Holiday Cheers

It’s under­stand­able that some peo­ple get depressed around this time of the year. There is the uncom­fort­able weather, lack of sun­shine, and inces­sant reminders of how we should all be out shop­ping, etc.. For­tu­nately, the flip side of that is that we can get cozy at home (with a tasty stir-fry of lemongrass-marinated beef), meet with friends in the evening (the blog­ger meetup was this Thurs­day night), give and get gifts, and per­haps even make plans for the new year. Pam has the jump on me this year in sev­eral ways: first, with one of the coolest gifts that you can give a nerd, an OLPC (One Lap­top Per Child) XO com­puter. Although it hasn’t arrived yet, I got the email con­fir­ma­tion of the gift so the cat is out of the bag. The way the OLPC pur­chase works is to ‘give one and get one’, so in get­ting me this inter­est­ing piece of tech­nol­ogy, Pam’s also insured that some child in another coun­try (like Uruguay and Rwanda) also gets one. It’s a project started by Nicholas Negro­ponte, the flam­boy­ant and charis­matic founder of MIT’s Media Lab, and now the of the Non-profit orga­ni­za­tion (OLPC) that has cre­ated the device with the idea of get­ting an inex­pen­sive (the orig­i­nal goal was <$100, the real price is now a lit­tle less than twice that num­ber) lap­top in the hands of chil­dren in poorer coun­tries all over the world, with the hope of bridg­ing the infor­ma­tion divide). Here’s an ad with Heroes’ Masi Oka for OLPC:

You can be sure that future post­ings will be about this new gift, and given that it has a pretty long wi-fi range and is one of the few lap­tops that has a screen that is vis­i­ble in full sun­light, as well as long bat­tery life and light­weight design, I’m hop­ing that there will actu­ally be some post­ings for this writ­ten on it (per­haps from the park out back?) as well.

Big Travel Plans

I men­tioned that Pam had the jump on me in the gift depart­ment. She’s also out ahead on plans for next year. She’s going to do some­thing that she’s wanted to do for years now: see Antarc­tica. In Feb­ru­ary (the end of sum­mer for that part of the world), she will first fly to San­ti­ago, Chile, then board a char­ter flight to the south­ern tip of Argentina at Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego (the world’s south­ern­most city). At that point, she’ll board the ship Explorer II, a “Dou­ble bot­tomed Ice Class ves­sel with an ice rat­ing (Ital­ian RINA Class 1-D) that exceeds the require­ment for oper­at­ing safely in Antarc­tica” (thank good­ness for that, with the recent sink­ing of a ves­sel from Gap Adven­tures, the M/S Explorer) The ship cruises for 2 days through the Drake Pas­sage to the Antarc­tic penin­sula. She’ll spend about 4 days there, mak­ing excur­sions in Zodiac rafts to the ice,where hope­fully she’ll see pen­guins like these. There are plans to land on the South Shet­lands, includ­ing Half Moon, Cuverville, Paulet, Pen­guin, Goudier and Decep­tion Island, depend­ing on the weather con­di­tions. I’m hop­ing that she’ll be able to send some of the day-to-day details of her voy­age, although I’m not sure how easy email will be.

Before all of this starts, there are a few other (less impres­sive trips), includ­ing a visit to my par­ents’ house in Bal­ti­more, and a week in San Fran­cisco for Mac­World Expo. Looks like 2008 is going to get off to a busy start.