As TJ mentioned, I was on holiday for a couple of weeks. A group of us went to Singapore and Thailand - just the usual tourist stuff, nothing overly amazing but good clean fun (and a well worthwhile break from winter and work).

This isn't my personal blog, so I won't bore you with details of the holiday (or even worse, photos), but I thought you might find a few of the more gadget oriented parts of our holiday interesting.

I took along my Palm Tungsten T3 - I had intention of reading some of the books that were on it, and using it for mobile data - perhaps even updating a weblog or two while I was mobile. That didn't work out - reading on your palm is fine around home, or at work, or when waiting in line at the movies, but I'm just not comfortable taking it down to the beach. Old fashioned paper works a lot better (fortunately, I took some of that as well).

The mobile data thing didn't work out either. We all took our cellphones, and bought cheap pre-pay accounts when we got to Thailand - unfortunately, the basic pre-pay account on orange doesn't allow you to use GPRS.

The phones themselves were very useful - keeping a group of 6 together would be both irritating and frustrating for all involved. With us all having cell phones, we could split up, and do our own thing, but still co-ordinate stuff we wanted to do together. The rates are so cheap, we just called freely - 1 baht per minute for most of the day (the exchange rate is about US$1 = 45 Baht) - one hell of a lot cheaper than at home.

We started the holiday with 4 Digital Cameras and a Sony DV handycam - and one of the party (not me, unfortunately) picked up an identical handycam in Singapore. If you're capable of bartering a bit over dollars, and after a good bargain, Singapore is the place to do your electronics shopping - the price difference on the handycam was about US$200. Two of the guys picked up Sony DVD writers as well - at about 2/3 of the price they can get them at home.

The biggest success of the holiday was the combination of the belkin media reader, and a pair of iPods. With 4 digital cameras and just over two weeks, we generated about 4.5 gig of photos. The pair of iPods gave us some redundancy, and the ability to store all our precious snaps meant that we didn't have to pick and choose what we saved - we just stored everything (which leaves us the task of sorting through the photos now, but that's the price you pay for quality memories). Unqualified success. The only flaw to our plans was not being able to find an internet cafe with firewire and a CD/DVD writer - it would have been nice to make a backup - fortunately, it wasn't needed.

Just after getting back, I was presented with a new watch - a Rado Ceramica Multifunction. Quite possibly the coolest watch I've ever seen, let alone owned. Much kudos to my new fiance for the gift.

If you've got a tale of technology use that you'd like to share with people, why not drop me a line?