Category: General

This Thursday I’m leaving on a field trip to the Black Hills in South Dakota in search of pegmatites.

I haven’t been camping in a long time. I still have a decent sleeping bag which I haven’t used in years, but lack pretty much everything else. Last night I went to REI and got a tent and a mattress. I got a really good deal on an REI brand tent which was on sale for $109 and a Thermarest mattress. I set the tent up in the living room just for the hell of it.

I should have a ton of Black Hills photos when I get back. I have a ton of homework to get done until then.

If you look on the right hand column of my site, at the bottom, you’ll see a little box that says “Geourl”. If you click on it, you’ll get a listing of websites geographically near me. If you “view source” on this page you can see a tag that has my latitude and longitude coordinates for my house. I got mine with a GPS but you can also get it from Terraserver. Just dump the tag on the top of your website then submit the URL to Geourl.org. If you live in North America, remember to use a negative value for longitude.

This is actually something I’d like to integrate in my travel site for each update.

This post is a follow-up on my last one…

1) The domain name I reserved is Everything-Everywhere.com. I had to go with a hyphen because the non-hypen was taken. It was that or a .biz or .info.

2) I’ve been using the equipment list from Vagabonding.com as my starting point for what I need on my trip. I don’t know much about video cameras, but the one he used looks pretty big to lug around the world. I don’t know if you can get the same quality in a smaller package, though. I don’t think a floppy drive will be necessary. USB drives should be good enough.

3) I am thinking on taking two digital still cameras. One will be a small camera for everyday use. I think my current camera, Sony DSC-T1, is the camera for this. The still photos are pretty good and it does OK video. I’d like to take an SLR camera for high quality photos too.

4) My biggest unknown is the video. How/where I will edit, store, and shoot video is up in the air.

5) Laptop. I’d like a better version of my current laptop, a Sony SRX87P. Built in WiFi is a must, as is a DVD drive, which mine doesn’t have. Lighter the better. I don’t want to lug a lot of cables around either.

6) Web hosting. I think I probably have this taken care of. If Google doesn’t recind their video hosting, the heavy bandwidth part might be taken care of too.

7) Video editing. I will work under the assumption that I will have to do some editing on the road. If possible, it would be great to have someone back home who could polish and do a more professional job on the raw footage.

8) Communications. I’m assuming that most cities will have some sort of internet cafe or something. If not, I’m SOL. I will probably bring some sort of headset for VOIP calls. I’m also assuming that I can upload low quality video/audio from the road, but may have to send DVDs with higher quality stuff back to the US.

9) I’m debating if I should try to contact people regarding sponsorship before I start, or wait until the website is up with content. I could start the site before I go and document the prepartations. If I approached someone now, would I just come across as a loon?

Any thoughts or ideas are welcome.

I think the solution to “how am I going to serve up video” for my trip website may have just been solved.

I’ve been asked by many people if my trip is still on. It is. I’m not going to start for at least a year, when I get done at the U. Till then, I’m going to plan and prepare. Selling the house is a big first step. Other smaller steps will be getting and idea for how I’m going to manage the technology, what I want to do for the website, etc.

I think I got a domain name and a site name nailed down. I haven’t reserved it yet so I’ll let you know what it is after I register it.

To give you an idea of some of the technology things I’m looking at, here is a video shot by Bietz using the Sony DSC-T1, the same camera I have. Its not what I’d use as a primary video camera, but it doesn’t suck either. Especially considering its designed to be a still camera.

One other item I’m looking at are lightweight laptops. I have a Sony currently, but I’m not sure its what I would want to take with me. Nothing I’ve seen so far has jumped out at me.

Sometime in the next few months I will have to take down my reef tank. In a wierd way I’m looking forward to it because it will give me an opportunity to start over with a smaller tank. My current tank was my first reef tank: 175 gallons. Most people start with a small tank and get bigger, but I’m going backwards.

Why am I looking forward to it?

1. I can use the lighting I have for my 175 on a 50 or 75 gallon tank. This should provide a lot more light per gallon and allow me to grow SPS corals. Something I’ve had a hard time doing in my tank.
2. If I transplant some of my current livestock to a smaller tank, it will look a lot better.
3. Not having a tank as the centerpiece of your living room will give me more freedom to monkey with sumps and pumps.
4. Maintainance will be a helluva lot easer if I can reach down into the tank and touch the bottom without the use of a chair.

In conjunction with my senior project, I’m going to see if I can get a sample of stromatolite and see if I can grow it.