Traveling light
11:25 on Friday, November 07, 2003 • 3 responses
In a spirit completely antithetical to the very notion of “vacation”, I always find myself with completely unrealistic expectations for productivity while away.
My vacations aren’t really vacations. They’re explorations. Why travel several thousand miles to sit by a pool and sip ice tea? That’s not my idea of a vacation. That’s my idea of wasted time.
Maybe I’m just one of those people who has a fundamental incomprehension of the term ‘relax’.
It’s my firm belief that much of the ignorance in western culture is a direct result of a media culture which, in its preference to receive information and experiences passively, suppresses active curiosity. So when I go somewhere, I tend to try and sample every possible thing I can.
Nevermind that the overwhelming majority of those samples involve large quantities of food.
Anyway, it’s a given that I’ll take lots of photos. It’s also a given that I’ll make at least a handful of posts to etherfarm or entries to my journal. But I don’t want to take my laptop is because I have a tendency to spend more time in Photoshop and Logic Audio than I should when I’m away. So I’ve been working on ways that I can still post to the farm and store my photos but leave my laptop at home. I’ve acquired a small collection legion of devices which will allow me to post images and test to the farm from a wireless-enabled Palm T3, which weighs a small fraction of my laptop. I’ll (hopefully) be offloading my digital images onto my iPod. The whole rig weighs less than 1.75 lbs, which is great, because that will allow me the luxury of toting my camera and lenses, which together weigh about as much as a small horse.
Maybe one of these days technology will deliver a small paper sketchpad which, with a lead-equipped stylus, can double as a journal. Wouldn’t that be grand!
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