Australia: From Toronto to Sydney

We’ve arrived.

After parting with family in Toronto, we barely made it past airport security. That is, as Heather picked up her bags to walk away after being cleared and she dropped her boarding pass and stepped on it. She was ready to keep walking too, if I hadn’t spotted it. Close call!

On the flight to Vancouver, Air Canada gave me a whole can of ginger ale rather than just filling the tiny plastic cup. You come to appreciate these things very much when it’s $10 for a freaking sandwich on a 5 hour flight. (They were much more generous on the 15 hour flight to Sydney, but I don’t suppose that was by choice.)

I still don’t understand many airplane rules around electronics. I did a bluetooth sync between my Palm Pilot and my laptop over the Pacific and the plane didn’t crash. Why can I read a book on descent, but not read from the screen on my laptop or Palm?

Being without an Internet connection for so long has got me thinking about better ways to work offline. In Vancouver, I found some WiFi to quickly download new items from Google Reader using Google Gears. That got me thinking about where else could I use Gears (which is released under a free software license, by the way). Could my company use Google Gears for NateOffice for offline access to the CRM, calendar, etc as opposed to developing tools to sync with specific desktop clients? Could Gears being used in WordPress (plug-in possibly?) to make it easier to write offline? I don’t know much about Google Gears, but now I’ve got some motivation to start doing some research and play around with it.

Also, reading offline has been a welcome experience, but it’s also got me wondering why it has to be that way (offline, that is). More to come on that soon, after I do a bit more reading…

Upon arrival in Sydney, we spent the day running a few errands and scoping out the city for our return in a few weeks. I tried to sign up with 3 mobile, but it turns out they only have a 3G network (go figure). I ended up going with Optus across the street and getting a decent deal, which works out to ~10 cents per international text (as opposed to Rogers’ 60+) with a $30 AUD prepaid plan (which included the SIM card). I don’t plan to make any calls, though it’ll be nice to have the option in case we need to make last minute reservations or cancellations on the go. For phoning home, I’ve got WengoPhone working in Ubuntu. It’s less than 2 euro cents a minute for a call to a phone in Canada from my computer, which crushes anything Optus (nevermind Rogers) can offer, even considering the cost of WiFi around here (~$2-3/hour —> ~3-5 cents/minute).

We had a chance to visit Darling Harbour briefly and scope out the hotel we’re staying at during World Youth Day. We swung by the World Youth Day office to ask a few questions and pick up some information too. The excitement was contagious!

We still have no idea what we’re doing after check out in about 12 hours, but I guess that’s half the fun! Canberra is next on the itinerary… after we get some rest.