I wish I had a hat. I mean, all the other tour groups have them, so why can’t we? I feel like I’m missing out on one of the quintessential parts of the Chinese tour group experience. Yup, I’m on one of *those* tours. We get on our bus. We get shuttled to the next [...]

I love travelling as a civilian, which is to say, not having to hump around a giant backpack full of camping and climbing gear. The stuff in the photo above is all I plan on taking. The only things missing from that shot are my laptop, my SLR, a pair of noise-cancelling headphones, and the [...]

This is a test post to see if I can blog via email.

As usual, I’m procrastinating before a trip. Wins: got offline email working (thanks Aron!), picked up a nice little p&s for walking around shots, scheduled surgery (May 11), China logistics Fails: taxes, laundry, refi Indeterminate: other real estate dealings Here’s where we plan on going: Beijing (北京), Kunming (崑明), Jiuxiang (九鄉), Lijiang (麗江), Zhongdian (中甸), [...]

There’s been quite a bit of hand-wringing from dead-trees newspaper crowd lately as their entire industry is finally being forced to deal with that pesky internet thing. As usual, Seth Godin has some great ideas for anyone with the courage to implement them, such as Time to start a newspaper and When newspapers are gone, [...]

I’ve avoided reading this post on the evils of url shorteners (like tinyurl and friends) ever since it appeared on reddit, hacker news, digg, etc. because it’s one of those posts that you can compose in your own mind just from reading the title. But then the Freakonomics blog picked up the story, and I [...]

One week. Still need to do taxes. And try not to get too bad of a haircut in an ill-planned real estate deal. There are probably a million other things I’m forgetting. The ones above are simply what keeps me up at night.