stellar echo

With a week to go before we depart on our EuroTrip i have been setting up my Asus EEE to have all the connectivity tools a young-technologically-savvy traveller could need.

Everything is running on my Asus 1000HE running Windows 7 RC1. I am so far pretty impressed with Windows 7 and have migrated most machines in the house to use thee new OS. My serious development laptop still uses Ubuntu and will remain that way but at least it feels like Windows 7 is much better step in the right direction compared to the abortion that is Vista.

Windows Live Writer

This is the only Windows Live product I’m going to use. So far it looks pretty good, the ability to be able to write up blog entries while offline is something that has a big appeal to me during the long flights and rail trips. For kicks i also installed Messenger only to immediately uninstall this piece of crap when i saw the rampant advertising used. I normally use an old version of trillian pro. I think version 3, it does everything i want in an IM client while having a minimalistic skin. Works well.

Google Picasa

I absolutely love Picasa for my photo management and don’t use anything else. While I think Google missed the boat with Web Photo Albums due to the Facebook revolution. It is possible to get a Facebook image exporter added into Picasa to be able to quickly update Facebook. I am going to look for a Gallery plugin for my plug and have that update Facebook i think. Need to investigate this further.

Garmin Mobile PC

Armed with this software, a USB GPS receiver and the Europe 2009 maps i should be able to navigate the streets of Europe well enough. Our plan is to hire a car in Nice and drive around France a bit. I will be concentrating on driving on the wrong side of the road too much to worry about directions so this should be helpful.

Microsoft OneNote 2007

Came with my MSDN subscription, this is another MS program that i really like. We have all our travel notes, itineries, e-tickets and what not stored in various folders within one note. The ability to easily do a video/voice recording is pretty cool as well. Also being able to make nifty little ‘To-Do’ lists has really helped with the organising.

Anyways this is my first post from Live writer so it’s more of a proof of concept to see how well it hooks into WordPress. ta ta.