I’ve been traveling quite a bit lately. So, I’ve just added my Dopplr account to my sidebar and my facebook profile. If you’re my friend, you can see my upcoming travel schedule (dates are only approximate to the public). It’s a neat way to potentially meet up with others you know while you travel.

If you use Dopplr (and know me), drop me a Dopplr friend request.

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Jil is blogging our New Zealand trip over on Jilato.com (with much tech support). So far we are having a blast. Don’t expect us to keep up with the blogging while we’re here. Once in a while we’ll get to some stuff.

We miss everyone but are having a blast. The pizza is good here too.

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I’m in a nice hotel on the beach in Santa Monica, and I see this. Is Steve Wozniak really staying here too and is he on the same wifi network as me? Neat, or a good joke.

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I just got back from a family vacation. I went with David Brown and our families rented a house on the beach in San Diego. We visited Legoland, Sea World, the Zoo, etc. San Diego is a great kid-friendly town.

Randomly, I brought along An Inconvenient Truth with me to watch. David and Kris (Brown) had seen it and told me that it motivated them to buy their Prius hybrid. Gore presents some pretty compelling stats, and it certainly gets you thinking that something fundamentally new is going on. To me the most salient point is that we’ve gone from 2 billion to 6 billion people on the planet really, really quickly. This will obviously cause more stress on the planet, no matter what your views on global warming are. I thought the movie did a good job of explaining the issue, but left something to be desired in terms of how to go and do something about it. The web site has a “take action” area that picks up where the movie left off.

While I was gone and avoiding email, my friend Ari Newman invited me to join GreenDimes. This is a cool web site that makes stopping your junk mail easy. It costs about a dime a week, and they also plant a tree each month for you. Sure, you can sign up to stop your junk mail for a buck, but I wanted to get the trees too and support this site, so I signed up. If you’d like to sign up, please accept my invitation.

Anyway, I guess I’ve gone a little greener in this last week. Maybe for my next vacation, I won’t rent a SUV.

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I’m been out here in Silicon Valley for the last couple of days. When I checked into my hotel, and fired up my MacBook Pro, the Internet wasn’t working. After the hotel staff asked me all the usual questions about plugging stuff in and rebooting, they sent someone up. I hate that part - gee guys, I do this stuff for a living. Trust me when I say it’s not working. About an hour after the guy left stumped, it started working on it’s own.

I’m on my way home to zero degree weather now, sitting in the San Jose airport. I had a couple of extra hours so I stopped into “Bits and Bytes - An Internet Cafe”. They have power connections at each table, which is pretty cool. I ordered a beer, and fired up. What? No free wireless? No RJ-45 jack? I have to pay $10 to T-Mobile to get Internet access inside an “Internet Cafe”? What the - you can’t do that!

I’ve complained before about my bad luck with Internet in Silicon Valley. I don’t have this anywhere else, but every time I come out here the connections suck, are unavailable, or broken. Am I alone here?

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Jil and I spent a week in Belize to recharge. We barely made it out between the first and second blizzard. Our Friday morning Denver flight was canceled, so we had to drive to Colorado Springs on Thursday night in the blizzard, which took 3 1/2 hours instead of the usual 1 1/2. Somehow, we made it in time for the flight. Of course, it was delayed 3 hours.

We finally made it to Dallas and saw the news of how bad it was in Colorado. We spent the night there, then made it to Belize City and finally San Pedro on Ambergris Caye on Friday evening. We took a water taxi and arrived at our villa around 7pm.

Jil was feeling sick suddenly, and slept til 2pm the next day. I got up early, at 11am. Man, that was nice. I awoke to a beautiful view of the Carribean sea and the worlds second longest barrier reef about a half mile offshore. We spent that day just hanging out hoping Jil would get better. She did, from the lack of rest I suppose!

Our week in San Pedro was awesome. We went to four snorkel spots, did some zip lines through the trees, and went cave tubing. A few pics are up on Flickr.

No cars are allowed on the island, and the locals get around on golf carts. We were staying about 4 miles from “town” and the road was basically impassable. So water taxi was always the way to go, or a 1 hour walk to town. The beach was filthy in spots - they basically never pick up the crap that washes ashore except at the resorts.

The food was interesting - we preferred to stock up at the grocery store and eat at home most of the time. But we did venture out to two or three restaurants that were generally good. I figured there’d be more Mexican food, but most places had meat (usually chicken) plus rice and beans or of course seafood.

There are only about 500 hotel rooms on the island, so you don’t bump into tons of other toursts there which is nice. All in all I think we went at a good time of the year. The weather was great - we got some rain but it almost always passed quickly.

If you’ve never been to Belize and like to live like a local on vacation, it’s pretty easy to do there. Ok, a local with a condo and a private pool. Same diff.

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I’m heading out to Silicon Valley this week to visit SonicSwap (who acquired earFeeder) and to promote TechStars, which will launch it’s marketing efforts next week (yes, then I’ll even tell you what it is).

Following my “never eat alone” rule, I’ve still got a couple of open meals. Let me know if you’re in the area and want to get together.

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Teleportation (it’s now been done with both light, just recently, matter) sure would make life easier, wouldn’t it? The initial applications of something like this would be to move information securely from point to point. But what if it could move you? Sure would change the economics of face to face business and put entire industries out of business.

Yes, I know I’m a geek. That’s why I send money to the Planetary Society each year also. What if…..

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Jil and I spent 4 days in Vegas this week. Yes, that is forever in Vegas. We went with a different mindset this time. We have gone before to party and go a little crazy with friends. This time, we decided that we were just going to chill out and sit by the pool alot. So we stayed at Mandalay Bay which has an amazing pool and beach. We literally laid by the pool for three straight days. I was able to rid my reading pile of two books: The Art of the Start (fantastic) and Fire Someone Today (ok). Meanwhile, Jil took in The Ivy Chronicles (Jil: “great”) and the Secret Life of Bees (Jil: “good”).

As far as shows, we went to see Ka (very good), David Copperfield (excellent), and Carrot Top (ok).

Ka was worth seeing and the center stage was amazing. It rotates all over the place and much of the action takes place at crazy angles with people flying off of it (on purpose). The side stages also extend about 45 degrees behind you on each side. The Cirque shows are always cool to me.

David Copperfield has not lost a step. I hadn’t seen him live in about 6 years. I consider myself a big fan since I used to be a magician for birthday parties when I was a kid. I’ve always thought Copperfield was the best and was wondering if he still had it. He does. Unbelievable, incredible, impossible.

We went to see Carrot Top at the urging of our friend, Ed. I was afraid I would be annoyed more then entertained. But it wasn’t that bad - parts were actually really funny. The show is just very prepared for the most part and overall it wasn’t my favorite. It was probably better because we were in the first row and everyone around us was being teased.

We also had two really good dinners while we were there. Try out Circo (Italian) at the Bellagio and Gallagher’s (Steak) at NY NY.

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Jil, Andrew, Delaney, and I spent a nice labor day weekend with our friends, Kris and David Brown, at their cabin in Winter Park (CO).

We’ve been meaning to do this for a while. The Browns have two girls, so we made a kid adventure weekend out of the trip. We rode the alpine slide and spent a bunch of time walking, climbing rocks (pictured) and at new, local playgrounds.

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