Archive for the ‘Travel’ Category

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Recent Purchases

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

I don’t know if I have mentioned this on here yet but starting September 12th I will be leaving the US for 3 months again. This time we will be gone from September 12, 2010 to January 1, 2011. For the first month or so we will be backpacking through Southeast Asia (Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, maybe Malaysia), then two weeks in China split between Beijing and Shanghai. I can’t wait to go to the world expo! I am pretty excited about this trip and have recently started making preparations. I think three weeks ago we bought our tickets so now that dates are set in stone. But this stone only costs $100 dollars to modify so that’s cool. And I have started buying stuff!

Electronics!

Since I will be moving around a lot I have decided that my X61 tablet is just too big. Soon (next week) I will be selling it and I have already ordered my replacement laptop. It should be arriving this Friday. I had a really hard time deciding which one to buy. In the end I decided on the Asus Eee PC 1005HA. Yes I know it is last years model but I decided on it anyways.

At first I was looking at this year’s Eee PC netbooks and trying to decide between the 1001P and the 1005PE. The only things I cared about that separated the two were the 1005PE had 3 hours extra battery life,  bluetooth, and wireless N. The battery life on the 1001P is rated at 11 hours and, you guessed it, the 1005PE comes in rated at 14. I was struggling for a few days wondering how important these extra goodies were for my purposes. I then decided that none of these could justify my paying the extra 80 bucks for the 1005PE. But then when I was about to buy the 1001p I saw that Tigerdirect was having a sale on the 1005HA from last year! At the time I ordered it the sale price was $269.99. But as I write this the sale price has been increased to $279.99. Looking at the specs I noticed that other than the 10.5 hours of battery life and the N280 processor it was the same as the 1005PE, with a price tag that was 20 dollars less than the cheapest 1001p I could find! so I jumped on the deal!

Now keep in mind I do not care about things like hard drive size, 64 bit processing, or the performance differences. The N450 processor in the 1001P and 1005PE has 64 bit capabilities and the N280 does not. So anyways from my point of view the 1005HA was 100 dollars cheaper than the 1005PE AND I got all the extra little goodies I wanted like wireless N and Bluetooth, plus extra HD space which I don’t care about, while only getting dinged for 30 minutes of battery life from the 1001p which I was about to buy. I think 279.99 is an extremely good deal for the 1005HA and 269.99 was even better!

But anyways that’s enough about my netbook purchase.

I also decided that carrying around a full sized 1 terabyte hard drive and the extra power brick that it would require was quite stupid so I bought a western digital 1 terabyte 2.5″ width external drive that is usb powered. This cost me 139.99 I was thinking about getting one from Fry’s for 119.99 but then I would have had to drive all the way to Renton and pay 9% tax (I have no idea what the WA cities tax rates are) or something so I just ordered the drive from Tigerdirect as well.

Clothing

I am a cheap ass, especially when it comes to clothing, so I will not be buying the 250 dollar rain jacket and the 90 dollar lightweight breathable pants.

Anyways, since it is kind of early I have only ordered two things so far. A backpack and a lightweight rain jacket. Since we will be going during the rainy season and I am still pissed about the pouring rain that soaked right through my backpack when I was in Taipei I went down a sort of unorthodox route for my backpack. I ordered a medium Seattle Sports H2O Gear Waterproof Backpack. It looks more like it should be used for water rafting but it is cheap and waterproof so I am gonna try it. I’ll post back here if for some reason it is impossible to use. who knows how long this link will work but here is the link to the backpack where I ordered it. I also ordered the White Sierra Trabagon Rain Jacket from the same place. The reason why I ordered the jacket so early is because I think the lightweight jacket will be nice to wear around Seattle since it is summer but every once in a while it rains.

Edit (7/27/2010): I received the rain jacket and it is perfect. The backpack however is not perfect haha. Being a noob I thought this would work, but I did not know that these types of backpacks have no zipper. On top of the no zipper it was HUGE in my min 25inchs tall with a 14 inch diameter did not seem that big but it is quite huge. So the backpack is getting returned and I have ordered the Deuter Futura Zero 40 Pack this was last years version so it is a closeout. It’s only 40 liters compared to the 63 liter monstrosity that I am about to return. I also ordered some vibram fivefinger flows (backordered), 20 feet of rope (just in case), and some other stuff. But these new purchases will be part of another entry when I get them all. Oh and also it seems that after July 4th the summer weather in Seattle is just like Los Angeles haha so the rainjacket is useless, but still nice to have it already.

Future

Soon I will have to order, pants, a towel, some sandals. Hopefully while I am in Hong Kong the Asus Eee PC EP121 will come out and I can buy it before everyone in the US!

Anyways I have a midterm in 3.5 hours that I am not prepared for. Managerial Accounting is no fun!

Posted in Gadgets, Tech, Travel | 2 Comments »

RJ’s Random Updates

Thursday, May 20th, 2010

It occured to me that I have not updated you, my one reader, on what has been happening in my life. There have been a lot of changes this year.

Some of you may know that I transferred from Fordham’s MBA program to LMU’s program well now it seems as though I am transferring again. I’m going for the Sarah Palin college experience I think 3 colleges in 1 year beats 5 colleges in 4 years. Next stop, idol of the Tea Party! But I digress. Anyways I am heading to Seattle University mostly in order to be closer to my girlfriend, because 1000 miles is just too far even if it is in the same time zone.

I’ll be taking summer school there because I will be taking the fall semester off in order to travel around in Asia. It is depressing but I don’t think we’ll be able to get to Thailand because of the people getting shot in the streets and during interviews and what not. But we shall see how that goes. I’ll post details on my trip when I get them.

For now my thumbs are tired. It’s tiring updating my blog on a cell phone at an airport (going to Seattle) I’ll catch you on the flip side! For now i’ll be playing robo defense on my Nexus One. Peace!

Posted in School, Travel | No Comments »

RJ in Mexico!

Monday, April 5th, 2010

So last week my girlfriend and I went on a 7 day cruise to Mexico and it was a great experience. The ship was called the Sapphire Princess.

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There were four sea days and three land days. The only problem was that we spent full days in Puerta Vallarta, and Mazatlan, but only half a day in Cabo San Lucas.

If I had to rank my shore excursion experiences it would be something like this:

1. Cabo San Lucas – Snorkeling
2. Mazatlan – Some sort of crazy show with people flying around a pole
3. Puerta Vallarta – Dona Engracia Tequila factory

Oh and the shore excursions are definitely not included in the price of the cruise so that is extra depending on which excursion you choose to go on. The actual outdoors activities excursions are generally more expensive than the tours that take you around the city. But the outdoor activities are much more fun.

Perhaps my rankings are due to the fact that in Mazatlan and Puerta Vallarta we took tours. And in Cabo San Lucas we went Snorkeling. In case you are on Princess Cruises and want to go snorkeling in Cabo San Lucas make sure you have your own snorkeling equipment, otherwise you will have to use the old used snorkeling stuff. My girlfriend and I just used the goggles because we didn’t want to use the snorkel’s with used mouthpieces.

Overall the cruise was great. The ship had four dining rooms full of wonderfully free food. Unfortunately anything that you want to drink other than tap water is not free. But really the food on the cruise was absolutely, positively AMAZING. The only thing I didn’t like was the Fish and chips at the Savoy dining room.

Other than the over indulgence on the free food there were free shows and lots of loud events to attend. Fortunately the girlfriend was uninterested in the loud events so I did not have to attend any of them. We did end up going to see a show called “Piano Man”, which was amazing! if you are ever on the Sapphire Princess I highly recommend that you take some time to see it.

Now here comes the bad part of the cruise experience for me. The one thing that really pissed me off was the extremely high cost of the pictures. Since my girlfriend and I were out there with no other friends, there was really no way for us to take pictures with both of us in them. The cruise line takes FULL advantage of this fact. To buy a single print of a picture was $19.95 US dollars. if you wanted to get a digital copy you had to buy the print, pay $10.00 extra for the digital copy, and buy a $15.00 USB key. I found this to be a ridiculous price but was forced to buy one of the pictures because I had no other options.

If you think that this pricing is ok then the service is actually very good. They have photographers wandering around special events just taking pictures of couples and families and then you can just go buy the pictures very easily.

Here are some pictures I took while in Mexico and on the ship.

Here is the beach where we went snorkeling. It’s called Chileno Bay.

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The main church in Puerta Vallarta

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This next picture has a very funny story behind it. While we were snorkeling at Chileno Bay, my girlfriend scraped her knee on the barrier reef that was out there. As you can see the scrape is quite small but she was convinced that if she got any of her blood in the water sharks would come for her. We were about 300 feet from the boat at this point. She made me pull her 300 feet to the boat while she held her knee out of the water. If we didn’t both have life vests we would have drowned for sure. The whole way back I was telling her “you are being ridiculous! no sharks are gonna come and eat you.” After spending what seemed like forever getting back to the boat she asked the guy about sharks and she was told “you watch too many movies!” Oh well at least it’s a funny story.

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The Panaplanta Flyers in Mazatlan. This was a crazy show they were spinning around that pole slowly unwinding the rope until they reached the ground.

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The Sapphire Princess at Cabo San Lucas

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I have like 1700 pictures that I took while on the cruise, way too many to post here but if anyone ever reads this they can post questions in the comments and I’ll ad more pictures. But I would totally recommend going on the Mexico cruise, but I would recommend that you do all the outdoors activities for the shore excursions instead of the Tours. The snorkeling was way more enjoyable than the tours.

Anyways, peace out ya’ll.

Posted in Food, Gripes, mexico, Travel | 1 Comment »

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