Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

We went on a 3 week trip with Amelia during the past month, from Brussels to New York, then from New York to Colombia, and back. We were a bit worried about all the flying - would she cry a lot? Would she be uncomfortable? But it turns out flying with a baby is super easy - at least it was for us, this time around.

When you fly with a baby, you (almost) get treated like a first class passenger. You get to board the plane before all the other (economy) passengers, if you requested a bassinet you’ll have more legspace, it’s not bad. All in all, the flights with the baby where at least as good, and sometimes a lot better, than the same flights without her.

First tip: call your airline in advance (at least 24 hours) to request a bassinet (a little baby bed that is attached to the wall). Not all airlines/planes provide them, but if they do, you’re gonna be fine. Each plane can only have 2 (depending on the type of plane) bassinets, so you want to try to reserve one for yourself.

They’ll put the bassinet up after the plane has taken off.

The bassinet is great for the baby to sit in to play, and even better for them to sleep. The soft movements of the plane made our 8-month old baby sleep great.

Here are some pictures of Amelia playing and sleeping in the bassinet:

As for toys, she loves plastic bottles, plastic cups, spoons etcetera, so that wasn’t a problem. Here’s her sleeping (which is what she did most of the time, which was great).

If you can’t get a bassinet (we didn’t get one on the NY-Colombia leg of the trip) you’ll have to carry the baby yourself - much more tiring.

Second tip (and this isn’t just for planes): take a baby sling. It’s a great way to quiet down the baby when she isn’t in happy mode, or to get some sleep:

Third tip: if there are other babies on board, don’t be afraid to socialize. A guy in a seat next to us made a fuss, but if you can’t handle two babies playing for half an hour (they weren’t even crying or being loud), get on your own private plane buddy. We also put one of the sheets that come on each seat on the floor so the babies could play for a while.

Fourth tip: when boarding, go line up after the first class passengers have boarded, most likely they’ll let you in first.

Fifth tip: breastfeeding is of course super easy - no bottles to warm etc. But if you give bottles they can easily warm them up in the plane. Also remember that airplanes make you dehydrated, so drink extra and make sure the baby gets extra fluids too.

Sixth tip: strollers and babyseats. You don’t have to check in your stroller, you can take it all the way to the gate and to the door of the plane. They’ll then put a tag on it and put it in the luggage, and when you leave the plane you wait there and they’ll had you your stroller back. Easy.s

Final tip: don’t forget to back the baby.

ps: as for the jetlag (Europe-US), it’s not too hard on the baby. She takes lots of naps anyway during the day, so she was alright. The hardest bit is always US -> Europe. We arrived yesterday morning, were jetlagged all day. Amelia slept during the night, but woke up at 4 for about an hour, so I carried her in the sling. Then she slept until 12 noon (so did we). I think the jetlag affects her less than it affects us.

Have you done long flights with your baby? Leave a comment!

(ps: the best parenting blog I read is Her Grace. No parenting tips, just stories. Check it out.)

Yahoo travel is rocking the online travel world. I just noticed this innovation: instead of making you enter dates and then telling you what prices they have flights available for, they let you look for prices for a destination on any date, tell you the cheapest offerings, and then let you search for dates that those flights have seats available. Amazing. The UI for that part is functional and looks like this:

As far as I know, no other online travel service lets you search like this. I’ve been waiting for this for years.

Akshaya, a project in India that I visited and blogged about extensively, wins the ARS Electronica PRIX for digital communities (via Dina).

LoQUo is a Spanish Craigslist clone - seems to be based in Barcelona. As opposed to the Spanish Barcelona Craigslist (which has exactly 9 rooms/flats/.. for rent/sale/…), it IS quite active.

The Belkin digital camera link doesn’t support iPod mini. Is there a way to store your pictures on your iPod mini while travelling?

A small part of one of our interviews (Quicktime Movie, 1.6Megs) in Colombia.

I decided to start editing really short bits of the Colombia documentary I did but never edited… Valentina

1. Six days with the Akshaya project: day 1: overview
2. Day 2: technology
3. Day 3: entrepreneurs
4. Day 4: promotion
5. Day 5: training
6. Day 6: conclusions

In the past 5 days, I have tried to describe the project, mostly from a tactical level: how did they do things? I didn’t speak much with the strategic people, and I hardly spoke to any users. Today, I’ll talk a little bit about possible conclusions and lessons.
(more…)

1. Six days with the Akshaya project: day 1: overview
2. Day 2: technology
3. Day 3: entrepreneurs
4. Day 4: promotion
5. Day 5: training
6. Day 6: conclusions

Once people were convinced the training could be worthwhile, it took a few months for each entrepreneur to train one person in each of the families they were responsible for. Each center trained between 1000 and 3000 people. Most centers used two or three trainers to get the job done, and many centers stayed open late to accomodate working people - rishaw drivers, fishermen, farmers, businessmen, housewives.
(more…)

1. Six days with the Akshaya project: day 1: overview
2. Day 2: technology
3. Day 3: entrepreneurs
4. Day 4: promotion
5. Day 5: training
6. Day 6: conclusions

The Akshaya project was rolled out in Malappuram in the southern state of Kerala, one of the more backward and conservative regions of India. The population is largely muslim, has little education and is mostly rural.
(more…)

Poorbuthappy guide to India | Holy men, immodium and technology.: I’m starting a discussion about India. The site still needs work, but the basics are there…

1. Six days with the Akshaya project: day 1: overview
2. Day 2: technology
3. Day 3: entrepreneurs
4. Day 4: promotion
5. Day 5: training
6. Day 6: conclusions

The Akshaya project uses an interesting business model: local entrepreneurs run individual Aksaya centers, and are expected to become profitable by themselves. This way the project won’t die of lack of funds once the initial interest or funding dries out. Sustainability.
(more…)

1. Six days with the Akshaya project: day 1: overview
2. Day 2: technology
3. Day 3: entrepreneurs
4. Day 4: promotion
5. Day 5: training
6. Day 6: conclusions

The Akshaya project uses a combination of various wireless technologies to provide internet access to 3,500 square kilometers of rural areas in the rugged terrains of Malappuram, a hilly district in the Kerala state of India.
(more…)

1. Six days with the Akshaya project: day 1: overview
2. Day 2: technology
3. Day 3: entrepreneurs
4. Day 4: promotion
5. Day 5: training
6. Day 6: conclusions

The Akshaya project, launched in December 2002, has rolled out complete internet access in all of the villages of one of the more backward areas of India using a mix of wireless technologies, and successfully trained one member in each of the region’s 750,000 households to use the computer. The team is now creating an innovative business model to ensure sustainability. Even though it is still only starting, it is widely considered a success story of using technology for rural development.

Over the following week, each day I will write about a different aspect of the project.
(more…)

Gizmodo : Anoso Elio 20GB Photo Player: “The 20GB player doesn’t have TV-out abilities like Apple’s new iPod Photo, but it does better it in at least two ways. First, it has a built-in SD card slot for copying photos and data over from other devices”

Brilliant. This stuff might be useful for storing pictures while traveling. Reads your cards, stores your pictures AND you can see them. Nice.

My trip to India is a good opportunity to experiment with videoblogging on the road. I’m just jotting down some thoughts here, I might expand on this post in the future. You can see all my India trip posts, including videoposts, here.

I took a small digital photocamera that fits in my pocket and also takes short videos, and an Apacer stand-alone CD writer that lets me write my memory card to CD. This way I can take a lot of movies (a day of movietaking - 20 or 30 short movies - fills up my 256M memory card). I just save them to CD and then empty the memory card.

At first I posted individual short movies. However, they were too short, my fan (there’s only 1) complained he wanted to see larger movies. And in fact, I tend to take a few movies if something interesting is going on.

I’ve settled on a process of finding a computer with Win XP, using Moviemaker to join those few related movies together. I don’t really “edit”, I just throw them together and save the movie, which also optimizes it. I don’t even review the movie - it takes too much time and I’d rather not spend my entire trip locked up in an internet cafe.

I tend to rent 2 computers at the time in the internet cafe, so I can use 1 computer to work with Moviemaker, and the other to do my emailing meanwhile. Moviemaker takes some time (can be 15 minutes) when importing movies from CD, and when optimizing movies. So I just spend that time on the other computer.

Then I send the movie to my friend’s Gmail address who ftp’s it to my website. I should be able to ftp it myself to my site, but I haven’t figured out how that works yet.

When my friend lets me know the videos (I usually sent 10 at the same time) are online, I create posts for them in my blogging software. I spread out the dates of the posts so one movie a day gets posted, instead of 10 movies and then 2 weeks of silence.

A disadvantage of this technique is that my movies end up in a proprietary Windows format that doesn’t play nice with anybody else’s formats. But it’s the only easy way I found to edit and optimize on the road. Win XP computers aren’t in every internet cafe, but I could usually find one. And after optimizing, most internet cafes have enough bandwidth to upload a few movies.

Windows Moviemaker works well. It’s very easy to use, and I only need to put a few movies together, so no problems there. It comes installed by default together with Windows XP. And it optimizes movies quite well if you choose Save Movie. I choose the highest quality, which still produces files that are usually below 1 Meg for my short movies.

My tiny camera is a Canon Powershot SD100 - I bought it last year for about US$300. It’s stainless steel body sets it apart from other digital cameras. The memory card cost US$70 then, now they’re much cheaper. It works great for taking videos - its size means I almost always carry it with me (except on the beach and when partying), so I can take a quick video whenever something interesting happens.

Questions and comments welcome. I’m sure there are other practical techniques for videoblogging while on the road.

Steph emailed me, turns out she also has some India videos on her blog.

This guy is trying to explain the difference between Indian and British English (Windows Media movie, about half a Meg). Afterwards I took the bus.

International phonecalls are easy (Windows Media movie, about half a Meg), little telephone boots are literally everywhere (even in the smallest village). It’s affordable too, a 30 minute call to the USA costs about 7 US$. Internet cafes are also in a lot of places (though you can spend days without finding one), this one is in Mysore.

I love to take pictures of cows, they have great shapes that catch the light in always interesting ways. Big eyes, too. I’m not sure if this activity was any weirder to the locals than many of the other stuff tourists do in India (Windows Media Video, about half a Meg).

Monkeying around in Mysore (Windows Media movie, about half a Meg).

When you spend a lot of time on buses, you get bored and take a lot of movies of busrides (Windows Media Movie, about half a Meg).

The covered market in Mysore is beautiful (Windows Media movie, about half a Meg). Here are some more scenes from Mysore.

A lovely mail prepared in the train station (Windows Media Video, about half a Meg). This was a good eat, we had Masala Dosa (spicy pancake).

Mumbai (previously known as Bombay) is a busy bustling city. A lot of cars and there is also a crazy funky beach where lots of people with kids gather (Windows Media movies, about half a Meg each).

A beautiful little shrine on a hill in Goa (Windows Media movie, about half a Meg).

There are a bunch of tibetan settlements around Mysore (South India) - the Indian governement was nice to the refugees when the Chinese started fucking up Tibet. It’s hard to legally visit (you need a bunch of slow paperwork), and I didn’t want to get anyone in trouble by illegaly visiting (which supposedly is easy), so I didn’t go. I filmed some tibetans in the internet cafe (Windows Media Video, about a Meg) in Mysore.

Indian trains are a must (Windows Media movie, about half a Meg). Second class tends to get crazy, this is in first class (I think).

a portrait (Windows Media movie, about half a Meg).

Fishermen in Goa bringing in Sardines (Windows Media movie, about half a Meg). You can see the sardine schools swimming (they’re dark spots in the water), so the fishermen just get in the water with a net, find the sardines and then catch a load like this one.

I like cows (Windows Media movie, about half a Meg).

more getting around movies, on a bike and on the bus(Windows Media movies, about half a Meg each).

India is a country of many forts (Windows Media movie, about half a Meg).

Goa is a great place to hang out on the beach, this was an evening in one of the beach cafes (Windows Media movie, about half a Meg) in which we were wondering about the origin of chess (it does come from India), so one of the guys ran to the nearby internet cafe and googled it.

Half of the fun in India is getting around (Windows Media movie, about half a Meg). The movie shows a trip in a motorised riskshaw (3-weeler).

I’ve had to switch to the proprietary Windows Video format for reasons I’ll explain in detail in a future post about videoblogging on the road. For the record, the internet cafe I’m in currently is fast but doesn’t allow heavy uploads because they get charged for that.

Anyway, here’s the first of the Windows Movies: sometimes the selling gets to be a bit much (Windows Media movie, about half a Meg).

Gmail requires IE5.5+ which means I can’t access it from 70% of the computers here in internet cafes in India who still use IE5.0.

I am writing some stuff on the road (different internet cafes every time) and I find myself longing for solutions that support writing on the road. I write in WordPress - not bad, but not perfect either. Any suggestions. The perfect thing would be a lightweight keyboard with a memory of its own (and some kind of preview) that I could use to write anywhere and then plug into a computer to transfer the text whenever I visit an internet cafe…

Ah Bangalore. The pizza! The cheap books! The proper coffee! The copied western atmosphere! After a few weeks of roughing it in South India, Bangalore, usually described as a place where there’s not much interesting for the traveler, is a true joy.