The Making of My Blog – Part 2

Getting the words down is always the most difficult part.

What I mean by that is that when I’m on the road in some faraway place, it’s one thing to collect interesting notes in my notebook for my Excellent Adventure emails that I have sent out in the past. It’s another to get them out to you. You may remember that I had mentioned in my final email from France last October that I would no longer be sending out emails anymore and I’ve spent a lot of time since then building this web site. So here it is and all you have to do now is tune in with your web browser and read my updates.

However, the problem has always been the effort it has taken to get my emails actually written. Generally this has involved me sitting at some Internet café for sometimes several hours converting my hand written notes into some semblance of an interesting story. The problem I have always found is that it takes time to be creative and I usually walk away after hitting the Send button feeling that I could have written more or at least proof read the thing once before sending.

So for the past four months I’ve been thinking of a way that I can compose my journals in the hotel every night and then just do a quick connection to the Internet to send my precomposed masterpiece.

This search eventually led me to the device that I currently using to compose this posting: my brand new Dell Axim X50 (see picture above).

I’m not going to make this a technical review as this really isn’t the focus of this web site. Suffice to say the X50 runs a version of Windows called Pocket PC and with the addition of this great foldout keyboard, it allows me to type my long documents a little bit at a time each night in the comfort of my hotel room.

Once I have typed enough, my intention is to get briefly hooked up to the Internet and post it (and maybe some pictures) for the viewing public. As the X50 has built-in wireless capabilities, my first choice will be to find a wireless connection in each location that we go to. By doing some quick searches on the Internet, I have already printed out a list of wireless “hotspots” in most of the towns in Italy that we will be going to in the fall.

With any luck, I will have the next 7 months to get all the bugs worked out of things and be ready to make my first Excellent Adventure posting from Rome in late September.

Baden

(written and posted from my Dell X50)