Product Placement 

(insert lucrative corporate endorsement contract here)

Here's a summary of the gear that we're using on our trip.



Photos and low-res movies are provided by our Canon Powershot S40.  It has some limited optical zoom and is pretty durable.  I've dropped it many times and only once has it really sustained damage.  And then, it was easy to have Canon fix it under warranty.  The best part of the camera is that it is small enough to carry most of the time.  And I'm impressed that it can go fully automatic or fully manual.  The feature I like the most is the set of pre-sets that are between automatic and manual settings.  The feature I hate the most is that the flash defaults to being on, so I have to remember to turn it off everytime I turn on the camera.  Grrr.
  Canon digital camera
Our laptop is an Apple iBook.  That lets us use iPhoto to manage the photos and manipulate them for posting on the web.
  Apple iBook
Our luggage is by Victorinox.  Julie loves how easy they make it to organize everything.  I think they make us look like German tourists.  But this is all we are bringing for a year's worth of travel. The bags hold up pretty well, but need repairing in India to put a few straps back on. The wheels turn out to be a very good idea despite warnings from our friends that we won't ever find flat places to pull them.
our luggage
At the last minute in LA, we got a Canon Elura 40MC digital video camera.  I don't have much of an impression of it yet, but it is very small and lots of fun. The camera doesn't work too well in the cold and occasionally just spits out the tape, but we get some good footage with it.
digital video camera
We upgraded from Sprint to Voicestream, but by the time we bought our phone, they had changed their name to T-Mobile.  Too bad... I thought Voicestream was a cool name.  Regardless of the name, we're digging the new phone.  It is a Pocket-PC (Wallaby) with international roaming and web access.  So far, my virulent hatred of Windows in general hasn't poisoned my opinion of this phone.
My experience over the first week of ownership has been:
Customer service: 9 out of 10
Network coverage: 6 out of 10
Audio signal quality: 9 out of 10
Web/email network coverage: 4 out of 10
Device capabilities: 6 out of 10 (I'll never be satisfied until there is a GPS in there, and I miss the Palm tip calculator)
I haven't been able to get a signal in Auckland, so it starts out with a bad rating on international roaming.  In Wellington, I figured out how to get signal on the local network:  I had to switch to 900MHz and turn the phone off and on.  Now the phone's current network is 530-01-11.
International roaming turns out to be way too expensive and we just cancel the service after a month.
PDA cell phone
We bought this Royal Enfield in Delhi for our trip through India.



How to contact us:
    rfd@finninday.net
    jfd@finninday.net