I ended up travelling quite a bit over the last year, spending in four different countries over a month each. It definitely was a big year for me and my wife. Travelling is fun but does get tiring and we have found three big travelling pains that really bugged us: changing phone numbers and keeping track of them, finding decent Internet connection while on the road and shipping our personal stuff around with us.

Starting with the last one, generally the less things you take with you the better. In some cases though, you can’t avoid taking a big suitcase with you no matter how you cut down, especially if your’e moving permanently from place to place. How did we get around it? Well, things we didn’t need to have with us while travelling but needed at our final destination got boxed and sent ahead of us via post. We also left a few things we didn’t want to get rid of (but didn’t want to carry around) in boxes at friends – mainly books. Once we travel back that way, we’ll pick them up again. At least that’s the plan.

Phones were probably the easiest one to solve and we simply bought new SIM-cards each time we arrived at a new country. Prepaid plans are similar in most countries and will give you basic connectivity with the obligations and cost of a contract. Having a local phone number saved us a couple of times (i.e. during a car break-down).

The biggest trouble was actually Internet. We always tried to get Internet with our phone plan, but if that works or not depends a lot on the locations you’ll be staying at. Some places just have awful cell phone coverage, even in totally civilised areas. When our phones couldn’t get decent Internet we tried using Internet at hotels, but we slept at a few B&B’s around the UK where there simply wasn’t any WiFi or it was so poor, it wasn’t usable. Finally, dropping by a fast-food like McDonald’s or KFC for some free WiFi did the trick too a couple of times.

So why was having Internet access such a priority? Well, I need my email for work, and I couldn’t afford to not work for 5 months, so being on-line was a must just for that reason. But besides that, it simply makes travelling a lot easier – and cheaper. In the UK we used LateRooms.com to find cheap and decent accommodation. Makes a lot of sense, not only you get to find what’s available and pick places that have good reviews and are reasonably priced, but often you’ll actually get a lower price than if you phone the hotel up directly. A similar site we used in New Zealand was Wotif.com.

A couple of times we needed a rental car, and using a search site to do this is a good idea also. We used CarHireLondon.com.au in the UK and it worked fine. The thing to remember with car rentals is that they’ve become a commodity and the whole industry is now controlled by a few big players. While you can go for smaller, local brands, the big companies (Avis, Hertz, Budget, etc.) have got good systems in place to consistently provide a good experience (at least most times). They do it by keeping their vehicle fleet relatively new, offering unlimited mileage and having a huge supply of cars (nearly) always available.

If there is any one other thing I missed while travelling was having a decent computer chair with me (I bought one though at the place we stayed longest). Oh, well, maybe next time we’ll be able to crack that one also.

A few months ago I enjoyed a family trip to New Zealand. If there’s one thing that I hate about travel is organizing it. Or rather – the thought of having to organize it. Fortunately, things are not always as complicated as they at first seem. Actually, several things turned out to be surprisingly easy.

I guess there were two tricky parts in planning the trip. First one turned out to be the tickets. I tried a few sites including IWantThatFlight.com.au and WebJet.com.au and this is where I ran into a few issues with my bookings. Turns out the price of the ticket is never the same the moment you book it and when they contact their airline. Ended up having to cancel bookings and move things around.

The totally easy part was the car rental, which was simple to book at http://www.carhirenz.net. I guess we had a bit of luck here because we got an upgrade after arriving at Auckland Airport.

The thing I was most worried about was the accommodation. I didn’t know if I needed to book in advance or not (wasn’t sure how busy the Christmas season would be in NZ). I decided to book the first and last night and book the rest as we travel around. Each day I’d hop onto Wotif.com and find a place to stay in the area we were going to that night. It turned out to work fantastically. We didn’t have much trouble finding places and we had the flexibility to stay a bit longer or shorter at certain destinations as we went along.

Over all – brilliant holiday, and who knew, but these travel engines can actually be quite useful.

If you’re planning to visit Austalia, there’s one place you should consider checking out, and that’s Tasmania. It’s called “the holiday island” and not without a good reason. The best time to go to Tassie is December – February, as that’s when you’ll find the best weather. Tasmania is a beautiful, green place but it can also be pretty cold, that’s why it’s best to go there during the summer.

What should you see once your there? Definitely visit the capital, Hobart. Go to Salamanca markets, take the trip to Port Arthur. Rent a car and drive around the island, go to Launceston or try out the West and take the Gordon River cruise. There’s plenty to see, so if you can, plan it and go!

If you’ve ever moved to a new place without having a job there, chances are that one of the biggest challenges you’ve found is finding employment. One options i never considered until recently was looking for a business for sale. Finding a small but working business that wasn’t very expensive turned out to be a great way of getting started at a new place. Suddenly I found myself not only with clients and suppliers but also with a couple experienced staff. Instead of being tough the early phase of my new business turned out to be exciting and even… profitable. More next time.

You’ve probably already heard about  lean manufacturing. What’s it precisely about? In short, lean is a a philosophy of production that considers using resources for things that won’t create value for the final customer to be wasteful and so to be eliminated from the production process. Lean manufacturing concentrates on delivering a quality service or product while reducing the amount of work needed.

There is more than one approach to lean production. Some view it as a set of tools which help in decreasing the amount of waste in production. Others see lean as being an effort to maintain a special flow in production eliminating “unevenness”. The latter philosophy was promoted by Toyota. The main goal in both these philosophies is generally the same though the method to achieve it is somewhat different.

More information on maintenance benchmarking: http://www.mcpeurope.com/amis.aspx

Another interesting piece of software is self storage software. It’s unique in that it has to be able to solve multiple problems at different levels at once. A good self storage program will both be able to take care of space management as well as the customer management and the billing/accounting side of the business.

So what kind of functionality will a good piece of self storage software include? It will have a well designed reservation system, and it should be scalable, i.e. allowing for managing multiple storage sites. Flexible reporting and complete pricing and billing control is also essential.

I’m having some problems with the blog roll – my links won’t appear

I’ve added it in the “Widget” section, but it won’t work.

I’ve done it again – another gap in posting here. Maybe I’ll make these a bit more regular some day. A place worth visiting added to the blog roll.

I’m in the middle of winter, so this might be for this grumpy post. The thing I love about winter? Nice looong warm evenings with a couple of coffees and my favorite blogs. The worst? Making it worm. If you’ve got gas heating, your cool (or rather I should say safe and snug), unfortunately not all have the luxury of an easy access to a gas pipeline. Fortunately there are some more and more advanced coal heating systems that help you automate the fueling.

That’s not super hi-tech, but boy it’s handy.

Recently I’ve been thinking of ways of cutting the costs when using a satellite phone. There are at least a few options to consider. One in considering satellite phone rental instead of buying your own phone. This may not always work, though, as the longer the period we need the phone for, the less financially interesting this option is.

The other is cutting the costs when buying your own phone. How? Well, first you might consider choosing the right satellite phone plan, as just like with regular phones, you can cut your costs somewhat by correctly estimating your usage and choosing the best option from your provider. The second is buying a cheaper sat phone. The simplest way to do this is to buy a used phone. If you want to go real cheap you can consider buying a first-generation sat phone, like an Ascom 21 or Hughes 7100 (if your considering Thuraya) or and Kyocera SS-66K (for Iridium).

They are somewhat more bulkier than the new models, but as long as you don’t buy damaged equipment, you should do just fine with them. The older phone work fine within their networks – just as the new ones (Globalstar might be an exception to this, as their old phones might not work globally due to some compatibility issues – but Globalstar is a seperate issue of its own so I’m going to leave it for another time).