Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later. At some level I’m almost relieved that it’s out of the way. Somehow yours truly lost his bank card today. I made two trips to the bank today, one to HSBC near Alto Palermo and one to CitiBank. At HSBC I took out 1000 pesos and at CitiBank I did the same. I made it back home, did some work, then went to a little coffee shop where I read for an hour or so. When I got home from there I opened my wallet, and was surprised that my bank card wasn’t in it. I actually have every other card in the safe in my apartment, but because I had gone to the bank ...

While SMS is great when you have a package that includes unlimited SMS messages, it can be extremely expensive to either send or receive international SMS messages, often to the tune of $2/message. Here are a few alternatives that are available for the iPhone to help reduce costs. Kik Messenger A few days ago, my friend John recommended that I grab a copy of the Kik Messenger application on the iPhone. Kik is an SMS-like application that allows you to have real time text chats with your friends over data or WiFi. Because it supports push notifications, it’s as real-time as SMS is, which makes ...

I’m down to the 15 hour mark right now, and am just enjoying a beer in my Vancouver hotel room prior to heading out and meeting up with a few friends for dinner. I went out yesterday and bought a few more things to take along on the trip, so I wanted to highlight those here. Marmot Jacket I originally went to MEC in Vancouver to buy a nice jacket for my trip. I was looking for something really light that I could possibly wear in the evenings, and also something to add a bit of warmth if I’m in Europe later next year. I found the perfect jacket at MEC, but they unfortunately didn’t have ...

My friend John sent me this link. I think you have to watch the video to truly appreciate the application: Basically it’s an iPhone application that can translate (in real time) between Spanish and English. Obviously the grammar is a tad off since the words don’t get reordered, but I can imagine a lot of really great uses for this on my trip. I’m going to grab a copy and play around with it this weekend. But definitely cool. ...

Mailbox, Photo By Dulcie on Flickr One of the obvious problems with going away for a whole year is figuring out what to do with your mail. While many services and companies these days offer paperless options, many still do not. I know first hand that if your VISA bill gets returned to sender, the very first thing the VISA company will do is put a hold on your card until you get a proper address again. So it’s important to have your mail end up somewhere. I briefly debated asking someone in my family to look after all my mail for me. The idea there would be to simply use one of their house addresses ...

iPad, Photo by John Biehler My recent trip to Mexico gave me my first real opportunity to use my iPad on a travel adventure. I haven’t really had a lot of time to try watching movies or TV shows on it, and thought it would be fun to try watching a movie on the plane instead of paying for an inflight movie on WestJet. I loaded my iPad up with Mission Impossible III, Dances with Wolves (I had a copy floating around) and a few new episodes of House. I also made sure I charged the device up to 100% before leaving for the airport. The first great thing about having the iPad loaded with movies is ...

I had an idea roughly ten years ago out in Ottawa for a website or service that would let you pick your starting destination and get a list of possible ending destinations. That idea came out of a trip my friend Rob and I tried (unsuccessfully) to go on. We were both sick of our day jobs in Ottawa, had lots of money (compared to other 24 year olds), and had a long weekend coming up. So we started calling travel agents, telling them we didn’t really care where we went, as long as we got the hell out of town. Despite our efforts, we came up empty handed since none of the travel agents or their ...