I’m heading to a friend’s wedding in Seattle in November. I’m actually pretty excited about the trip because it’ll be my first real weekend there since 2007. Seattle’s one of those cities I always expected to fall in love with, but for whatever reason, just haven’t managed to yet. I suspect it’s because I don’t really know where to go when I’m in the city, but I’ll do a bit more research this time around. The last time I was there I stayed at the relatively trendy Hotel Max, which was fairly central and had a decent little lounge. I was talking to the people at the Alexis ...

I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading lately with regards to travel destinations. First and foremost are a few travel books I picked up last year, namely one on Montenegro. But I also have books on Eastern Europe and various city destinations such as New York City. Reading them though one can’t help but feel that a lot of what made these destinations unique has slowly eroded over time. For example, you’ll find english speaking people in almost every city nowadays. I always like traveling to a remote destination and trying to speak in their language, but even on my trips I could always fall ...

I wrote a blog entry a few weeks ago where I toyed with the idea of maybe doing some traveling in the next year or so. While sitting on the couch here today watching movies, I started thinking about that idea more and more. The reality is that I can work from anywhere. All I need is a backpack with some clothes in it and my trusty MacBook Pro, and there’s really no reason why I couldn’t work from any little coffee shop I encounter. Now that my car and student loans are mostly paid off, my monthly expenses have dropped significantly. In an ideal world, I’d be able to rent my apartment out ...

Whenever you travel somewhere new, there are invariably a bunch of local customs or behaviors that you encounter that are completely opposite to those back home. I try to keep a mental list in my head such that I can try to seem less out of place when I return to a location a second time. Here’s a partial list of things that I’ve encountered on my travels that are different in various locations: In the United States, soft drinks are called “Soda”, not “Pop”. Most people will either giggle when you say the latter, or not know what it means In Oregon, all gas stations are full service. ...

Last night my friend Rebecca had a few tickets to the Canucks game given to her at the last minute. She popped on iChat and asked if I wanted to come, which of course I did. It was the first Canucks game that I had seen this year, and the very first game of the playoffs. Tonight I’m heading out to Osoyoos with John Bollwitt. Apparently he has a radio setup to do down at a wine show out there, so him and I are taking his company’s mini-cooper out to the interior for the weekend. Other than Mexico (which was obviously pretty cool), I haven’t ventured too far from home since moving back to ...

And a flight attendant had to help land the plane. Crazy. Glad everyone was ok. It’s strange that one person can’t land a plane by themselves. I would have thought they could have. ...

Someone on Twitter tomorrow asked for some advice on things to see and do in Tokyo, so I thought I’d write a bit about my trip in April of 2006. At the last minute, my employer asked me to attend a SIP interoperability conference in Tokyo. Since I had never been to Asia before, I thought it would be a pretty awesome trip. Derek and I left Vancouver sometime in the afternoon on a Saturday I believe, and we landed in Tokyo 10 hours later. Narita airport is actually more than an hour outside of Tokyo, so even after you land you still have a fairly long trek to get into the city. Derek and I paid ...

I do tons of flying compared to most people. The last few years haven’t been as busy as normal, but for a while there I was getting on a plane on average of about once a month to go somewhere with work. I chronicled some of my trips over the last few years here. One of the things I’ve always sort of snickered about on planes is the need to still blatantly point out that smoking is not allowed on a plane. I always thought it was fairly self-evident that one shouldn’t light anything while sitting on top of several thousand pounds of kerosene, but apparently I was wrong. It turns out some idiot ...

This weekend I’m going to do something I haven’t done in a long time — I’m going to head home. To be honest, I don’t think I’ve been back to Chilliwack since easter, which is a very long time for me. I’m not entirely sure what my plans are for the whole weekend, but I’m heading back to Chilliwack at least for a few days. I might end up in Osoyoos visiting a few friends, but I’m going to hold off making any plans until after I get caught up on sleep Saturday. I’m also hoping to spend a bit of time with my grandma, since I haven’t seen her in quite a while and she hasn’t ...

To say that yesterday was a rather crappy day would be an understatement. For several weeks now I’ve been planning on attending WordCamp in San Francisco. Since I’m paying for the trip out of my own pocket, I decided to try and be a bit more financially conscious than I usually am on trips. So I decided I would fly out of Seattle instead of Vancouver, which as it turns out was around $300 cheaper. I was actually looking forward to the drive, and burned myself a few CDs. I went into work for a few hours in the morning, and then hit the streets heading for Seattle. Somewhere around White Rock, ...

I went for a walk this afternoon down to the mall to buy a few new shirts. When I got there, I fielded a SMS message from John Biehler saying he was heading to the Apple store and asked if I wanted to meet up. I met him and Peter there, after which time we all headed down to the new Crumpler store on the edge of Gastown. I’ve always wanted a Crumpler bag, but they were hard to come by in Vancouver. So today I picked up a new camera bag with the intention of taking it to Victoria tomorrow. Here’s what it looks like: I opted for the smaller of the two bags they had, and I’m already regretting ...

Update – Hotwire came through for me again. We’re going to be staying at the Magnolia Luxury Boutique Hotel right in Inner Harbour. So exciting. The other day Arieanna contacted me via Twitter and asked if I wanted a photo pass for the festivities this weekend in Victoria. Since I haven’t been to Victoria in a few years, I thought it might be a good opportunity to sample some island beer and take some photos. Sometimes photo passes just let you get your camera in the door, and aren’t really anything special. However, Arieanna just got confirmation that our passes include access to the ...

Those of you that follow my Twitter feed probably noticed that I almost made it to Serbia about a week ago. I was scheduled to fly over there to spend a month helping out our software development team, but at the last minute it all fell apart. It appears that all the stars at work have realigned, and I’m most likely heading to Serbia this week. I’ll be gone most likely for around four weeks, and will be getting a small apartment out there. My flight will most likely take me from Vancouver to Frankfurt, and then onwards to Belgrade. From Belgrade, I’ll be taking a car or a train up to Novi ...

I left Vancouver yesterday to set out on a mini adventure. First, I swung by Langley to have lunch with my dad, and laid out a few options about where I was going to go. During the course of the meal I eventually finalized on doing the North Cascades Highway in the United States, and headed out shortly afterwards. I spent about an hour waiting in the line-up to cross the border. Considering I didn’t really have a final destination, the border guard was actually pretty nice to me and even chatted with me for a bit about life in Vancouver. I made it to Rockport on the first night, and set up camp ...

Wow, it feels like I’ve been disconnected from the Internet for a very long time. I spent today somewhere between Los Angeles and San Diego, hanging out at Legoland with my family. I actually wasn’t really sure what to expect, given that I haven’t really been into lego in a long time. But the good news is that Legoland was a lot of fun, and it was a nice change from the line-ups and the pace of Disneyland. Also, Legoland was near the water, and was a nice change from the hot weather down in Anaheim. Jessica, taking a break at Legoland. My nephew Derek spent about $150 on Lego in Legoland, ...

I tried doing a quick HDR of the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco. Turned out not bad with the fog. ...

Last night I ventured across the water and ended up down at Dave’s house in North Vancouver. It was good times, complete with an amazing BBQ, some rum, and a bunch of tech talk. I didn’t really feel like hiking to the bus stop at 1am to head home, so Dave let me crash in his guest room. The one thing about having a huge chunk of plastic under your eye is that you can really tell when your body is a bit dehydrated. For example, right now my left eye is really sore and I have a mild burning sensation, which usually happens when I’m dehydrated, or when I’ve had a few drinks. Obviously that ...

I hate Air Canada, really I do. They have screwed me over so many times and are at least partially responsible for how much I hate flying these days. The last time they gave it to me was last year coming back from Boston. I arrived 90 minutes before my flight and was told that due to weather they were going to delay us a while in the airport. Since I was hungry and needed a beer, I said no problem. So, they booked me on a flight two hours later and said it would be fine. The funny thing is even though it was raining outside, every other airline appeared to be operating normally. After dinner ...

I got an email this morning asking if I’d like to speak at a university technology conference in Venezuela in May. All expenses would be paid for. Caracas, Venezuela, photo by josemazcona Fun party in Caracas, photo my rmendezHell yah baby. Hell yah. I just have to come up with something to talk about. Maybe I’ll talk about the cute group of women pictured above. ...

Yup, I now have proof that yours truly is in fact a published travel photographer. What does that mean? That if you have a plane, a sandy beach, and maybe a few cute locals in bikinis waiting, I’d be more than happy to come help you out by shooting some photos. Air Transat’s In Flight Magazine, Atmosphere Air Transat sent me a few hard copies of their Atmosphere in-flight magazine, since I had only heard from a friend that some of my photos made it in. Sure enough, a few of my photos from the Dominican Republic are on pages 20-21 of the Winter edition of Atmosphere. Thanks for mailing it ...