vacation, all I ever wanted . . .

[eimarra]

Yes, it is time for our cross-country trek. We did this two years ago. This may become a pattern (next year, the plan is for my husband and I to go to Hawaii for his 20th reunion); we'll have to see.

We're going to see lots of friends and family, a couple museums, some national parks . . . should be a good time.

Now that I have the iPod Touch (with Livejournal app installed!), I might even be able to post short updates along the way, depending on Wi-Fi access. While we're in Canada, I know we'll have access, so I'll certainly be posting then.

In fact, I'll be posting a review of the August issue of Realms of Fantasy. They posted asking for people willing to blog about the issue in return for receiving a complimentary copy, and I signed up. I did something similar for Fantasy & Science Fiction, but I posted that review on my Blogger blog.

So I won't be totally incommunicado, but I'm not going to be reading everyone's LJ while I'm away, either. If you think there's something I really need to see, e-mail me the link & I'll get to it as soon as I can.

Comments

[doc-lemming.livejournal.com]

But have fun.

And don't worry about the FM Exercise promise--just get ready for the trip and do all the other things you have to do.

[eimarra]

The exercises aren't taking me that long to do, really. We'll see if that changes as the week goes on.

I will have fun, thanks.

[hoshikaze.livejournal.com]

Sounds like fun, hope you have a good trip. How's the I-pod touch working out? At some point I'd like something more mobile, but don't want to be tied to a qwerty hard keyboard. For the mean time I set up twitter so I can text it - no mobile data plan needed.

[eimarra]

I love, love, love the iPod Touch! I can access pretty much everything (haven't tried FM yet), and I've got scads of reading on there. (Note: some sites have iPhone or mobile-friendly sites; some don't, and even with the zoom capabilities of the iPod Touch, they're annoying to use.) I have one app (TextGuru) that allows me to write stuff and e-mail it to myself so I can then import it into whatever program, but it's not really a good tool for long stints of writing. It has a few (where few is defined as at least 3 and less than 20) games on it, too. Oh, and I can finally listen to all the podcasts conveniently. This is the first iPod I've had. I had the podcasts on my computer, but if I'm at the computer, I'm already working with words, so listening to shows didn't work well.

How do you text to Twitter without using a mobile data plan? I mean, doesn't your cellphone carrier require one? (I can't be accused of being a Luddite, but I've never texted in my life.)

[hoshikaze.livejournal.com]

The touch sounds like fun. For longer stints of writing I'm keeping something more along the lines of a netbook in line, though having a smaller mobile device for internet might be handy at some point. (Probably behind the laptop/netbook and camera priority wise).

Twitter accepts SMS (I have no idea what that stands for) text messages, once set it up it's like texting from one cell phone to another. I had to ask my husband to make sure that SMS was indeed the standard text messages, and not something more into an internet data plan. I'm not the biggest fan of texting, though it's handy when in lower cell reception areas. I mostly set up twitter on my phone so I could post random thoughts/updates while on vacation. My husband and I have a family plan with our phones, and we have plenty of texts we can use. He has a data plan on top of that so he can still e-mail, and do Google maps while we are traveling.

[eimarra]

Okay, I see. But since we never text, we didn't get texting included in our cell phone plan; we get charged for each text message sent or received. So unless I change my habits, it's not worth it to me to Twitter from my cell. I was, however, confusing the data plan for Web access (which I also don't use on my cell) with a plan that covers texting. It's all data, right? :-P

[bonniers.livejournal.com]

I'm sure your muse will manage to figure out some way to get her daily diet of link salad.

Have a great trip!