Have Network, Will Travel

Four people, one car, several New England states plus NY and DC (I lost count). In 7 days we have traveled 1400 miles, stayed in 4 different hotels and two relatives homes and never been without our network. We have two laptops (one windows 7 one new macbook pro), three iphones, one ipod touch and an another phone with internet capability. We used a Verizon MiFi 2200 for internet, 3g when it's available and local or hotel free networks. Our only technical problem is that we don't have enough power in the car to keep everything charged. With two iPhone chargers, we have to take turns charging.

Okay, so you are probably thinking that we are on vacation and don't need all this technology, and according to one of my kids, we are too plugged in. "No iPhone at dinner, Dad!" We did see lots of wonderful places and spent some great quality time with family and friends. It's been a great trip but thats for a travel blog. Maine is beautiful, took pictures and posted to my facebook. Part of the trip was for a wedding. When we arrived at our hotel, we used chat on facebook to find out what room other family members were in and who had arrived yet. Of course photo's were being posted even as the event was going on. There were long stretches where we didn't use any technology, but the comfort of knowing it was there was nice.

Interestingly enough, we used the plain old iPhone maps and "directions to here" to get everywhere we wanted, even a detour through Philadelphia for cheese steaks. Getting to Pats or Gino's can be a bit dicey. Off topic, we have eaten at both and prefer Pats because it has more topping options. We used it in Boston to follow the Freedom Trail and find restaurants. The iPhone maps worked pretty well for us. Hubby drove while I navigated. I guess if you are driving alone, then you need voice turn by turn but this was more a digital version of the old paper map, but with search functions. 

It's really nice having the network with us, it definitely made our trip easier, but it didn't define it. I'm not nostalgic for the old days without technology. In fact I think we are able to do and see more because we can search for great cheese steak or a good pub. I don't miss having to juggle several maps to travel and we have plenty of adventures and fun. Plus, DH likes being able to deal with all his email and not have 1000 of them on his return. 

Welcome Baby Mac

Ok, I finally did it. I'm posting from our new Macbook Pro. I still really want the iPad but couldn't justify them both. Macbook Pro won. I waited, rather impatiently, only 4 days to get it, checking the fedex tracking number several times a day.

Of course, it's the same mac I was expecting and the out-of-box experience is all I expected from Apple. I quickly set up the user accounts to match my iMac so everyone would be able to use it. Here's where it gets ugly. In a momentary lapse of judgement, I decided to set all three mac's to use Mail and set up gmail as IMAP instead of POP. For those of you who don't know about this, IMAP (as opposed to POP) is the protocol that allows you to use a local mail client like outlook or apple mail or entourage but changes are synchronized to the online gmail account. In English: If I make a change to the local email, ( archive, delete, move to a folder) then it will be the same way on all computers and at gmail.com. Here is what I wasn't planning to do: wait for 20 minutes while Apple Mail downloaded 6342 messages.....on all three computers! Well, I figured there are plenty of messages I could delete. I've had this account for years and never cleaned out the online version. I was using POP before so deleted files were never deleted on gmail's servers. Here is what else I wasn't planning to do: spend more than two hours on gmail cleaning out old emails. I've got it down to a respectable 2714. But there is no way to sort by anything in the online version so I have to search for say "amazon" then it will list all emails from "amazon" and I can select "all" and select "delete". How much fun is that?

Luckily, one of my wine drinking friends came over and saved me.