I flew MSP to Amsterdam, which took 8 hours and I lost 7 hours in time zone changes. Then I flew 3 more hours to Athens, losing one more hour. I slept a little on the plane (movies sucked), but plane sleep is always kinda weird. At least I was warm enough this time. I'm having no trouble staying awake right now though, and I don't anticipate having any trouble sleeping tonight, so I think I'm doing pretty good.

I had a driver waiting for me at the airport, which was kinda stupidly expensive in retrospect, but it was nice to not have to think about it. I'm thinking about taking the train or the bus back to the airport tomorrow for my flight to Santorini though. It's rainy in Athens right now, which is no big deal. Today was really just about getting to the hotel safely. Anything else is a bonus. Here are the first few pictures I've taken; nothing all that interesting yet.

I know shots of mountains from inside a plane usually only look cool to the person who took them, but I was surprised at how well they came through here.

And this is what happens when I get bored on the plane and start playing with the camera.

The Marriott room looks much the same as all the others I've stayed in with one exception being the power situation. There's one advantage to importing my phones from Europe, I don't need an adapter!

And here is the current view from my room. A little dreary, but certainly NOT what you tend to see in the US.

Don't forget to check my flickr feed as I don't expect I'll blog all the pictures I upload. Later!

technorati tags:travel, greece, athens, vacation

So i'm in amsterdam on my way to athens. I figured i'd turn on my cell and make sure it works here. I had turned off direct push and active sync before i left so imagine my surprise when i noticed it had connected to gprs! This was like thirty minutes later. Not sure when that happened, or if i was being charged for it, but i know i'm going to be afraid to look at my bill this month.

Wow, the tech companies really seem to be listening to me lately! I guess I guess I never said it on this blog, but I passed on upgrading my Sony U750P tablet when the UX series came out because they hadn't upgraded the RAM yet. Now, only a few weeks later, they've announced a new version with a larger hard drive and 1GB of RAM! I don't care how bad Sony's rep in the geek world is right now (and it's quite bad), I love the team responsible for these sweet little computers.

Of course, this particular gadget clocks in at a hefty $2k, but I honestly don't know if I can avoid buying one. I think it will actually be able to run vista pretty smoothly, and that's something my current version wouldn't be able to do.

The US version of this devicde has EDGE connectivity, but you lose the CF slot. I don't really think this is a fair trade, as it really limits the expandability and I don't know if there is a way to use my existing Tmobile account for the EDGE connection without swapping my sim card back and forth, and that's just not worth it. I can just connect to the phone via bluetooth if I really need to.

It's exciting news nonetheless. Good job Sony! Looks like you can still do something right now and then.

technorati tags:u750P, UX, UX-280P, Sony, UMPC, Mobile, TabletPC

My thoughs on my new i-mate smartflip are pretty much summed up in this review. Like it says, every phone has positives and negatives. I'm pretty happy with my choice so far though. Everyone I've shown it to has been pretty impressed as well. It's definitely a cool lookin device.

I can't comment on the media playback functionality yet, as my microsd card still isn't here for some reason. I can say that I don't think I'll be using it for music much at all. I can't use my shure headphones because of the proprietary port, and there's not enough storage anyway. I'll stick with the ipod for a while longer. But I could see using the smartflip for music while biking, since it's a pain to carry my ipod while riding. The shure headphones aren't good for biking anyway, since the block out all other sounds (like car horns).

I can tell I'll still need to carry my camera though. Here are a couple test shots I took on my ride last night. Not surprisingly, they look like cameraphone shots. I suppose this is enough to get the basic idea across. But when the hell are we going to get a phone that takes decent pictures?

technorati tags:smartflip, smartphone, imate, cameraphone, gadgets