So, I'm typing this while on the plane to Maui.  We are being "forced" to go to Hawaii.  The horror!  Heh. ;)  The first time I went to Maui was with Laurie last April (2006).  Right after returning from that trip we learned the Laurie's friend Kate was going to be getting married on Maui in February of 2007.  Well, it's now February of 2007.

15 Hours Ago, Valentine's Day Evening

I left work at the usual time or a little bit early.  Laurie had picked me up, leaving our Jeep behind to drive up to Concord and go out for Valentine's Day.  The drive was fairly light on the traffic and we got to take advantage of the carpool lanes (although there are far fewer than there should be).

We decided on the way up to try to go to Claim Jumper with my grandmother since it was near a couple of other restaurants for backup as well as a CompUSA.  Well, we got up there in good time and only had to wait about an hour for a wonderfully large dinner.  Claim Jumper has super-American-sized portions.  I mean, the portions are large even for a typical American restaurant.  The food was good, though.

Why a CompUSA? Well, we currently have two Canon 30D DSLR cameras.  However, when fully kitted they can be a bit too much in many situations.  So, we've been wanting a regular, small, pocket-sized point-and-shoot digital camera.  What better than trying one out while going to Maui for a week?

So, we picked up the Canon PowerShot SD900.  It's in a titanium case, has a 10MP sensor, a reasonably sized screen (although other cameras like the SD630 had larger screens).  It still has an optical viewfinder for saving battery (from 230 pictures to 600 pictures per charge).  Of course, I'll be writing more about this later.  We're not yet totally convinced this is the point-and-shoot for us, but we'll see.  This size and weight are great, so far.

12 Hours Ago, The Middle of the Night

We tried to get to sleep early since we had to leave the house at 5:30am.  So, we got to bed at about 11:30pm and about half hour later I got in to a terrible coughing fit that juts wouldn't stop.  I must have been coughing violently for an hour or so before getting back to sleep.  I kept poor Laurie awake who also didn't get any sleep the night before.

7 Hours Ago, Rude Awakening

We got rudely woken up by a very loud mechanical alarm clock that wasn't anywhere near us.  However, it went off at the right time.  My phone went off a few minutes later, but I was already up by then.  Some Starbucks, a trip to Longs for some cough stuff, and a drive to Oakland airport, we were ready to go through security.

It's always fun going through security with multiple laptops.  Luckily, they only ask you to take laptops out and not cameras, phones, as other gadgets.  Although the line was quite long, it went relatively quick and we had maybe a 15 minute wait at the gate before boarding. 

Back to the Present

So now I'm still sitting here on my Dell XPS M1210 laptop writing this entry.  I'm in a middle seat, but with Laurie next to me it's not so important.  Laurie is also on her Dell Latitude D820 doing some photo editing (some exciting news recently got her even more excited about such things and her blog is now far more popular than mine).

So what other kit do we have with us?  We're actually traveling fairly light.  Of course, you know we have both of our laptops.  These are to help with dumping pictures from the one Canon 30D DSLR that we brought and now the Canon SD900. 

For entertainment, we have my Nintendo DS and Laurie's Nintendo DS Lite (yeah, she gets the better one -- we actually had that one first and then I got a regular DS for me as it was a good price).  Of course, we also have our Apple iPods which is her 8GB Gen2 Nano and my 80GB Gen5.5 Video. 

We also have a Bluetooth mouse with us, some extra batteries for the 30D and the mouse, in addition to some books in hardback format.  Yes, those are real paper books.  That's about it for the electronic gear.  We have some Netflix DVDs and are hoping that the hotel connection will be good enough for some streaming Netflix if that isn't enough.

All of this stuff with built-in wireless raises an interesting question: is it really against the rules to use Bluetooth or WiFi on the plane?  There are planes with WiFi for Internet access (we even got use that on our around-the-world trip).  First, we were playing Club House Games with our DS's.  Of course, they were connected with WiFi.  Secondly, we're using the Bluetooth mouse to help out with the photo editing. 

Naturally, when we were connection the Bluetooth mouse we saw a phone or two that were still on.  One of them had the persons name.  I thought about calling out the name, but didn't really want to advertise that we were using wireless devices, too. ;)

Posted by Shane on February 15, 2007 12:18 PM | Permalink