Technology

Two pieces of technology have made documenting the trip and communicating with friends and relatives much easier.

Photographs were taken with the Kodak DC280 digital camera. With a maximum picture resolution of 1880 x 1168, the photographs are clear and crisp even when magnified. The colors are also most impressive. Getting the pictures off the camera and into a computer is easy and fast, owing to the USB interface. I haven't run into any bugs in either the PC driver or in the camera itself.

Our host for this show is a Gateway Solo 2500LS laptop: Pentium II, 330 MHz, 64 MB RAM, DVD-capable (great for watching movies on those 13-hour trans-Pacific flights). Many thanks to Jason Peeples for loaning me this laptop for the trip!

As far as Internet access goes, two thumbs down for the combination of South Valley Internet and global roaming (provided through GRiC) - it usually didn't work. Sometimes SVI would respond to my support request and global roaming would start working again, other times they wouldn't. I eventually gave up and started an account with a local ISP (Telstra Bigpond) and things have gone smoothly since then.