China, Here I Come

If you’ve been following me on Twitter, or you are “friendly” with me on Facebook, you would know that a truly amazing event in my life is rapidly approaching. If you don’t know, here’s the big news: I will be traveling to China from June 3rd until the 14th with my high school, as part of a school music tour.

Technically, the trip is just ten days long, but my group (there are two of them) will be laying over in Hong Kong along the way, providing an extra few hours of excitement. This really is a once in a lifetime opportunity, and I surely would like to savor every moment of the trip.

Obviously, while I’m on the road, my communication options will be somewhat restricted, but I’ll definitely work on sharing the experience and remaining open for contact.

• Blogging: I will be bringing my PowerBook G4 along for the trip, and there will be internet access at the hotel we are staying at. If I can find free WiFi around the area, I will surely use it, but the internet access in the hotel room isn’t free, so some of my friends will chip in a bit for the cost of the in-room connection (and I’ll gladly let them use of my laptop in return). Hopefully, this arrangement will work out, and I will attempt to blog while I’m in China. In addition, we have a school blog that we will try to update daily with photos, and perhaps video.
• Video: Being that I am a Qik employee, it makes sense that I should be broadcasting live video from my cell phone, but the only problem that would prevent streaming in China is the difficulty in obtaining a Chinese SIM card with a data plan. I have reached out to some Chinese Qik users, to see how they use Qik in China, and I found out that you have to be a legal Chinese resident in order to get a SIM card with the appropriate subscription. Luckily, my Nokia N95 (the phone that does the magical streaming work) has WiFi, which provides one more possible communications venue. Robert Scoble says that all Qikking at DAVOS and similar international conferences was done over WiFi, which is several orders of magnitude easier than obtaining a SIM card from a Chinese carrier. (BTW, you can view my live stream on either the Live section of this blog, or on my Qik profile page.)
  I am debating whether to take my MiniDV camera to take good video footage, but since my PowerBook doesn’t have a built-in web cam, I will bring along my iSight (the original FireWire version). An idea is to do a nightly video journal, where I’d record a clip every evening detailing my experiences, and then post to the web if there is enough bandwidth. 🙂
• Photos: I am still debating on whether or not I will bring my Kodak DC4800 to China. I have heard a lot that people get robbed of technology in China. (Fortunately, my hotel room will be equipped with a safe, and, needless to say, I’ll be making good use of it). If I do decide to take my Kodak camera, I will post my photos to Flickr. My N95 also has a 5 megapixel camera built in, so in theory, I could use the phone to photograph the trip. However, the camera functions on the N95 are particularly slow, which would severely impact the frequency of picture taking.
• Twitter: When I do get an internet connection, I will be Twittering. Seeing that I am “addicted” to Twitter, it would be very hard to not Twitter for more then a few days. One solution for tweeting on the go would involve Chris Thomson’s experiment, which I did consider, but dropped because of the complexity.
• Email: I will be checking email (the frequency will depend on the connection situation), so if you do need to contact me, the best way is to use the Contact page on this site, or email me directly.

To put it in simple words, this is going to be an awesome trip! Expect to see blog posts and photos on my Flickr photostream that detail the entire experience. Beijing, China – here I come!

Disclosure: The thoughts mentioned in this blog post regarding Qik are of my personal opinion and do not represent the business practices of Qik, Inc., or any of its employees or management, or those of its subsidiaries.