Mississippi River and Appalachian Trail Blog

I've been intending to get our regular blog http://sourcetosea.net/Blog/Wanderings.html more in line with the rest of the world for about three months now. I think I'm getting closer.

I've fixed a couple of goofy links, learned about http://technorati.com/ Technorati Profile and a few other submission sites, and am going to commit to posting on a more regular basis. I WILL finish the book on our Mississippi River expedition done soon and I need to get my virtual act together.

I love learning about this stuff, but man it's a pain wandering through the darkness sometimes.
If anyone has any suggestions on how to improve the blog, submission sites, adsense (or any other revenue), driving traffic, etc, I'd love to hear what you have to say.

Butt Inertia

"A butt at rest will stay at rest unless acted upon by an outside force. A butt in motion will stay in motion if it just gets off the couch."

~John Pugh

I’m a slothful individual. I can heat a house with burnt time. I slid just under the tax deduction wire by being born on December 31st. Odds are I’ll to be late to my own funeral. You get the picture.

That said, I think the only way to achieve anything is to just get off your butt and start. Just getting a goal and starting toward it is the big thing. Details work themselves out over time so don’t sweat the small stuff to begin with. Any progress is good progress. Just do something.

Tell people what your plans are. Parents, family, friends, strangers off the street, it doesn’t matter. Some will be supportive. Some will say you’re a fool. Listen to the former but don’t ignore the latter. It helps to have people to face up to when you’re scared out of your wits and want to quit. Peer pressure isn’t always bad.

Taking the chance of falling on your face occasionally is good for the soul. When I’m old and grey(er) I don’t want the regret of not trying something just because I was lazy or doing busy work. Life’s too short for that. My father passed away when I was four and I doubt if given the option he would have asked for more time in the office. This trip down the Mississippi was one of the hardest things I’ve done but also the most fulfilling.

I was a wreck for months before we started. Sleepless nights thinking about details, worries about failure, and nagging doubts about doing the right thing were all part of the process. Once the canoe hit the water everything fell into place. Of all the miles, the first one was the sweetest. Just getting out of the rat race and trying something else was its own reward.

I made a deal with myself at the end of my thru-hike to do something cool at least every five years. That could be hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, biking across the country, or building a house from scratch. Anything to get off my butt and do something besides watch the years go by. If nothing else, I’ll have some good stories to lie to my unconcieved grandkids about.

The first and hardest thing is to get off the couch and start. Once that butt inertia gets going, it’s all downhill from there.

I’m a big fan of using the right tool for the job when getting words down on (virtual) paper. I like to write but I hate dragging anything out in the field that I don’t have to. On the other hand, I’m not very good at transcribing my journals from a notebook into a document file.
I wrote a series of newspaper articles during both my Appalachian Trail thru-hike and Mississippi River trips for the Greensboro News and Record. During those trips I was largely dependent on public libraries for their computers and Internet access to post articles and photos. While libraries are wonderful about letting me use their systems, this isn’t the most optimal set-up for many reasons. Hours of operation, distance from where I was staying, and just the issue having to go to one more place just to upload 1,000 words and a few photos. There’s got to be a better way. Maybe there is.
For the next trip I’m planning on using something like a Palm 680
with a folding keyboard for writing and photo management. As is stands now, I do most of my writing at home on an old Handspring Visor and folding keyboard that I can’t manage to kill. I love the convenience of just whipping out the PDA and hammering out a few words at the drop of a hat. For just getting words on paper, it’s hard to beat. The battery life on those old black and white units are incredible—I’ll go for about three weeks on a set of AA’s. The downside is that I don’t have WIFI or a card reader for the photos with that setup.

We did use a Pocketmail email device for much of our short emails on the river. It was very easy to upload and download text emails, but no provision for photos. There’s an audio modem on the back, so you just dial a toll-free number from any phone, hold the unit to the receiver, then get you emails. Very handy.

I’ve also demo-ed a unit from Alphasmart called a Dana. It’s a Palm-based unit that’s the size of a thin laptop, with a great keyboard and usable black and white screen. Batteries last about 40 hours, and it has built-in (but slow) WIFI. For just basic word processing, this is thing is great, and it’s built like a tank. But then there’s no real provision for photos...
What I want is a flash-based PDA with lots of memory, built-in WIFI, folding keyboard, and a battery life of at least 20 hours. That, and a benevolent benefactor to foot the bill for another long trip.