The Colosseum, Photo by David Iliff I went looking tonight to find out what the new 7 Wonders of the World were. I remember as a kid hearing that phrase a few times, and I thought there would be some straightforward list somewhere that simply listed them off in order. Unfortunately I’ve now come to the realization that there are many different variants of the list, all of which were undoubtedly influenced by different countries trying to be on the list such that their tourism industries would benefit. In fact, if you browse through the Wikipedia entries for Wonders Of The World, you’ll find ...

I didn’t see it live, but I read the highlights, and it’s pretty much exactly what I thought it would sound like. Whenever I see Gordon Campbell talk, I can’t help me feel that he’s talking down to everyone, and that’s the perception I was left with after reading his speech. First, he apologized for not giving the province a heads up about the HST, but Ottawa didn’t give him enough time. If that doesn’t sound like the biggest copout ever, I don’t know what would. Even if that’s true, you gotta wonder about any deal that’s shoved down your throat with a ticking stopwatch attached ...

A while ago Epson asked me if I’d like to take their relatively new Epson Stylus Pro 3880 printer for a spin. Since I’m obviously into photography and the printer can easily accommodate colour prints, I thought it would be fun to test it out to see what it could do. First of all, I should say that this is a BIG printer. When the courier arrived to drop it off you could tell he was having a hard time moving it. Once it was in my apartment, it basically blocked the entire front door. Being a typical bachelor I of course left it blocking the door for the majority of the evening, but eventually ...

We had a customer email us today saying they were having some issues with PayPal. For the most part, PayPal is pretty reliable when it comes to purchases for us, and we don’t notice any hiccups. But today it seems like something was amiss within the computer walls at PayPal. The post on PayPal’s blog today said: Anuj from the PayPal comms team here. I wanted to let everyone know that we’re experiencing an issue on PayPal.com. It started at 8am PT today and means that almost all our members are having difficulty logging into their accounts and sending or receiving money from PayPal. We are ...

I haven’t purchased anything new for myself to wear in probably a full year at this point. Unfortunately for me, that means most things in my wardrobe are starting to look pretty ratty. In fact, I was wearing a shirt the other day and noticed at the end of the day that there was a big hole in it that didn’t used to be there. Yes it’s true, I’m that awesome. I was telling Dale the other day that I’m probably about two shirts away from seriously having to consider wearing a garbage bag for the day. So, definitely time to go out and buy a few new things. Unfortunately, I don’t really ...

It would be pretty hard to call myself a Migratory Nerd if I wasn’t in fact a pretty big technology nerd. Thankfully, I have enough photography and technological gear around here that it’s pretty easy to describe myself as a nerd. In a perfect world, I’d be able to bring everything along with me. But given that I want to travel with a 40L backpack, I’m not really going to have a ton of room in there. The following is a list of the technology I’ll be bringing along on my little adventure. 13″ Macbook Pro The idea that people used to once travel the world for months at a time without ...

I haven’t stepped on a scale in about a month, but without a doubt I have been continuing to slowly shrink. I know this because the current belt I use to hold my pants up has five holes, and I’ve gone from the hole at the far side down to the hole at the other side. In about a week I don’t think this belt is going to do the job anymore, at which point I’ll probably buy a new one. I’ve been meaning to go to the gym quite frequently this last month, but just haven’t really had the motivation for a few weeks now. Hopefully this weekend I’ll get back into my normal routine and start ...

I’m originally from a small little town about 150 kilometres east of Vancouver called Chilliwack. It’s a picturesque farming town nestled between a few mountain ranges, and far enough away from Vancouver to have a little peace and quiet. And while Chilliwack is my birthplace and where my most of my family lives, I’ve spent nearly a third of my life living in Vancouver, either out at UBC where I did nine years of post secondary education, or in the downtown core, where I’ve worked the majority of my career. When I set out on my upcoming travel adventure, it’ll be from a familiar place: ...

For the most part, I’ll be spending the majority of my time in Argentina around the city of Buenos Aires. While there, I plan to sample as much culture as possible, and hopefully spend some of my down time getting private Spanish lessons. Near the end of my time in Argentina though, I’m hoping to take a week or two off and actually do a bit of exploring around the country. One of the attractions I’ve been told to not miss is Iguazu Falls, which is located right on border between Brazil and Argentina. It’s quite the trek from Buenos Aires to the border of Brazil, and I’ll probably have ...

I went down to Mountain Equipment Co-op (MEC) in Vancouver a few weeks ago with the intention of buying a new backpack for travel. While I’ll be living fairly normally in Buenos Aires, I wanted to have a backpack that would allow me to take the occasional weekend trip without carrying too much or too little. Since I have a camera and a laptop, I also wanted a bag which could accommodate both of those, since I know one or two people who have had camera’s stolen from checked baggage over the last few years. Most travel books I’ve read go out of their way to remind people not to pack too much. ...

I haven’t blogged about my upcoming trip in a while, so I thought I’d do a quick update. I have one room officially boxed up, and the living room is mostly packed as well. The next big chore is to go through all my old clothes and get rid of anything I no longer wear. After that, I can box up what’s left of the bedroom, and then start working on the kitchen. Truthfully, it probably wouldn’t take me too much longer to get the rest all boxed up, but at this point if I go too much further it’s not going to be very exciting living in my apartment anymore. I sold my TV a while ago to someone ...

Almost ten years ago, I started playing around with some microprocessor hobby kits at home. At the time they main ones were called STAMPS and you programmed them with BASIC. You could make them run motors, measure temperature, pretty much whatever you wanted them to do. A few weeks ago I ran into my friend John, and he was telling me about a similar thing called the Arduino. It’s basically a small little microprocessor kit that has basic inputs and outputs that you can use to do arbitrary things. Given that I’m an electrical engineer by education and that I haven’t really done anything electrical ...

There was a time when I had over $6,000 worth of camera gear sitting in my computer room. I love photography, and having a whole kit full of professional lens is great to have, but it’s not really very practical to lug that much gear around, especially if you’re trying to travel light. I’ve spent a lot of time over these last few months thinking about what type of camera gear to bring. My first plan was to simply take along a high-end point and shoot camera and make due with that. Given that my old Canon Digital Elph was dying, I went out and bought one of the nicest compact cameras I could ...

Today is Tony Pierce’s 104th birthday. Tony’s a great guy who has built himself quite the media empire down in LA. The last time I saw Tony, it was at some dimly lit, somewhat seedy strip club in east Hollywood. Prior to that, Tony and I sat in his car in some parking lot, drinking cheap beer out of a brown bag and reminiscing about life. Good times. Have yourself a good birthday dude, and try not to get into too much trouble. ...

About a year ago I reverted this site to a simple theme, mainly because I haven’t been entirely sure what to do with it. I set out about six weeks ago to do a refresh of this site that would cater to some of my upcoming travel adventures. As I got about half way on it, I realized it probably would make more sense to do a dedicated travel site catering to people who want to explore world travel and also for traveling techies like my self to get more information about some of the places I’ve visited. So, that’s what I ended up doing. My new site is called The Migratory Nerd, and is at themigratorynerd.com. ...

I decided about six weeks ago that I wanted to have a completely different online presence for my travel adventures. While my personal site has served me well by allowing me to write about personal subjects and technology over the last few years, it’s become somewhat disjointed. So, with conscious effort I have finally managed to put something together with a specific focus: travel. Unlike most versions of my website, which normally take all of about two or three days for me to get online, I’ve slowly been tinkering with this one for the past few weeks. I haven’t had a lot of time, so mostly ...

Yesterday morning I woke up to a call from Passport Canada that basically let me know that they didn’t really have a solution to my problem. From their perspective all I had to do was to drive down to Vancouver, show some ID, and pick up my passport. The main obstacle was that Canada Post was saying that they would refuse to release it to me within a government issued ID that has my old address on it. Despite all that, I figured it was worth a shot anyways, so I packed up some documents that had my old address on them (including a copy of my 2009 tax return, and some T4 slips), and headed into ...

So, I made a mistake. I can’t really understand how I possibly made it, but it seems clear it was definitely my mistake. When filling out my passport application about a month ago, I accidentally put my mailing address as my old address in Vancouver. Perhaps I thought it read “Previous Address” or something like that, but after looking through what I sent them, I definitely put my Vancouver address into the “Mailing Address” portion of my passport. Which would explain how it was mailed on the 8th of October and also why I still don’t have it. I thought I could simply drive into Vancouver ...

It’s true, I’m a nail biter. I have been for as long as I can remember. I blame it on my mom, she was a nail biter too! The thing is, I’ve been biting them so long that for the most part I don’t even know I’m doing it. That’s what makes it a hard habit to stop. It’s not like smoking where you have to go find the pack, pull out a lighter, and then light up. I’ll literally be on the couch and realize my hand is in my mouth and I’m biting. I’ve actually never been successful quitting, but I’d really like to stop. I’ve tried all those fancy polishes that are supposed to help ...

In just 45 days, I’ll be out of my apartment out in Chilliwack, and essentially homeless for the next 30 days. Truthfully, now that my place is partially boxed up, I’m getting antsy to hit the open road. My current plan is to have a lot of my stuff already in storage around November 1st, so I can possibly go visit a few people in the United States in November. As I mentioned before, I’m also heading to the Mayan Riviera in just three weeks, which will be a nice break from the norm. I haven’t had a vacation in the sun since about the same time last year, so I’m definitely looking forward ...