all posts tagged “travel”
Upcoming Speaking Engagements
Posted by: leelefever on October 28, 2011- 10:33am
Categories: facetoface, presentation, Speaking, travel
I'll be speaking at a couple of awesome educational events in early December. Here are the details...
I'll be one of the Rapid Fire presenters at the Big Ideas Fest at Half Moon Bay, CA, December 4-7. Details from the website:
3 days of innovation and inspiration, 16 Speakers, 4 hands-on Action Collab sessions, and numerous opportunities to network with fellow education mavericks and change agents. All of that, plus an entire Pacific Ocean coastline on which to marvel.
Also, I'll be the keynote speaker for the Western Regional Computer Advisory Committee's 2011 Symposium, in London Ontario on December 8th, 2011. The symposium brings together teachers, principals and administrators in Western Ontario, Canada. From the website:
Symposium is all about ideas. The keynote and breakout sessions are carefully selected by the organization committee. There is no "call for proposals"; all of the keynotes and sessions are selected specially for the message that they will deliver. The message is timely and contemporary with the goal being to inform all of the school districts at the same time. Regularly, the audience is filled with over 400 directors, superintendents, principals, and technology leaders.
I hope we'll see you at one of these events!
Speaking at the Texas Library Association Conference
Posted by: leelefever on March 6, 2011- 4:00pm
Categories: education, library, presentation, Speaking, travel
It's true. Sachi and I are attending the Texas Library Association Conference in Austin, April 12-15th. I will be presenting on Thursday the 14th at 2pm and my talk is called "The Art of Explanation - in Plain English". I hope you'll come.
This will be our first library conference and we're really excited to meet people like you and take it all in. Librarians are among our most dedicated fans and this conference is one of the biggest events in the library world. If you're going to the conference, leave a comment or contact us - it would be great to meet face-to-face.
Sachi and I will be attending the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) later this month in Washington DC. This will be our first time attending the conference, so you may see us wandering around with lost looks on our faces.
Because it's such a huge conference, we're hosting a Tweetup [?] so that we can be sure to meet you. Come say hello!
Date: Monday June 29th, 2009
Time: 4:30-6pm
Location: Old Dominion Brew House - Convention Center (we've reserved a room in the back) Map
You can RSVP using Upcoming.org
We're @commoncraft, @leelefever, @sachilefever on Twitter.
On Christmas Eve of 2004, Sachi and I made a decision. We decided that, in one year, we would depart on a year long trip. We reserved a web site address that night: www.theworldisnotflat.com (TwinF). In January of 2006 we departed, dedicated to blogging the whole trip.
After a glowing recommendation from another traveler along the way, we added Sri Lanka to our itinerary, with some apprehension. Sri Lanka experiences some domestic terrorism, but it mostly stays in the northern part of the country. Further, the southern part of the country was devastated by the tsunami a year before. We knew it would be an adventure.
Thanks to connections via Lonely Planet's Thorn Tree Forums we were introduced to Mervyn, our driver for 10 days in Sri Lanka. Like others in the tourism industry in Sri Lanka, Mervyn depends on tourists coming to their country. Tourists who start their plans by searching the Web.
This is Mervyn showing us how to drink a King Coconut:
We became friends with Mervyn and had a wonderful time in Sri Lanka. We always felt safe and Mervyn was a perfect driver and guide - he gave us a local's perspective and became our friend. He introduced us to Arrack, a favorite alcohol of locals. We told him that we would write about him on the Internet and hoped it would help his business. It was the least we could do.
Last night, on Christmas Eve, 4 years after deciding we would go on the trip, we received this email message from Mervyn:
DEAR SIR,
HOW ARE YOU? I AM FINE AND ALL OK WITH ME. I HAD GOOD BUSINESS FOR THIS YEAR. THAT IS BECAUSE OF YOU. THIS YEAR 90% FROM THE BUSINESS I GOT FROM YOUR WEB SITE THAT YOU RECOMAND ME. I SAY AGAIN AND AGAIN THANK YOU VERY MUCH.
I WISH MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR TO YOU AND YOUR WIFE.
MERVYN
This message made our Christmas extra special this year. Mervyn is honest, has a good heart, is very hard-working, and deserves to have a successful business. It's inspiring to me, as a blogger, to think that a couple of blog posts can make such a big difference to someone like him on the other side of the world. Our post is the #3 result for "Driver Sri Lanka" on Google. I hope we can continue to help Mervyn's business in 2009.
Our photos from Sri Lanka
Blog posts from Sri Lanka
What's Missing From This Sign at Airport Security?
Posted by: leelefever on December 7, 2008- 4:00pm
Categories: communication, design, offtopic, signs, travel
Me (to the friendly TSA ID checker): Do I have to remove my laptop computer?
TSA Employee: Yes, you do.
Me: It's not listed on the sign
TSA Employee: Well, it's the most important thing to remove.
Me: But not important enough to be on the sign?
TSA: It's supposed to be on there, the people that printed it messed up (rolls eyes).
The TSA folks have hard jobs and I appreciate what they do. However, it doesn't exactly give me a safe feeling when the instructions for moving through the line efficiently are "messed up" and no on seems to care.
I'm heading to a couple of tech conferences this Fall and I'd love to meet you there.
Gnomedex - Seattle, August 21-23
Nerds of all types converge on Seattle for Chris Pirillo's annual conference. This will be my 3rd one and it rarely disappoints. If you're headed to Seattle, or in Seattle and going to the conference, let me know.
Blog World Expo - Las Vegas, September 20-21
This appears to be a big event. I'm fortunate to be particpating in a panel discussion called "Avoiding Disaster: How Not to Use Social Media" on Sunday, 3-4 PM. My fellow panelists will be Patrick O'Keefe (our faithful organizer who runs the iFroggy Network and author of "Managing Online Forums "), Problogger Darren Rowse and Jason Falls from Social Media Explorer. Here's the conference schedule.
If you're headed to either of these events, I'd love to meet you there.
To finish up China week, I'd like to share some of our favorite photos from China. Enjoy the Olympics!
Shanghai from the Pearl City Tower
A squished pig from a Nanjing market.
Summer Palace
Locks on Yellow Mountain. You might remember these from The Amazing Race.
Li River, near Yangshou, China
Li River Karsts, via Guilin, China.
It was a sunny day in Shanghai. The umbrellas (parasoles?) were to block the sun.
Yangtze River - Three Gorges
Grand Hyatt Atrium, JinMao Tower, Shanghai.
No, she was not chopping off my head with a giant knife. I was getting a haircut and, much to my surprise, I got a massage too. They even cleaned my ears with a Q-tip. I think I'll be the only person sticking anything in my ears in the future.
Sachi at the Great Wall. But you probably figured that out yourself. You might enjoy reading about our Mutiny on the way to the Great Wall.
OK, now back to our regularly scheduled programming...
Below is a short story that was posted to our travel blog from Shanghai. Almost any visitor to China is likely to experience a higher-than-expected level of competiion while standing in line for something like a subway ticket. In the case below, I had made up my mind to be a competitor. Unfortunately things didn't work out as planned.
From the post: Lessons in Line Breaking
I had made a decision and I was going to act on it. Gone were the days of standing passively in line while Chinese people wedge themselves in front of me and place an order before I could react. I was going stand up for myself and try to be a little more Chinese.
This is not the kind of thing you can plan – it just has to happen and just last night, I had my chance. We were in the Shanghai subway terminal in line for our first subway card at a vending machine, as we’ve done so many times before in other cities. Just as the couple in front of me at the machine received their card and turned away, a young Chinese guy stepped directly in front of me. So, with great determination, I stepped in front of him enough to place my right shoulder at about his eye level and in a single motion stepped directly in front of the vending machine. It was mine! HAHA! I’ll show you line breaker! I’m no push-over tourist softy!
So there I was, with this foreign and unfamiliar machine staring me in the face. It was mine, yes, but I realized all too quickly that I had no idea how to use it. The instructions were in English and the #1 read “Select Fare???. Scratching my head with waves of embarrassment pending, I searched the machine for anything that said “Fare???. Nothing. I inquisitively pressed a couple of random buttons in the hopes that something would happen. Nothing. My pride was on the line here and I was blowing it! Thoughts of fleeing in shame entered my mind when I heard a voice over my shoulder, “Where do you need to go???? It was the line breaker politely asking a simple question that I couldn’t answer completely. All we knew was that we needed to go two stops on Line 2. He ended up doing the whole transaction for me and after many “thank yous??? I left with our subway cards in hand and my pride more than a little crushed.
The moral here is that if you’re going to try to act like a local, be prepared for the entire event. Going off half-cocked is a good way to shoot yourself in the foot.
If making signs in Chinese characters was my job, I would be very, very bad at it. However, I might hire someone who knows the language well before erecting a permanent sign at a major tourist destination. For a long time, this didn't happen in China and we snapped the photos below before they invested in changing the signs for the Olympics.
The guy in this photo is one of the most interesting people I've ever met. He's the blind adventurer Miles Hilton-Barber.(notice the broken cane, his favorite schtick) Photo is from the Three Gorges Dam. He did not turn over.
I never could figure out why they wanted to protect the railings. This was at the Summer Palace, where I felt compelled to write a rant about tourism and tour groups.
An earnest request at Yellow Mountain. Most tourist travel in China (outside the cities) is controlled. Most people are herded onto busses and kept in a group, led by a flag-bearing guide who speaks English and may use a megaphone. We are very independent travelers and grew quite tired of these guides.
At the Three Gorges Dam.
I didn't take it as a compliment.
I think they meant "crab"
4 Stars!
And finally, not a sign, but an illustration of a difference in culture. I present to you, on the busy streets of Beijing - a car-to-car turtle salesman.
Reading back through this, it may appear that we didn't like China. I would say that the tourist experience in China, compared to other places, was not as enjoyable. We were only there a month, which is far too short of a time to know if we really like it or not. We left the country wondering what would change before the Olympics and what Westerners would say upon returning.
In honor of the start of the Beijing Olympics, we've decided to make it "China Week" here on the Common Craft blog.
In a lot of ways, China was where we first started to experiment with video. We bought our first video camera (a Sony DCR - PC 1000) in Hong Kong, just before spending about a month in mainland China in 2006. Over the time in China, we edited and posted our first "real" videos.
This week, we'll share a few of those videos and some stories from our time there. It's stuff you won't see on NBC, I promise.
To get us started, here is a 3 minute video that focuses on local food from Chongqing, a giant city in the Sichuan Province. Please note that what I call "rodent heads" may actually be rabbit heads (rabbits aren't rodents). Anyway, enjoy...
- 1 of 4
- ››
Recent Post Topics
Subscribe with RSS