I’m moving. Travelling, really.

Around the world.

In 3 to 4 month chunks.

A city at a time.

Really, it’s about time. I’ve been thinking about it for several years now, planning piecemeal, laying down disjointed bits of foundation. But it’s happening. For real.

One of the best perquisites of Canonical is the inherent assumption of remote working. As long as you have a laptop and wifi, you could really work from anywhere in the world (modulo a tiny bit of reality, but for the most part true), assuming you remain productive and available for your colleagues.

It’s time to get while the getting’s good, and take advantage of the freedom. Have laptop, sense of adventure, and strong GI tract; hitting the road, in search of wifi and the perfect bánh mi (or empanada, I’m not terribly picky).

I love Fort Collins. It’s the perfect Pleasantville, and I’ve never been happier living here for 8 years. But Penelope claims that you cannot have both a happy life and an interesting life; you have to choose one.

So, I choose interesting.

FAQ
When are you leaving?
I leave Ft. Collins on 30 September 2011.

Where are you going?
First stop is San Francisco.

San Francisco is hilly, isn’t it?
Right-o. Hence the recent addition of a rear brake on my fixie. I’m not too scared of pedaling a 54×19 up hills, but I am scared of riding down them without additional stopping power.

For how long?
My sublease runs until 31 December 2011. I’ll probably extend it by an extra month and stay til 31 January 2012 because moving on New Year’s Eve sucks. Unless the world ends, of course, in which case the move will be permanent.

Then what?
I’ll come back to Ft. Collins to make sure my house hasn’t burnt down. Maybe gather a few things, maybe sell some other things, maybe do a bit of skiing (February is the best ski month in Colorado anyway), and figure out where I’m going next.

Oh, you’re not selling your house?
No, I’m too lazy to pack yet, or to fix the small nagging things that need to be fixed in order to sell a house.

Are you renting it out then?
Yes, I’ve some friends renting it out for the first stretch, but nothing lined up after that. Would you like to rent a nice house in early 2012?

How about your car?
My lovely renters will run it once in a while to keep the battery from dying. But I plan on leaving it garaged in Ft. Collins mostly.

Ok, so what’s next?
I’m not sure. I really want to go to Taipei, but it kinda depends on how my current work project is going. We currently have staff in two major timezones, the Americas and Europe. Stretching staff across 3 timezones into Asia is horrible. I did that for my last project, and it meant that someone always had a 2am meeting, which sucked. So, if current project is winding up as expected, Taipei is next. If not, then the next strongest candidate will be Buenos Aires.

What factors into your choices?
I’d really like to improve my Mandarin. I plan on taking lessons in San Francisco, and continuing them in Taipei if I end up there. Otherwise, my Spanish could use some tuning up as well. And I fucking love empanadas. Seriously. A lot.

One factor to consider is the length of the tourist visa. Most countries will give US citizens a 90-day stamp without too much hassle, so those countries are more appealing. But to be honest, this whole trip is an experiment in playing it by ear.

Why keep coming back to Ft. Collins? Why not just a ’round-the-world ticket?
I wouldn’t exactly call myself commitment-averse, but I’ve noticed a common pattern in my life heretofore has involved a lot of hedging. Also see above note re: ear-playing (which sounds a whole lot worse than the longer phrase).

Will you blog? Tweet? Facebook?
Yes. Yes. No.

Email works too.

Will we still get platypus Friday?
I shall endeavor to please.

Don’t you think fake-asking yourself questions on your own blog is a little pretentious?
At times, I hate me too.

And clichéd?
Ok, ok, I get the point.

In any case, if you have travel suggestions, tips, whathaveyou, I’m happy to hear them all.

Stay tuned to this space for the latest and greatest.

Cheers!

SPACE BAGS

Belated Iceland photos. Been busy busy with life, the universe, and everything.

Goðafoss

ashy icebergs

See moAR:

• alex’s photos
• leonard’s photos
• victor’s photos
• tommy’s photos

Those with a keen eye or snoop around in the exif data will note that I made all of these photos with my Canon 10-22 wide angle lens. It’s becoming my favorite general purpose “travel with just one lens” lens in spite of several clear weaknesses. For most tourists who simply want to show they were there, this lens will capture more of “there” than any other, especially the grand buildings that are so prevalent in Europe. And, after a bit of practice, you can start taking advantage of the lens’s distortion to make interesting images of day-to-day life (since the small moments are what actually make travel interesting), but usually end up rather boring.

On the down side, the lens is slow and you’ll occasionally get frustrated with the “all wide, all the time” perspective, but on the whole, it works well for me as my walking around tourist lens, especially when you want to travel light.

Check out the full set here:

Budapest 2011

Oh, and for several reasons, I didn’t take many^Wany photos of UDS itself:

• “still life of people in meeting rooms” isn’t exactly the most exciting subject
• I left my Speedlite at home
• my lens is too slow (F/3.5-4.5 ) for most indoor shooting
• and anyway, you can see all of Sciri’s fantastic people photos on his site

I’ve been remiss in blogging lately.

We sailed in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and it was lovely. A week on a 43.3′ single-hulled yacht. And we didn’t kill each other.

Happy 30th birthdays, Brett and Lindsay!

• check out the rest of my photos
• and then see Brett’s pics
• and finally, Mike got great photos of sea monsters!

Today we take a peek at hippos. As you might imagine, these behemoths are quite easy to spot, not only due to their large size, but also because in the park, they have several well-established locations where they like to hang out.

The Wikipedia article is chock full of interesting facts. I’d recommend spending 3 minutes reading it just because you’re probably not thinking about hippos enough in your daily life.

For instance, hippos are most closely related to whales and other cetaceans. But their foot structure resembles that of a giraffe.

Wikipedia doesn’t mention much about hippos lounging on grass, but we saw these lazy bastards just soaking up the sun in the Ngorongoro crater.

Although hippos typically spend most of their time in the water, they don’t eat water plants, preferring to eat grass. They can eat up to 150 lbs. of grass at a time, and “over prolonged periods hippos can divert the paths of swamps and channels” as they walk to their favored grazing spots.

Adult hippos can’t swim! They bounce off the bottom of the river bed.

I find that fact to be ludicrous, as if these animals weren’t ludicrous enough already.

As hippos are related to whales, the typical way to refer to a group of them is a “pod”. An alternate group name, and the one I prefer is a “bloat”.

A hippo pool smells like an outdoor toilet that has been abused by animals the size of… hippos. That splashing water isn’t brown from mud. It’s poop. Hippo poop.

They mostly just lounge around, but there’s the occasional bit of splashing.

Males are only territorial in the water, but they don’t fight to the death; they fight to the pain… of humiliation. Once one hippo realizes it’s weaker, it goes away. And there’s nothing that’s more painful than humiliations galore.

galump, galump

That’s it for this edition of Tanzania Tuesday! See you next time!

The famous secretary bird, so-named because the feathers behind its head resemble a secretary with quill pen tucked behind her ear. This guy is cool because although he can fly, he prefers to run around on the ground and catch its prey by stamping on it or smashing it with its beak like a hammer. Wikipedia says:

Studies of this latter strategy have helped reconstruct the possible feeding mechanisms employed by the dinosaur-like ‘terror birds’ of five million years ago.

Think about that for a minute. Terror birds. Hundred-foot tall terror birds stomping around and smashing tiny mammals with their beaks. Terrifying.

A Kori Bustard. We got these confused with secretary birds, although in retrospect, I’m not sure why as they look quite different. Apparently, another bird (the bee catcher) is supposed to ride on top of this bird, although we never saw that happen.

No explanation needed for these ostriches. They’re pretty common in the Serengeti, and once we saw a flock of perhaps 10 or 12 just standing around. Quite a site. The male has the darker feathers, and the female is a lighter shade of grey.

I find it bizarre that they have different colored necks.

Small birds aren’t easy to identify for a non-birder, but the lilac-breasted roller is colorful and distinct. Other small birds were pretty much impossible to identify, let alone photograph, as they were constantly flying away from us.

We saw lots of crowned cranes, although in local vernacular, they’re just referred to as crowns. Surprisingly for me, crowns seem to be quite happy in dry environments, not needing wet marshes that we typically associate with cranes here in the States.

The helmeted guinea fowls always made me laugh because things are funnier when they’re fat.

Buzzzzz. A vulture from the old world. Wikipedia says they’re different from new world vultures because they hunt by sight, rather than smell.

One interesting tidbit I learned was that vultures spend as much time watching each other as they do looking at the ground, and when one bird takes an interest in something on the ground, the other birds join in on the circling. It’s the vulture version of keeping up with the Joneses, and in a hilarious parallel, it’s exactly what the safari trucks do on the ground, watching each other and congregating in hopes of seeing a lion or something.

Ooh, the vultures have found a dead wildebeest. Nom!

Ruh roh, a marabou stork has arrived. This bird is hideously huge and ugly, and by far my favorite bird I saw the entire trip. I thought vultures were huge, but look at how the marabou stork dwarfs them. It’s not just foreshortening either.

Mr. Marabou gulps rotting wildebeest down his gullet, which expands like a pelican’s. So awesome.

Thanks for stopping by for another installment of Tanzania Tuesday!

Two male Thomson’s gazelles face off

Today’s Tanzania Tuesday entry is about members of the antelope family.

Thomson’s gazelles are ubiquitous. They were, by far, the most common form of wildlife we saw in our travels. They’re twitchy and prone to bolt and perhaps the size of a blue heeler dog.

You’d think that it would be easy to differentiate Thomsons from impalas, because the impalas’ horns are curved to such an extreme degree.

In fact, it’s hard to tell the difference between the female impala and the male Thomson. The way to be sure is to look for the horizontal strip on the Thomson. Impalas don’t have stripes.

Impalas are larger than Thompsons too. They seemed to be about the size of a North American doe deer.

This is a dik dik. They’re really cute, really small, and rather rare. I think we saw two in all of our travels.

Too bad we never heard them scream, which is supposedly what they’re named for. It would be cool to see a mini-deer the size of a large cat, scream.

Speaking of rare, these were the only two eland we saw at all. The above photograph was taken from about 150 yards and even with the tight crop, they still don’t really fill the frame. Eland are extremely shy, and when we pulled up, even at 150 yards out, these two shied away. I only had about 30 seconds to get this shot.

Topi are pretty cool, leathery looking creatures. They were more common in the western part of the Serengeti, compared to the eastern part of the park.

The life of all animals in the bush is an itchy one. Flies, gnats, mosquitos, and all sorts of other flying biting stinging nasties fill the air and are just waiting to swarm. No animal seems safe, except possibly birds.

The lesson to be learned here is that air power is always the advantageous form of warfare.

Happy Tuesday!

Tech Tuesday is on temporary hiatus, as it’s been replaced with Tanzania Tuesday.

Today’s topic is lions!

In Swahili, “simba” are one of the highlights of any safari. Everyone wants to see lions. Luckily, these cats are rather easy to find while on safari, as they’re rather large (compared to say, leopards), and tend to laze about openly.

Surveying the Ngorongoro crater.

Default state of being: waiting and watching.

A lazy male.

Stalking an ostrich. Dream on, kitties…

What you won’t see much of are lions actually hunting. Mostly, this is because they hunt in the early dawn hours, and likely, you won’t be awake unless you can convince the rest of your group (and driver!) to be up at 5am and out the door by 6am.

If you do manage to find lions hunting during the middle of the day, you probably won’t see any actual kills, since what happens is that one safari truck pulls up to watch the hunt, and then ALL the safari trucks pull up alongside to watch as well. The constant influx of trucks obviously disturbs both predator and prey, meaning you probably won’t see any actual kills. Sigh, the tragedy of the commons.

You may have better luck in the less popular parks, but in the Serengeti… forget it.

Thompson Gazelle metaphorically crapping its pants…

Lion cubs are somewhat hard to spot, due to their smaller size and their coloring. But when found, they obey the law of charismatic megafauna, which is to say, babies of said megafauna are invariably cute.

Flies are a fact of life in the bush. Every animal has to deal with them, even if they’re at the top of the food chain.

Lions will hunt people; they’re what make the bush dangerous. It’s not like the ocean, where you can go scuba diving amongst sharks and they probably won’t bother you. If you’re walking around in the bush, especially at night, you’re easy meat.

Packer estimates more than 200 Tanzanians are killed each year by lions, crocodiles, elephants, hippos, and snakes, and that the numbers could be double that amount, with lions thought to kill at least 70 of those.

lions on wikipedia

Looking down into the crater of the Ngorongoro Conservation area around sunset.

So said the driver sent to fetch me from Julian Dean International Airport. We stepped into the night and sped towards the Dar Es Salaam CBD.

“Speak Swahili?”

I fished around a bit and managed “jambo!” but after that, nothing. Asim, satisfied, repeated

“This is Africa country.

Tanzania.

Dar Es Salaam.”