On our way home!

We`ve arrived in Zurich at an airport hotel. Our flight departs tomorrow about noon. Looking forward to seeing zu, er, you all.

Wish zou were hier

Greetings from Luzern (Lucerne). Internet access has either been difficult or pricey so I haven`t posted recently, as you have noticed. This post is coming from a public terminal and the time is ticking down by the minute, .20 francs per min, or 16 cents per. Having a great time though things are busy. Weather has been great making a picture postcard of Luzern. However things are expensive in Switzerland. Lunch yesterday cost 100 francs and dinner was 130 francs for nice but not superb.

More from Sound of Music country

Click on image for bigger picture.


This is from the Mirabelle Gardens, a location from the Sound of Music.


Remember this location?



We sang in University Church this evening.


What great acoustics tonight!

Travels with Geoff

Click on the pictures for bigger pictures.


Lauren can't resist playing with my new wide angle adapter.


We made it to Neuschwanstein (Crazy King Ludwig's Castle).


Susan takes time to smell the flowers.


We found a green grocer market behind the main tourist district in Salzburg old town. This is also Gordon's new crush.

The hills are alive ... in Salzburg!

Good morning from Austria! We're on vacation with our church choir in Bavaria. After being up 33 hour straight we've had 7 hours of sleep and are ready and raring to go (apart from my body thinking that it's only midnight, and typing on a German keyboard on the free terminal in the lobby). Saw King Ludwig's castle yesterday - fantastic! And the countryside is amazing - like Indiana with hills, and even better! Will try to post pictures later.

Love to all!

Tip: A better way to track your passwords

If you're of a certain age you can remember a time when you only had your ATM code to memorize. Now almost everyone has at least a half dozen passwords and secret codes to track. And with new security standards sites are beginning to require passwords be changed every few months. What to do, besides keeping your passwords on Post-Its on your computer screen?

Today I share a tip about computer tools to help you keep track of your passwords. These are both on-line and off-line tools, much more secure than your yellow sticky. And the best part is, they're free!

Talk is cheap, especially with prepaid wireless phones

In response to the many inquiries, yes, I am on vacation. Okay, so no one asked why I haven't posted on a while.

Be that as it may, here's a tip that may save you lots of money if you're a light cell phone user, but still find it necessary to pay for a cell phone. Using the right plan you can pay just $2.50 a month for the privilege of carrying around a (working) cell phone. Yup, you can carry around a cell phone for cheaper but only if you can't use it to make or receive calls.

Here's the tip. Run, don't walk, to Page Plus Cellular. They buy cellular airtime from Verizon Wireless in bulk at a huge discount, then resell them to people like you. You have to pay up front at about 14 cents a minute, but that works out to be a lot cheaper than the regular cellular pay-by-the-month plans if you don't make a lot of calls.

Here's more on how this works. If you don't already have a Verizon phone lying around you'll need to by one from Page Plus or from one of the resellers that are a part of their reseller network. (My favorite is Babblebug. Great name, eh?) I think this can be $40 or cheaper. It won't be the latest phone with the latest bling but you're not a fashion plate now, either, are you? If you by a phone from Page Plus or a reseller you'll also get about $10 worth of minutes, or about 71 minutes. Now, if you don't use up all the minutes, the next time you'll have to lay down money is in four months. That's how ofter you must buy minutes. You'll have to buy a minimum of $10, but you can buy more, too, at a little better rate than 14 cents a minute. A bonus is that unused minutes just roll over.

There are other prepaid plans but Page Plus seems to be the best. Don't take my word for it. There's a guy in the northeast who has researched and used many of the plans. If you want to get all geeky and engineer-like about the analysis check out the CellGuru.

Yes, I eat the dog food. All four of us are on prepaid plans. Yeah, the kids suffer because they don't have RAZRs like their friends. They say they have the oldest phones of any of their friends. I tell them fine, suffer. I had to borrow cars from my folks, and that orange Datsun 1200 was no chick magnet! It's a character builder, that's what it is.

As always, no charge for this money saving tip.

Lake Tahoe here we come!

We're off to Lake Tahoe for a few days. This is an extended family trip - Mom and Dad, Gary and his family and us, all in one big house near Zephyr Cove. Anyone have favorite buffets that we shouldn't miss?

Lauren's graduation video

Lauren graduated last Friday afternoon and I was there with my new digital camera. I set it to take a video and let it roll.

However, the result is unfortunately in the "just because I can" category. The video is low-res and jerky because I messed up my settings. But whatever the case isn't it fun to see friends and family on TV?

New header today

I think a blog is a little like moving into a new house. Today's change is a personalization of my blog with a new header. This is from our western US driving trip a few years ago. This was taken at Independence Rock in Wyoming.

Tip: Drinking the Web through a straw

If you (try to) read more than a half dozen websites every day you should really think about using a "newsreader." A newsreader is a single computer application or a web page that automatically collects the content of your favorite web pages (like Where's Geoff) and presents it to you in a single place. It strips out much of the formatting unique to each web page (like the advertising!) and just gives you the text, pictures and sounds. As one writer put it, "It's like an Inbox for the Web." What's more, most newsreaders are free! Really!

There is some magic that websites have to do to allow reading via newsreaders, but most mainstream sites with frequent updates you'd care to read support newsreaders.

My favorite newsreader, by far, is Google Reader. The screenshot is from my page. You can see all the sites I want to follow on the left, and the articles from the sites are in the wide column on the right. Reading the stuff is as simple as scrolling.

Here's a nifty intro to Google Reader. The interface has changed since the intro was created, but the principles are the same.

Ready to start? Click here!