Getting ready for a vacation can take quite a while when you don’t take them regularly.
We aren’t taking a lot of clothes. I never have been one to over pack in this regard; I probably learned this when I backpacked Europe when I was younger and every ounce I took had to be hauled around for five weeks. Karin has said she also learned this after our honeymoon trip, as she never did wear half of what she brought along.
What is taking some time is obtaining and organizing all of our electronics.
It seems weird to take a lot of electronics on a relaxing vacation, and I have even commented on it before when I have seen others overdo it. But as we are preparing for this trip, I realized just how much we will be taking this time around. Last trip we had a 2 megapixel point and shoot camera (hey… it was 5 years ago, that was high technology!) and a video camera. I do not count my SLR camera, as it is a 35mm film camera.
For us to return to Playa del Carmen for our fifth anniversary, we have had to budget far in advance, basically since the wedding. There has been a number of electronic items that we have been planning on purchasing for which we have also budgeted, and we decided for each to delay purchasing them until just before this trip. With the advances in technology today you eventually must just plunge in and ignore that what you buy will very soon be replaced by something better and cheaper; and we choose our trip to be the plunge time as we wanted to be able to take each on the trip with us. As this is the blog of a geek, I thought I would devote some posts to our new gadgets.
To begin, several months ago we each purchased media players. Karin had wanted a MP3 player for some time, but she could make due without it. I sometimes felt cruel reminding her of this fact when she would see one on sale; but each time I would point out how much better it was than the last sale in both price and features, and that waiting until close to the trip would pay off, to which she would reluctantly agree. When we did begin recently to look at what was available, the Sandisk Sansa was a strong contender as it had a decent amount of memory with a micro-SD slot to add more memory, and it also as an a LCD screen for bonus viewing of pictures and video. When Future Shop had them on sale one week, I checked their competitors’ websites to see if the sale price was good, and I found an obvious mistake for the same player on the Staple’s site. The 2 Gig Sansa player was listed for half the price it should be, it was even cheaper than the non-video version. We ran down to our local Staples, but they didn’t have them in stock; which is OK as they would likely have been properly priced. We then headed down the street to Future Shop and pointed out the online Staples price, and they were more than happy to beat it by a further 10% of the difference. In the end we were paying less than half of the true going price, and with that deal we bought one for each of us.
Then more time was spent installing an alternative firmware, which is the software that runs on the player. That’s right, you can change that for a number of players. I installed Rockbox, which is a large open source project that has versions for other players also, such as iPods and iRivers. Rockbox doesn’t just allow you to play music and videos, but takes advantage of the players being a small computer and adds in items such as a calendar, eBook reader, and game player. Neat features for sure, but it just makes that much more to figure out.
Time was also spent on accessories. Without leaving Future Shop, we could have easily spent more on items such as cases for our players than the players themselves cost. Instead I spent a lot of time looking up acessories for this and other items we recently purchased, and ended up making a number of eBay purchases. Yesterday our largest order arrived, which included a silicone and a leather case for each of our players, and a car charger and a wall charger that will both also charge any other devices that charge via USB.
Having my own player will be handy. I had already been thinking of buying a digital voice recorder that I could use to make notes with when taking pictures. A voice recorder would also be handy for remembering everything that I wanted to blog about; my journal attempts at night last trip did not prove too successful. For the same amount of money I now have a player that doubles as a voice recorder. I’ve already found that it is quite handy to drown out everything in the background when you need to get something done at work.
Naturally this has been heaven for a geek like me. Before we leave next week, I’ll introduce you to the other toys we’ve acquired.
