscrambled, and it’d tell you if you were right or wrong to try again. Later I wrote a program to make crossword puzzles but I kept running out of memory and crashing the little computer if I gave it more than than a dozen words.

About a year or two later we got a TI-99/4A which was far more a “real” personal computer than the ZX. In addition to taking cartridges like the old Atari’s it also used an audio tape recorder for storage, but later we got a 5.25″ external floppy disk for it. The change from audio casette storage to floppy disk was as dramatic then as the change happening today from Hard Drives to Solid State Drives. I do remember commercial software for the TI-99/4A actually coming on audio tapes, as well as on cartridges and later on floppy disks. Unlike the ZX which I honestly barely remember, I do vividly recall playing text based adventure games like Zork & Oregon Trail on the TI which were then followed by games with actual graphics like Tombstone and Hunt the Wumpas… mind you not video, just static graphics that changed one frame at a time when you moved or did something.

In 1984, at 12 years old, my parents bought me my first computer (as opposed to the other’s being “family” computers), an Apple //c. I spent uncountable number of hours playing games like Ultima on that computer. In fact all I really remember about being 12 and 13 was playing on that computer and skate boarding anywhere and everywhere I could. The really significant event for me surrounding that computer however was when I first went online thanks to a Hayes SmartModem.

As a fun point of reference, 300 Baud modems back then transmitted 1 bit per baud, meaning 300 baud = 300 bits per second and hence todays 20Mbps broadband is roughly 100,000 times faster. I don’t remember if my first modem was actually the 300 baud model or a later 1200 baud model, but It was enough though to connect to Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) all over the country and rack up excessive phone bills. BBSs back then operated mostly like forums do today, except that generally only one person could call in and connect to each site at any given time, meaning for popular BBSs a lot of time was spent redialing and listening to busy signals. Later multi-node BBSs came about which allowed a few people to connect at the same time but it was still nothing like the instant on and thousands of simultaneous connection world we have today.

I wish I could remember the names of all the BBSs I used to dial into back then but a few names stick: The Lexicon of the Cabal, Cult of the Dead Cow, PeaceFrog, The WELL, The Crow’s Nest, TheFallOut Shelter, The Nucleus, The Asylum…. there were so many others though. As a 14 year old kid it was an amazing connecting with people all over the world via BBSs back then. There was plenty of hacking, phreaking and file sharing going on, but mostly it was just community. I imagine it was a a lot like the birth of amateur radio although at that age I didn’t really know what Ham Radio was to draw that comparison. One could also argue that that it was at that time I did my frist User Interface Design work creating new menu pages and primitive ASCII art for a couple BBSs I frequented. I really enjoyed figuring out what was the most important navigation elements and what would make the most sense to use as a menu… no not graphic menus, text menus where B meant go to Bulltien Board and F meant go to File Sharing Area etc.

The Apple //c was followed a couple years later by an Apple IIgs which I eventually took to college. Near the end of college however I switched to a windows laptop knowing that the engineering industry I was headed into was not Apple friendly. Since that first laptop I’ve never again owned a desktop computer. At school and work I still used plenty of desktops and servers, but as a personal computer it’s been laptops ever since.

In 2008 I switched back to Apple and am now onto my second MacBook Pro. A few years ago I added a Mac Mini Server at home which works mostly as a media and file server. I also have a couple remotely hosted virtual servers running Linux for various personal purposes (remote storage, GIT/SVN, etc) in addition to those I manage for web hosting clients.

Get on the bus!

June 13, 2008 by Jon Brown Leave a Comment

The last few weeks I’ve been wondering if it was possible to take public transportation the places I was headed. My motivations were a mix of things: eco-friendliness, gas prices and a desire to explore. Mind you I think high gas prices may just save the country and the planet in lots of ways but that’s a subject for a different time. Several weeks ago I started looking to see if there was a public transit alternative available to the places I was going. It started with trying to find if there was a public transit option to get between my two “homes” in Idyllwild and Long Beach. As I expected before beginning my research public transit doesn’t reach Idyllwild… not even close. So I looked deeper wondering if I drove down the mountain to Riverside could I there pick up a Metro-link train and get to Long Beach. I discovered, again as expected, that if I drove about 45 minutes to Riverside it was indeed possible to catch a Metro-link train there from which I would then need to travel Union Station in LA where I could transfer to the Metro. Metro-link would take about 1:30 to get to Union Station. A short ride on the Metro Red Line followed by a ride on the Metro Blue Line would then get me to the Long Beach Transit Mall. Metro time, a little over an hour. From the LB transmit mall I would then take a short 3 mile bus ride would in fact reach home in Long Beach. About 15 minutes on the bus.. Driving door to door would take me about 2:15. If I drove the 45 minutes to the nearest train station it would then take me an addition 2:45 to get long beach. Or a total trip time of 3:30 hours door to door assuming I wouldn’t have to wait between connections. Waiting between connections it would easily take over four hours. Mind you because the public transit system in Southern California is so fractured there is no one online search engine that can actually put this trip together. It required separately searching Metro-Link’s website, LA Metro’s website and LB Transit’s website… of course that was after I figured out which website to search, which for someone completely unfamiliar with Southern California’s public transit system took quiet a while as well. Someday maybe they’ll all get incorporated into Google Transit, which is amazing, but for now it’s a nightmare to figure out. I think in the end it took me longer to figure out how to make the trip than it would have to take it… which I decided not to do anyway.

A few days later I tried to figure out if I could take a bus from Long Beach to Aliso Viejo (South Orange County). If I was willing to walk a couple miles it was indeed possible and would only take me three hours to get where I could drive in 45 minutes… Fortunately this time, Orange County’s transit system is on Google Transit, so figuring it out is quick, but again it doesn’t make a very appealing way to get there. Especially since it would require a couple miles of walking even though there is a bus stop literally in front of Elena’s in Long Beach and on the corner of the public park I was trying to get too.

Over the last several weeks there were other futile explorations until I woke up today with an idea for a different approach. Instead of trying to figure out how to get to places via public transit that I needed or wanted to go, I decided to figure out where I could get to using the public transit system and then what I might want do there. So I walked out Elena’s front door and got on the bus which I knew before getting on would take me to the Long Beach Transit Mall, from which I was 99% sure I could get on the Metro Blue Line to LA. After 15 minutes of waiting for the bus, 15 minutes of riding the bus and maybe 5 minutes of waiting for the train I was on the Blue Line headed into Los Angeles. I wasn’t exactly where I was headed, but I figured that I could always just turn around and go home if I ended up somewhere lame… fortunately I didn’t.

Originally I planned on just trying to make it to union station and then walk around down town a bit, see what I found and then head home. However about 20 minutes into the ride on the Metro Blue Line a different destination came to me, Chinatown. The Blue Line made it to Metro Center, somewhere I may explore next time. After exiting the train however I looked at a map and determined that indeed if I transferred to the Metro Red Line I’d make it to Union Station as originally planned and if I then transferred to the Gold Line and traveled just one more stop would indeed reach Chinatown. I arrived in Chinatown a little over two hours after getting on the bus in Long Beach. Driving would have taken a little under an hour depending on traffic and not counting time it’d take to find parking. Which today, being a weekday, wouldn’t have been bad. All told the round-trip cost me $6.90, and that is in part because I was lazy and not sure where I’d go so I bought a Metro day pass for $5.00 even though it might have been slightly cheaper buying individual tickets. The bus was $0.90 each way. All told I went to Chinatown and back, had some great food, practiced a little of my mandarin (mostly listening as I’m still shy about speaking it) and had a great adventure… all things I find lacking in my life back in the USA. For comparison spending on which of my cars I took driving there and back would have cost about $16 in gas and require about $3.50 for parking, so let’s call it $20.

I learned to things today, first to think of public transportation in Southern California from the standpoint of where one CAN go, rather than as a means to get somewhere specific, and second that blind adventure can be had in the USA with fun results

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