There are a lot of different choices for airlines when you travel. To be honest, I take the ones that are the cheapest and have the best fitting schedule. But from this, I have still found some to be superior. Here is a list of them. Remember this is just from my experience.

• Emirates - I can't say enough about this airline. It is awesome. Good food, there is a entertainment console in the back of every seat, and I wasn't bored one second of the entire trip. The entertainment console let me watch a variety of movies, television shows, the in-flight map, one of two camers pointed and down and out the front of the plane, sports, play video games (some between other passengers like tetris), listen to music, and other things. It was great. My flight from Dubai to Johannesburg was on demand video as well. You started to watch something whenever you wanted and it would autopause when announcements came on. Based out of Dubai, so you will probably have a stop over there. You could be in worse places than the Dubai airport though.
• Asiana - Very reasonable prices. Food and service were great. They are based out of Seoul, so chances are you will have to stop over there.
• Continental - Good airline. Houston based so be prepared to stopover there.
• Air Canada - Good airline. Have a habit of lost luggage.
• TACA - This outfit is in latin america. They get a lot of bad reviews, but they are cheap and were fine for me.
• Aerogal - They have flights to the Galapagos islands. You are definitely not riding in style, but you don't have much choice. My wife received a flower when she disembarked.
• Tame - Airline from Ecuador. They get the job done.
• South African Airways - Was fine. Nothing special here either though.

Summary

Emirates is by far the best. Seriously, if you have the opportunity to take them for the long haul flights and the prices are the same, use them, you won't regret it.

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The age old debate amongst travellers. The backpackers do it there way and believe they are the only true travellers. The tour company people just want the simple holiday and not waste time trying to figure out how to get from point A to point B.

I married a "tour girl", my first trip on my own was backpacking so I can say I have seen both sides of this story. Both have their pros and cons and you have to ask yourself what you want to do. My first trip was, in my opinion, amazing. And when I look back as to why it was, backpacking was a big part of it. I had the flexibility to do a lot of stuff that you never would get to do on a tour. That being said, I also had 2 months to do it in and wasn't overly rushed.

Remember, think about what your aptitude is and what the place is like where you are going. Backpacking isn't cut out for everyone and you might not even enjoy it. Here are some pros and cons. I will just list the pros for each as the cons are intuitive from looking at the other option.

Backpacking

• Flexibility to change your plans.
• You can go places tours don't go. This is what made my Asian trip so good. Some of my favorite places weren't on any travel routes.
• You are not relying on the tour company to be good. If they aren't, you are going to have a bad trip without much choice.
• You meet way more people.
• Usually cheaper, but not always.

Tours

• There is no wasted time, generally. Everything is scheduled and booked so you won't have to wait around.
• Some things have capacity booking and a tour company will make sure you do what was on the itinerary.
• You can leave your brain at home. You are taken care of. Wake up calls in the morning, paperwork prepared for you, advice when you arrive to a destination, and the list goes on.
• If you tour with people for awhile you make good friends with a lot of people which is nice when you share activites with them.
• Safety. This is really important if you are in dangerous countries.
• Easier border crossings? This is generally true. I was recently in Africa and backpacking would have been annoying in more than a few circumstances.

I have to say I have enjoyed both. My tour holidays were very, very relaxing and my backpacking trip was an "adventure". With backpacking though, you need to be disciplined and resourceful. It is more of a working holiday because you always need to be on your guard and planning ahead, because no one will be doing it for you. If you are a hands-on-kind of person then go for it.

You need to consider the region you are going to as well. After being to Africa, I was quite glad I was part of a tour. South-east Asia is geared towards the backpacker so I was glad with that choice (not that I put any thought into it as it was my first trip). I would have gone either way when I was in Peru and Ecuador. I did it more like a tour, but their transit systems and the activities I did didn't require it. We actually tried a bit of a mix. We had a couple free days here and there where we did whatever we wanted. With the Amazon jungle tours, the Galapagos, and Machu Pichu it doesn't matter. You have to go with a tour company anyways, so whether you booked it as part of an overall tour from home or found each one individually it won't matter.

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I purchased this camera in March of 2006 and it has treated me well. If you are considering a camera I would definitely recommend it or its newer version, the D80. Takes good photos, comes with a protective lcd cover, has the extra scroll wheel for more quick controls over settings, and a variety of other cool features.

At the time, I just purchased the body and instead of getting the kit lense, I bought the Sigma 10-20mm wide-angle lens. I did this because I knew that instead of the 18-70mm kit lens, I wanted the more versatile Nikon 18-200mm VR lense that had recently come out. I use mine primarily when traveling and I knew this combination would cover me off in 90% of the circumstances.

My Nikon D70s

Since then, I have purchased the 50mm 1.8D lense, the SB-600 flash, and a camera-to-ipod file transfer device so that I'm set to go when traveling.

I did not own a film SLR beforehand so I did not have any other lenses to base my decision to by a Nikon off of. If you want to know why I purchased a Nikon here are the reasons. Keep in mind I was comparing to the Rebel XT.

• Number One Reason: The Nikon 18-200mm VR lense. If you don't know what this means, it is a versatile lense that goes from wide-angle to a decent zoom level. Perfect for traveling. I almost never take this lense off my camera.

  Now Sigma and Tamron make this lense for other cameras, but the extra feature with the Nikon is that it is a bit quicker on the higher zoom and it has VR (Vibration Reduction). If you are familiar with Canon, VR is Nikon's image stabilization. It helps you take more photos in low light situations. I have found it invaluable. The equivalent lense is not available for Canon yet.

  This lens was impossible to get a year ago, but now is more available and cheaper. You can read more about it on my article on the Nikon 18-200mm VR lens.

• I have large hands and I love the feel of a big, beefy camera. It just felt better in my hands. I bought and returned both the Nikon D50 and the Canon Rebel for a week each so I had a good feel for both of them. The Nikon just feel superior in terms of sturdiness. I don't know if it actually is sturdier but it sure feels that way.
• D70s had the extra thumb wheel. At the time I thought I would need it for manual shots, but I realize I don't do that many. It does control a lot of other features though, which I found I have used a lot. I hate going to the on screen menu and on the Nikon, I almost never do.
• D70s had the protective screen cover. I know this sounds lame. You can just buy the sticky plastic for your camera lcd, but I really liked it. It makes it look that much more ready to travel with.
• Higher maximum shutter speed (1/8000 sec). This is really nice in bright light as it occasionally can't have a fast enough shutter to not overexpose the picture.

Now that I have talked about how great it is, I will discuss some of the negative points I have noticed. This is from shooting with a Rebel XT to see the difference.

• The Nikon tends to have a "hot" flash. A little bright and sometimes too white. The Canon seemed to pick this up better. If you are play with your settings you can control it.
• The white balance is occasionaly wrong on the Nikon. This makes the picture have incorrect colors. If your pictures in RAW mode, this doesn't matter as it is easy to change when you at home. If you notice it on your screen, or like me, just get used to what situations it happens in, you just select the right balance using your command wheel and you're fine.
• Minimum ISO setting of 200. It would be nice to go lower for really brightr situations, but the high shutter speed compensates for that.

You can see more specs at dpreview.com.

Bottom line it is an awesome camera. The Rebels are excellent as well and I would tell you to buy whatever make your current lenses are. If you don't have any yet, then go try both out like I did and pick the one that feels the best. You definitely won't go wrong with the Nikon.

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For those of you who haven't heard of Second Life. It is an online multiplayer game where you can use in game money to buy and sell things, but this money has an exchange rate with the real dollar. It allows the casual gamer to buy money for use in the game and people who play all the time to make money on their own in the game. Kind of a neat concept. Check out this article here.

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Spam is one of the oldest and most annoying side-effects of the internet. Our mailbox can have flyers, but we have the option of posting a sign that asks politely to not receive them. There is no such option with spam. I just read an article on CNN concerning spam. It says that 9 out of 10 emails are spam.

This is ridiculous.

The thing I don't understand is that it has been around so long and there hasn't been a good system in place to stop this. I don't mean spam filters, this is just a big garbage collecting system. I mean an effective means to reduce the overall output of this stuff. There have been some individuals taken to court, but that obviously isn't working.

I have never purchased anything from a spam email, so I think I lack any understanding of it. How much money do these people make? It is obviously worth their time to cook up these schemes.

Whenever I think about the plague of spam these kinds of questions come up. Perhaps you could answer them because I would like to know.

• How much money are these guys possibly making off SPAM?
• How much SPAM is actually representing legitimate businesses or products and how many are scams?
• If no one replied to SPAM would it not become unprofitable and people stop doing it? Perhaps this is an education thing needed by the end-user.
• What is the actual cost to a 100 person company in dealing with it?
• How do they get these lists of email addresses and are there any repercussions for those that collect them or hand them out.
• I'm all for freedom of speech and privacy, but is there a sensable way of tracking down the sources of this stuff.

I don't know. I do not have any kind of knowledge to know how to fix this, but sometimes you just rely on technology to improve over time and take care of it on its own. This definitely has not happened with spam.

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Well I officially went live yesterday. I had this site in development for about a week and figured I better get it out before I let it fall to the side. I have 2 objectives from this site.

1. I see all these "how to make money on the internet" sites and I want to give it a try myself.
2. A place to write down all that stuff I'm working on or thinking about. Hopefully get some good comments over time that will be help me out.

Making Money On the Internet

Okay, I am going to write an article at least once a week on what I'm doing here. It will recap what I have done and how well it worked. Right now I have officially made $0 from advertising and I have paid out $10 for registering my domain name and the first month of server space. I will be paying $7/month from now on. My first goal is to recover my initial cost ($10) and achieve recurring $7 a month. This sounds like a pathetic goal, but thats what I want. If I can do that by the new year I will be happy. This is what I have done so far.

• Purchased a domain.
• Developed a "blog" style web site that allows me to create pages. People can view them and if they want to add comments they have to create a user account. There is also a rating that can be given to an article, but I'm not doing anything with it yet. I also used my own crude page counter.
• Written around 15 articles. Most of them are finance and investing, but I have added ones around my other interests as well (travel, music, and computers).
• Added my URL to Google and signed up for Google Adsense. I added the google adsense to my pages, but they still aren't showing up yet. I think you have to wait until your site is indexed before they do.
• I placed text ads and one large picture block ad on every page.

I also have some "to-do" items that I want to try. If you know how they work or advice, let me know.

• Add a site map to google for my site.
• Find some different ad companies.
• Improve the layout and look of the page.
• I currently show summaries on the main page. Perhaps in true blog style I should just lay out the entire article.
• Register with different search engines and blogs sites.
• Add a page a day of good content.
• Figure out methods to get more traffic and have higher google rankings. I'm going to try the "add good content frequently" strategy right now, tinker with the meta tags and such in my page, and follow any advice listed by the search engines.

A Place to Write Stuff Down

This is the "Add a page a day of good content" I mentioned above. I have an interest in finance and investing along with other hobbies. I keep little spreadsheets and notes laying around, but nothing in any formal matter. This will be my venue for that. Accessible from anywhere with a computer I will no longer have an excuse.

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This is the first lens I ever bought. I bought the D70s body and then purchased this lens at the same time. I have to say it has treated me very well. This a very wide angle lense and has let me capture quite a few moments. It is half the price of the Nikon 10-22, but it is lacking the vibration reduction and the better glass inside. For amateur photographers it will definitely do the trick. Check out the Sigma 10-20mm product page.

I have used it in a few situations so far, including...

• Inside churches and buildings where I can't back up any more and need to capture as much of the scene as possible
• Making distorted pictures
• Capturing large amounts of landscape scenery.
• Really capturing scope. You can take a picture of someone up close, but it still captures a huge amount of the background scene.

I have had a couple of annoying things with the wide angle aspect of this lens. Photographers will already know this, but for the novice like me it was new.

• The built in flash does not have enough cover for this lens. There will be a shadow underneath the lens. And I mean a sizeable one. I couldn't use this with a flash until I bought the SB-600 which has a wide angle diffuser on it or I could point the flash to bounce off the ceiling/wall.
• The lens cap that comes with it is really annoying. Doesn't always stay on very easily. The cap on the Nikon 18-200 is a lot better as it has strong springs and you have to pinch the cap on the inside to remove it.

I have written an article called Understanding the Value of Wide Angle Lenses.

Zoom Range

Here are two photos taken one after the other. I made sure the size of the front of the lens remained the same size in both photographs. The first photo is zoomed in at 20mm and the second is at the widest angle possible. This gives a good example of what a wide angle can do. It can keep the subject you are close to fairly large, but it gathers in more and more background into a shot the distance increases.

Sigma At 20mm

Sigma At 10mm

A technique I will commonly use is to walk as close as I can to a subject I want to be large in the shot, but keep them in one side or to the bottom of the frame. Then the wide angle can pull in all the detail to the side of top of the subject and really show the surroundings of the subject and set the tone for the photo.

Sample Photos

Here are a few photos.

Roux

Wake Surfing

Gravestone

Check out how long it stretched it upwards.

Trans Siberian Train Washroom

I was able to get the whole washroom in this shot.

Piano

This piano fills a lot of the photo, but I was still able to grab parts of the room and add them to the photo.

St. Anne de Beaupre

There is no way I could have gotten the whole cathedral in without backing way up and having a lot of empty space around all the sizes.

Dinner Time

My dining room is a bit tight. To capture the whole table I would have to move out past the wall with a normal lens. I was able to capture the whole scene here.

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This is always the big dilemma. You know you want a digital but what do you go with. I purchased a Nikon D70s SLR in March of 2006 and it has been a great camera, but it took me awhile to come to that decision. Cameras are an expensive purchase and you don't want to waste your money. I have tried, for a week at a time, both the Canon Rebel and the Nikon D50/D70s. In my opinion you can't go wrong with either one, but when you talk to people you will always get an opinion to go with one or the other.

Personally I find it quite annoying. Whenever someone gives you advice on this, you need to evaluate why they are saying it.

• Has the person always been a "Nikon" or "Canon" person. They tend to fall in with the brand and go a bit biased sometimes.
• Did they own an SLR before. Perhaps all their lenses forced them to buy the same brand anyways to avoid the cost of buying all that new glass.
• Have they tried the other one out?
• Do they know what you are looking for in a camera?

Basically, I would do the following...

1. Figure out what kind of photos you will be taking. What features will be of most value to you? If you are outdoors, traveling, portrait, everyday use, or whatever, it will make a difference to what you want.
2. Read up on different models. The best site by far is dpreview.com. There are excellent reviews written here to fill you in on the basics and the details if you want. They even discuss things that might annoy you like where a button is placed or how the on screen menu behaves.
3. Go to the store and try them out. See how they fit in your hand. If they have a good return policy like Best Buy, you might be able to get them and take them home for a week.
4. Talk to other people, but remember, they can be biased.
5. See what lenses are available for this camera. They usually are all comparable, but I really wanted the 18-200 and the best one of this is only available on the Nikon.
6. What type of warranty is included. Nikon is 2 years and Canon is 1, but most places sell extended warranties. Sometimes for only a small fee.
7. What do your friends have? Seriously. When figuring things out and looking at the next lens/accessory to buy, you can learn with your friends and swap lenses without having to buy them first.
8. Do you already have flash memory cards of a certain type? You might want a camera that supports that type so you don't have to buy more of a different format.
9. Do you want to take occasional short video clips? Point and shoots do this, but the average SLR will not.
10. How rough will you be with your camera, does it have a screen protector, rugged body, body material won't get all scratched or show scratches, more sealed to prevent sand from getting in, or etc. Konica Minolta has an awesome little point and shoot for traveling. Only a few buttons on the back, massive lcd, and the optical zoom mechanism was contained inside the camera. No moving parts or openings on the outside of the camera for dust, sand, or moisture to get in. I don't own one, but I used one from a friend for 2 weeks while in South America and it was awesome.

Last, don't sweat it. Most name-brand cameras are pretty good quality nowadays.

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This lens was one of the reasons I went with Nikon in the first place. I thought it was the perfect travel lens and I was right. It is so versatile that it covers you off in most situations, plus it has the added vibration reduction feature to save you a few photos from the low light situations.

This lens has been a huge success for Nikon and I think they underestimated the demand for it. Tamron and Sigma both have equivalent ranges on their lenses, but they are a bit slower, don't have the same quality of glass, and there is no VR (image stabilizer) on them.

See the product page for the 18-200.

Review at dpreview.com.

If you are thinking of this lens, I would definitely recommend it, but you need to ask yourself what kind of photography you want to do first. This lens isn't very fast, but it has such a good zoom range and vibration reduction that is makes up for it. It can replace a couple lenses in your bag for sure. Here are some pros about it.

• 18-200 gives you a nice range and lets you use one lens where you would probably have at least two. When I'm not traveling, I feel free to just take this as my only lens and know I will be okay for 90% of the situations I will be in.
• Vibration reduction is built into this camera. This will give you back a couple shutter speed stops when you are taking photos without a tripod. Really nice in low light situations and you can't use your flash. There are two pictures below of a lion painting in my home where I took the photo without VR turned on and then again with VR enabled.
  
  For more of an explanation of camera shake and Vibration Reduction (Image Stabilization on Canons) and some picture examples, read my article on Vibration Reduction/Image Stabilization.
• It comes with a lens hood. This is the black plastic piece that helps cut down on stray light interfering with your images.

No Vibration Reduction

Vibration Reduction Turned On

There are a few cons as well.

• This lens is quite a bit heavier if you are used to cheaper lenses with lighter glass.
• It is harder to find, but I understand it is easier now.
• It is a bit pricy for the amateur, but it is saving you the cost of a couple lenses if you think about it.
• You cannot use a teleconverter with this lens, so if you are thinking you will try and get a bit more zoom out of it, you can't.
• This is part the Nikon DX series of lenses. They only work with APS sized sensors to you cannot use this lense on Nikon film cameras or full size sensor digital SLRs like the D2 or D2X.

Basically, if you are the amateur, casual, and/or traveller I would recommend this lense as a good one lense solution. Go to a camera store and try it out. You will be impressed with the results.

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I added a google sitemap today. A sitemap is an XML file that contains information to aid Google in indexing your site. I didn't feel like writing the whole thing out, so I found a web site that would generate it for me and tried it out. sitemapspal.com worked pretty easy. I just fed in my url and out it spit the XML. I tweaked the XML a bit signify when pages would change.

I am just wondering what kind of a difference it will make to my site. It is so basic I would think it wouldn't but we'll find out. I changed the homepage frequency to daily and increased its priority, but that is about it.

I saved the text to a file called sitemap.xml and then used the Google website to upload it to my sites account.

Does anyone else know some more detail around it?

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