I've been bouncing around Galway for a week now, and one thing that surprises me compared to a lot of other countries I have visited is how hard it is to find free WiFi. Lots of places seem to offer it on the internet, but when you actually show up to use it you typically only get 20 minutes for free via BitBuzz or Boingo. As someone who typically works remotely as I am travelling, 20 minutes just doesn't cut it. Working In Galway Thankfully I found a pub in completely free WiFi in Galway: The Front Door. So while I typically prefer to spend my days working in coffee shops, for the time being ...

Back in high school I signed up to take English Literature, which for me at the time was a rather unusual departure. One of the reasons I decided to take the plunge was due to the rather passionate sales pitch by the teacher at the time, Mr. Chadsey. As it turns out, it was one of my most enjoyable courses ever, and many of the poems and prose I read at the time has stayed with me throughout most of my adult life. Oscar Wilde Statue in Galway One play we read at the time was The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde. Due to the controversial (at least at the time) life of Oscar Wilde, the ...

Many people don't realize that if they are in another country that they will often have to pay for all their medical expenses out of their own pocket. A simple visit to a doctor's office probably won't set you back too far in most countries, but being hospitalized can potentially bankrupt a person in certain parts of the world, such as the United States. I had a friend who got into a scooter accident in Thailand years ago, and only avoided hefty medical bills thanks to the travel health insurance he purchased before leaving Canada. So without a doubt one of the first items that should be on everyone's ...

Rebecca Bollwitt is one of those rare people who doesn't need an introduction. Her Vancouver blog, Miss604.com, is well known in Canada and parts of the United States, and has been voted the #1 Vancouver blog for the last four years. Rebecca has organized several conferences in the Vancouver area, including two WordCamps, several Twestivals, and several blog-until-you-pass-out 24-hour sessions of Blogathons. Not only is Rebecca actively involved with Vancouver and her website, but her and her husband also co-founded a WordPress-centric design and development company called Sixty4Media. She even ...

Anyone who has flown across a few time-zones knows just how inconvenient jet lag can be be. You either arrive in a new destination exhausted, often unable to sleep, or find yourself walking around a new location in the middle the day like a zombie. A Jet Lagged Sea Otter Fundamentally jet lag occurs because your body's internal clock is out of sync with the time in the new location after you arrive. While you can observe jet lag whenever you cross a time zone or two, it's usually more prevalent when flying between continents. The worse jet lag I ever had was coming back to Canada from Ireland ...

I used to wear a watch all the time, probably since I was around 18 years old. My first watch was some tacky gold-plate Seiko that I took a fancy too around that age, but over the years I slowly upgraded to more stylish options. That changed around the time I purchased my first iPhone though, when I suddenly stopped wearing one. I guess at the time I figured wearing a watch was a bit redundant since my phone could show the time with just a single click of a button. But last year I started noticing other guys wearing watches again, and I thought it looked sort of cool. I looked around my apartment ...

Piggy Bank, Photo From 401kCalculator.org While I've tried off and on to make a little money from my website over the years, it's never been something that was really important to me, primarily because I have another full time job that makes me more than enough money. Another reason is that I personally am not a huge fan of most advertising, as I find a lot of it to be intrusive. That said, travelling around the world and writing about it isn't cheap. I likely spend anywhere from $6,000 a year or so on plane tickets, and lots of other money on tourist attractions, subway tickets, bus rides, and ...

One of the first items I try to tackle whenever I hit a new country is to get a pay as you go SIM for my iPhone. If you are on a budget it's something that you may not want to do, but I find having data on my phone invaluable for various reasons. Last time I was in Ireland, I opted for a Vodafone SIM card for my iPhone. I remember at the time it was reasonably priced and gave me 100MB or so of data. Since I was going to be in Ireland for a month though, I wanted to have more data. I look at Vodafone's pricing, but it started at around 40 Euros for the month for 1GB worth of data. Getting A SIM ...

Anyone who likes to cook can appreciate the challenge of making food without a nice selection of herbs and spices. When I'm back at home, I have a pretty full spice cabinet with probably about 30 different containers ranging from saffron to gran masala to coriander. But unfortunately when I travel finding some of the herbs and spices that I'm used to can be a challenge in many parts of the world, and basically impossible in other parts. A good example of that is chilli powder - it's basically available in every supermarket in Canada, but I couldn't find it anywhere when I was in Brazil. Since ...

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I'm currently in Europe travelling around with my girlfriend, and our plan is to be here until December. Since she was adamant that she didn't want to bring a full computer with her on this trip, we decided we could make due by sharing my Macbook Air for various tasks. That meant that whoever wasn't on the Macbook Air would have to make due with one of our two iPad Minis. I don't mind using my iPad Mini at all, but typing on it gets a bit tiring, especially when you're trying to work on a document (such as an eBook), or put together a presentation. I thought in this case that it might be a good ...

Last year while in Paris I decided to head down to the Louvre, one of the finest museums of art in the world. While there are several masterpieces there, one of the most valuable paintings in the world in also displayed inside the Louvre: The Mona Lisa. The Mona Lisa, or La Gioconda, is a painting by Leonardo da Vinci, and is thought to be a painting of Lisa Gherardini, the wife of Francesco del Giocondo. Part of the painting's appeal is the beautiful Tuscan background and the enigmatic pose of Lisa in the painting. The Mona Lisa, shown here in the Louvre Prior to viewing it last year, I decided ...

After three years of travelling solo and about ten or so of travelling with various businesses, I've become pretty used to booking accommodation online. Hotwire Hotels, Hotels.com, Priceline, HostelWorld - I've done them all. While each of those services listed above has advantages and disadvantages, one service I always go back to faithfully is Hotwire Hotels. Hotwire Hotel Room If you've never used Hotwire, their business model will probably come as a surprise to you. Essentially they offer you extremely discounted hotel rooms in most major cities in the world, which is a great way to save ...

I first heard about the Drobo Storage Array from my friend Tony a few years ago. A Drobo Data Array is basically a self-contained RAID-5 data storage array in a box. For anyone that doesn't know what that means, it's basically a fault-tolerant form of storage where you can lose any one drive completely and still recover all of your data. Unlike most RAID-5 software or hardware systems though, the Drobo unit is intelligent in that it will work with different sized drives, and expand accordingly in the future if you pop a new drive in. My business partner picked up a Drobo about six months ago, ...

Probably the best book I read last year was Steve Job's biography by Walter Isaacson. I thought it was a fascinating book that showed just what a polarizing figure Steve Jobs actually was. Recently I found myself looking for a new book, and Amazon recommended Walter Isaacson's biography of Albert Einstein, Einstein: His Life And Universe. I recently finished reading it and I wanted to share my review of it here. Einstein in 1921. Photo from Wikipedia. As someone with a physics background, I was impressed with how Isaacson dealt with some of the technical achievements of Einstein, such as the ...

Whenever I look to book a hostel nowadays, I almost always gravitate towards one of the online booking services such as HostelWorld. Not only can you see a huge inventory of available hostels in the area, but you can also see reviews from recent visitors. Sometimes a hostel with a good rating will have a bunch of poor reviews recently due to something like construction noise nearby, so it is always a good idea to read the reviews in detail. For our trip to Cuzco, Peru, we decided to stay three nights in Cuzco upon arriving to eat some of the local cuisine and to help get our bodies acclimatized ...

When you travel around as much as I do, you eventually find yourself in need of a rental car. While I'm usually quite happy to take a bus, often it's more economical to rent a car for a few days, especially if you're trying to get to a hard to reach destination (Cape Reinga in New Zealand was one location where I purposefully rented a car). If you've ever pulled up to a gas station in a rental or unfamiliar car, I'm sure some of you have wondered how to find the gas tank. I personally used to slow the car down, pop the gas tank open (often using the lever near the floor), then rock my head back ...

I recently returned from Brazil, and decided to stock up on some new electronics. While down at the Apple store I managed to grab a new bluetooth keyboard for my iPad Mini, as well as a few other gadgets. That's when my eye caught some of the Fitbit devices on display in the Apple store, and I decided to get one. What Is The FitBit Zip? The Fitbit Zip is basically a pedometer, a device that measures and records each step you take. If you wear it around during the day you can log how many steps you take, and in term how many calories you burned during the process. Fitbit Zip: Wireless Activity ...

I recently returned returned about four month's ago from a three week visit to Australia. I managed to make it as far as New Zealand in 2011, but didn't have the time to get across to Australia. Despite appearances, most people think Australia and New Zealand are fairly close - but they are actually separated by a distance that would take between 3.5 and 4 hours to fly between them, which is obviously quite far (like going from Calgary to Toronto). I left Vancouver on a Wednesday with the goal of being in Sydney on the Friday (you lose a day crossing the date-line). It was a long flight (14 hours), ...

Last year I sold my Nikon DSLR and replaced it with an Olympus OM-D M5 micro four-thirds camera. While I've had a few of the micro four-thirds cameras, the Olympus OM-D camera was the first one where the image quality seemed on par with my DSLR, not just for outdoor photos with tons of light, but also for low-light photography as well. As a former wedding and concert photographer, it was a bit challenging to go from my Nikon and Canon gear (where most of my lenses were f/2.8 or faster) to my micro four-thirds lenses, where most zooms are f/3.5 or slower. The lack of a built-in flash on the OM-D ...