Four days to launch, all systems panic

Cleaning the house, stacking up things that still have to be stored, working out which documents we need - and which work files I need in order to make progress on two books while on the road.

We just discovered that Aidan and Declan's wonderful nanny from long ago, Sarah, is living in Hong Kong. We are planning to meet, and she just sent me a long e-mail full of good advice on where to stay and what to do.

Boys' haircut day tomorrow... Aidan, Declan and I have (to Kerry's consternation) decided to "travel short."

More on E-Books

Well it turns out all is not quite so simple. Library books are protected by digital rights management (DRM), and the only way to get a DRM'd book on the sony reader is to run it through the sony software. And the sony software only runs on windows based machines. And the netbook we'll be traveling with runs linux. And for that matter, to buy from the sony store, we also have to run the sony software (which again, we can't, since we've got linux). So we'll be loading the ebooks before we go, and be forced to rely on non-copyrighted items when we've gotten through our initial purchases.

Once the Kindle arrives, we'll see if they do any better. I was told that you can send non-Kindle formatted files to amazon, and they'll convert them to kindle format, but...wonder whether this works with DRM?

In good news, we can load a ton of books on the readers before we go, and we can add while we're with Clarissa and John in England (using their windows machine). And there are an amazing number of free books out there (anyone want to read all of Shakespeare?).

Just testing

Google makes it easy to post a photo to your blog and have it automatically land in a Public Web Folder too. Trouble is, I want to do the opposite: publish multiple pictures to the Web folder, then pick some from there to put on the blog..... I don't have the hang of this yet.

E-Books

I've done it--I finally managed to order a kindle (if you're hoping for one for Christmas, lurk on the site until they post some refurbished ones). Now we'll have both a sony e-reader and a kindle so we should never lack for reading material.

I've heard from other long term travelers, especially those with kids, that finding suitable reading material in English is hard and expensive. Digital books are such a great way around this problem.

And we've discovered that the public libraries, both Seattle and King County, have wide selections of e-books we can download for free where ever we happen to be in the world so long as we have an internet connection.

We're at less than two weeks and counting...

New York, London, Paris...

It sounds like the boast underneath an international perfume brand.

We just booked our accommodation in New York City (we'll be in Manhattan for three nights at the Belvedere Hotel near Rockefeller Center, then in Greenwich for three nights with Lori and family). Then to London, where Clarissa is trying to get us into both the Messiah and the Westminster Abbey Christmas Eve service. Then to Paris, for which our Montmartre apartment keys have just arrived.

This, irrelevantly, is a picture of a spectacular dawn over the Cascades taken from our bathroom window.