I am now halfway through my tour of part of South America.

Cayo Muerto

The trip started off in Venezuela (more pictures from Venezuela here) where I was immediately introduced to my second family, the Hurtados. About 90 minutes after landing in Caracas, I had seen a dead body, saw Ines for the first time in almost 7 years, met her father, mother and other sister, about 30 (at least!) other members of her extended family, and though I tried really hard to remember their names, I forgot most of them. And then I got my first glass of wine in South America which was soon replaced with a cuba libre. Shortly after, some of Ines' friends taught me how to call Chavez a son of a bitch in Spanish, which was a new Spanish expression for me.

A Giant Man of War

I then proceeded to spend the next 3 days enjoying solitude and sunshine in the small beach town of Chichirivichi, reading, appropriately, 100 Years of Solitude. I also spent time recovering from the bad sunburns I received after my first contact with the sun in quite a while. I also got to see a great big jelly fish, which was awesome, and yet scary.

A long drive later and I was back in Caracas combing the city for Arepas (which are really good), wedding cheese, wedding pastries and views of the city. Thursday and Friday with my mom, sister and the Hurtados went fast, but seemed to cover much ...

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Railay East Sunrise

I've finally gotten around to finishing tagging, titling and describing my trip to Singapore and Thailand that occurred in March (!!) of this year. I know that it is really late, but I guess it is better than never. I put all the pictures up on flickr for people to check out. Since I've got flickr integration now, you can see the pictures in my photo gallery on my site. I've changed the privacy settings for all the pictures that have people (I know) in them, so to see those you will need to be a contact of mine on flickr. However for all the other ones, you can check them out on my site.

• Singapore Pictures (with a couple in Malaysia)
• Thailand Pictures

I also have the trip up on my travel page, so you can get a general idea of where I went. You can check it out at here.

I've had a bunch of ideas recently for my travel page that I've wanted to implement. However, in order to implement them, I've needed to rewrite the Javascript that powers the page. I chose to use the Prototype Javascript framework due to my familiarity with it and its browser compatibility. After some time spent rewriting the code, I was able to get the page back to the same feature set (for only like the 5th time).

The rewrite has allowed me to quickly and easily add two new features to the page. The first feature is the ability to view track segments. This means that I can have a track that is broken up into segments, and each segment can be shown individually. Currently, I don't have any trips that have track segments, but I may start taking advantage of that in the future.

Second, when no trip is selected on the travel page, something interesting is displayed. Now, all trips are aggregated together and shown on the map. So so you can get an idea of all the places I've been at a glance. Note that right now the page load is really slow. I know this and I know why it is slow, and I've got plans to address it.

As a final note, I've tested the page on Safari 3.1.1, Firefox 3.x and IE 7. With other browsers, your mileage may vary. And seriously, stop using IE, please. It hurts the internet.

After arriving in Singapore quite late and subsequently getting little sleep, the next two days can best be described as me acclimating to Singapore, in more ways than one. Not only is there a 15 hour time difference (midnight in Santa Barbara is 3pm in Singapore), but there is also a hotter and more humid environment, better food, friendly people and more.

So to begin my first day in Singapore, I proceeded to get a cab to the office I would be working at. I had no idea where this office was located; all I knew was the address and the name, "The Comtech Building". I gave both of these pieces of information, along with the name of the company I was visiting, and got a ride to 438 Alexandra Rd. This was indeed the location of the company I was visiting (there was a big sign for them), but was not the right address. The address I had been given was 60 Alexandra Terrace. The cab driver went inside and asked, then came out declaring this the right place. So I gathered my heavy books and left the cab, which quickly drove off. I asked the attendant inside where to go, and he told me I had the wrong building. So I doubt the cab driver asked him anything. Luckily, the other building wasn't too far away, which gave me my first chance to walk in the nice Singapore heat and humidity. By the time I reached the right building, carrying my heavy books, I was sweating tremendously. The fact that all buildings are heavily air conditioned sure helped. After kind of cooling off, I proceeded to the right lobby and got checked in, feeling very unclean the rest of the day. The day went smoothly enough, with ...

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Starting the morning of March 17th, 2008, I began what is my first international trip of the year. I started keeping an even more detail journal of my travels this trip, and will be slowly posting them online here. Below is what I've written up on just the trip to Singapore.

After getting back from Mammoth with Green Hills around 10:30pm, Sunday night, I proceeded to pack for my 3 week trip to Southeast Asia. Around 1am on Monday, I was finished (or content that I was finished). 4 hours and 15 minutes later, I was awake. Shortly after that, my sister Megan picked me up for the short journey to the airport. I arrived a fair bit earlier than I should have, but after my debacle with going to India the first time, I didn't want to take chances. So I got to sit at the airport for a while.

The flight to San Francisco was uneventful and short. At SFO, I only had to wait a short while for my buddy Marcus to arrive. Coincidentally, Marcus was on the same flight as me to Hong Kong, though he would be staying in Hong Kong while I was continuing on to Singapore. I used my skills (ie. membership) to get both of us into the Red Carpet Club, where we hung out for a bit waiting for the flight. Just before Marcus did arrive however, our other roommate from college, Joe, got a ticket to come to meet Marcus and I in Thailand after my stay in Singapore. So now it will be all three of us exploring the Andaman coast of Thailand. Basically, a really awesome time.

For the flight to Hong Kong, I had gotten a business class upgrade. I tried no less than ...

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I just added my GPS log of what I've done so far on my trip to Singapore. I also took a quick trip up to Johor Bahru in Malaysia, just across the border of Singapore, for a bite to eat for dinner. So far the trip has been awesome and I'm hoping to post some journal entries soon.

I've been recently working on updating my travel page. Part of the reason is that with the old page, everything was done with javascript, and thus was not good for search engines. Plus, it made the page much slower, and harder to work with. As part of the front-end change, I rewrote the back-end. Now, the back-end should be much better than previously and quite a bit faster. The back-end previously was in python, which was running as a CGI script, which took forever. The new version, in PHP, is going to be much more optimized. In addition, rather than loading all the GPX files at once, I now only load one GPX file at a time, cutting down on load time. And finally, now I can link to individual trips.

Below is a copy of an email that I sent out from India on October 18, 2007 about my journey and experiences there.

So it's now my 4th day in India and I thought I should send an email. Plus, I got sleep last night and am not struggling to stay awake during the breaks in my class. This is a long email simply because I wanted to record this stuff for my own records and figured while recording it, I might as well send it out as a status email. As they say: kill two birds with one stone.

I got into India on Monday morning around Midnight after a very long set of flights (~25 hours of travel time from Santa Barbara to India). The best part was that my luggage was not lost! At the airport, I met my driver (who is my personal driver for the week) who took me to the hotel. By the time I got to the hotel, it was around 1am on Monday. After barely noticing how nice the hotel was, I popped half an Ambien and fell asleep... to awake at 5am. I wasn't meeting my driver until 8am. I laid in bed for a good hour before conceding that I was not going to fall asleep. I started watching some TV and got caught up on world events in India, Hong Kong and Australia, the three English speaking places nearby that the English news covered. This was of course unless I wanted to watch cricket on ESPN or the other 5 cricket channels covering a repeat of THE SAME MATCH.

Finally I met my driver and we proceeded to drive the 5 or so miles to the company's office in 30 minutes. This was my first taste ...

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First of the new things, Happy New Year! It doesn't yet feel like a new year, but I'm sure it'll kick in soon enough.

Secondly, I finally decided to go ahead and get some real hosting going on. I eventually decided upon BlueHost as they had a good deal with all I wanted out of hosting. I think it should work out better than my previous solution of my personal computer on a dynamic cable connection. Not too mention the fact that my personal computer, on a wireless connection, is a laptop. I'm quite optimistic that the new solution is going to work out fine. So far everything has been painless and I got everything transferred easily.

While working on the hosting transition, I decided to do some upgrading to my site. I updated the styles and worked on the backend a bit. But, what I'm most proud of is my travel section. I got a Garmin eTrex Vista C GPS for Christmas, and I've set up a nifty little page. Basically, wherever I go on travels, I'm going to keep track my trip as a route on the device. I can also add waypoints at points of interest. Then, I simply export all that data and upload it. Then the page draws all the trips and plots the waypoints on a Google Map. I think it should be pretty cool showing all the trips I end up taking with the GPS. Eventually, I'll add more information on the page, but not for a little while as I'm pretty happy with what I've got done so far. I'll just have to go on trips and collect waypoints now. I'll let ya'll know when I do post updates ...

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So a week ago, my roommates and Matt went to Las Vegas to celebrate Marcus' birthday. We had a really great time. Unfortunately we lost a collective $220 on Cal's loss to UCLA. Overall, I didn't loose too much there, and would go back again, this time to take their money (if such a thing is possible).