How Magazine Interview

The author at work in Nepal

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Interview with How Magazine

4/29/98 Phuket, Thailand
N 28 degrees 12.767' E 083 degrees 57.634'

How Magazine intervied me by e-mail about the basic details about my trip. Here are the answers:

My job this year is to travel around the world, take pictures with my Agfa digital camera, and write stories about design at the turn of the century. These stories and pictures are available for co-publication on the Agfa and ID Magazine web sites. I upload the images to a storage server in San Francisco and the clients pick what they like. ID picks up some of my stories for their printed magazine, and Agfa may publish the design stories in a book they will digitally print on their presses when I return. Agfa gave me a contract, ID pays me freelance if they like the stories.

Unfortunately for me, most of my stories end up being quirky tales of cheap exchange rates, harrowing bus rides, or late night stargazing sessions. Lately I've tried to be a little more adult, the Painting and Bottle Boat stories are the result.

1. My Background
I've been doing this digital junk for a long time, first as a graphic designer at Wang Laboratories in 1983. In 1987 I recieved a Master of Fine Arts in Graphic Design from Yale University, where I spent a summer working for Clement Mok at Apple Computer. After graduation, I became a partner at Burns, Connacher, and Waldron Design Associates, Inc., a print design firm specializing in high-tech accounts like Apple, IBM, Agfa, and business accounts in the investment bank and insurance industries.

While at Burns, Connacher & Waldron I started lecturing to designers about using the computer to do design. That process led us into the electronic presentation market, and eventually into multimedia. Our first big project was a Hypercard Stack for Agfa Electronic Prepress Products. We made 50,000 diskettes for distribution at trade shows throughout the world. We ended up doing presentations and kiosks for a bunch of corporate and government clients. One of our installations is still active on Ellis Island in New York Harbor.

I left Burns, Connacher in 1992 and began independent consulting in multimedia development. I did interactive television prototypes with Bell Atlantic, financial services software for JP Morgan, and a bunch of demos for advertising agencies. About the time the web kicked in, I teamed up with Anderson & Lembke business-to-business advertising and produced a number of large corporate web sites including Agfa (www.agfahome.com) and Torget (www.torget.se) the publishing experiment for the Swedish Postal Service. We did the entire agfa site with a staff of ten, but the Swedish site had 200 consultants involved and took one year to finish. By the way, it came out much uglier than we wanted, but is to this day, claim the clients, it is the most visited site in Europe every day.

In 1992, as practice for developing web sites, I made a web site for an inline skate wheel company named fr Progressors (www.frprogressors.com), the first in the Action Sports industry. At that time there were no good web development tools and I wrote the code in Microsoft Word and previewed the results in Navigator. I think that helped me become a little fearless about building sites when I left the US. I can always fall back to writing code cold. Burning to a crisp on the Net in 1996, I took a year off to run fr Progressors finances, moving them from 45K in sales to 750K in ten months. Then my partner burned me for 45,000 dollars. Time for a break.

2. Round the World
I'm 38, single, no kids, no debt, with a little savings, and between careers. What better time to take a year off and see the world.

I never traveled much as a youth, but got used to living in a foreign-speaking country when I commuted to Stockholm 25 times in eight months for the Torget project. I'd always been afraid of strange food, and getting lost in the woods. But all that travel kinda sparked something in me and I began thinking about visiting Thailand, where all my Swedish pals went diving in the winter. I'd saved up a chunk of money and thought, "Well, if I'm going all the way over there, why not go all the way around the world?"

Then I thought, "How nice would it be if I found a sponsor?" Agfa announced their second digital still camera, the ePhoto 1280, in September. I put together a one page proposal and sent it to my longtime client Peter Broderick. It outlined my expected route, schedule, and story ideas. I proposed that they could use the photographs I made as test images, and as content associated with the web pages of the camera. We negotiated a price and they supplied me with the camera and software.

I tried to get a computer company to sponsor me, but ran out of time. I found a satellite telephone sponsor, but the equipment was too heavy and bulky to carry. Finally, I had a few introductory conversations with a global cellular telephone provider, but once again ran out of time. I'd suggest at least 7 months lead time for anyone looking for sponsors. I had 2.

3 Equipment
At the end of this note is the complete equipment list, but I'll describe the main components for you, and why I chose them.

The Camera
The Agfa ePhoto 1280 digital still camera (check out the www.agfahome.com site for details) shoots digital images in five resolutions, from web-sized to pretty good print reproduction res. It has a nice zoom lens, comprable to a 35-105mm zoom on a 35mm camera. The images are stored on removeable 4mb RAM chips. I have four of them, and depending on resolution I can get up to 36 photographs on each chip. The chips are reusable.

The camera has no viewfinder, relying instead on a 2 inch color LCD screen on the back. Because the lens and camera body swivel, the screen is visible at just about any camera angle. This is a cool thing cause people don't often know you are pointing the camera at them, and don't freeze up or pose for you when you're shooting candids.

The camera comes with a serial cable to connect the camera to Mac or PC compatible computers. The software, Photowise, imports the images (JPEG format) into the computer and enhances the JPEG files to give them a little more clarity and definition. It seems to do a good job.

The computer
Apple Newton Messagepad 2100 was my choice to cart around the world, but the evaluation was done with the following stuff in mind:

Main considerations:
1. Size and Weight
2. Electrical consumption
3. Compatibility
4. Cost

1. Size and Weight
I wanted to carry my entire life around in a backpack, so whatever I brought had to be small. The lightest full-featured laptops computers I found still weighed 8 pounds and up when you add in the weight of batteries, chargers, and accessories. And light laptops are expensive too! I looked at the palmtop PCs by HP, Psion and the like, but their keyboards were miniscule and impossible to actually write with.

Finally looking into the Apple Newton, I found a machine that weighed less than two pounds, had a full-sized keyboard, and is really cool looking to boot.

2. Electrical consumption
The Newton runs on standard AA sized batteries, and under normal use (excluding modem time) lasts about three weeks. That was a mammoth advantage over laptop computers. I nearly never have to plug the thing into an outlet for writing, which has let me write all over the place, on boats, in busses, planes, on a volcano, and in the back of a pony cart on an island with no motorized transportation.

The Agfa camera also uses AA sized rechargeable batteries, and I have three sets, and two wall outlet adapters. The rechargeables all died within four months, and I have resorted to using Duracells, which last about one hour before emptying out.

3. Compatibility.
I needed a computer that could interface with the Agfa ePhoto 1280 and send the images back to the client. The Newton does not run Agfa Photowise, but I found a small software company that made such a piece of software. It's called Tibet. It connects the Newton to the camera via a cable, downloads the camera image into the newton, and FTP's it to a server in Los Angeles.

I read that the software works really well, but they never delivered the product to me before my departure. Instead, I bring the camera into a Internet Cafe, beg them to let me install the Agfa Photowise software into their machine, download all the pictures to the hard drive, and then use Cute FTP to send the images to a server in San Francisco. Agfa and ID Magazine are supposed to pick up the images from that server.

Now, I only use the Newton to write the stories and send via it's internal modem.

4. Cost
The first laptop I priced out, which was configured the way I wanted it, cost $ 4500 US. The Newton cost $ 1000. I expect that sometime during the year the PC will get stolen, or rained on, or tramped by an elephant, so the Newton still looks like a good investment, even if I have to buy four of them.

Last month, of course, Apple killed the Newton line, so if something unsavory happens to mine I'll have to find a new toy along the way.

More equipment:
For additional memories, I have an Olympus Infinity Zoom 35mm pocket camera for snapshots of beaches and drinking binges, and a Canon EOS Elan 35mm SLR for shooting transparency film, best for magazine or book reproduction. My Garmin GPSII global positioning device, a gift from a collegue, lets me plot my position on the globe to within 30 meters, (right now it's N O8? 00.384' E O98? 17.766'), so I can be absolutely sure of exactly where I am, despite being completely lost. It hooks up to my Newton as well, in conjunction with some mapping software I'm awaiting.

All told I have about 15 pounds of gadgets, and there are many days I would like to throw the whole bag in the sea just to make my back feel better.

4. Balinese Art Story
If you read the story, I referenced the Neka Museum. That place tells a good story of the development of painting in Bali. Lying on a beach a week after visiting I got all nostalgic about how Bali must have been in the 50's, and how I just missed it by 40 years. Then I remembered that some of the painters that were there in the 40's and 50's were still alive and living in Bali. I though it might be interesting to get their views on how new technology in the 1990's might effect painting now. So I spent ten hours on a boat back to Bali to meet these guys and write the story.

Most of the stories I write are simple, linear tales of the road, and might have a single reference to a photograph on the web (check out www.frprogressors.com/agfaimages/MORE.htm and read the Bottle Boat story). The Balinese Painting story broke itself up in a way that would be enhanced by presenting it as a web site, instead of a single text story. I also wanted to show examples of the painting styles I described, because they are beautiful and interesting.

The story started with pen and paper, my little green notebook and I hopped on my Honda scooter and drove off to meet some aging painters. I interviewed them and scribbled notes for transcription later. Lots of fun, and very interesting conversations filled with insight from guys over 80.

Then the "expatriate-cool-techno-virtual-office" part. I sat on the front porch of my elephant grass thatched-roof cottage ($1.62 US per day including breakfast) in a bamboo chair, looking over the bananna and coconut trees with my little computer tucked onto my knees. As the Geckos ate mosquitos around me, and between breaks to shoo away clucking chickens, I tapped away at my keyboard and wrote the story, lighting a candle to see the keyboard as the sun went down. I sat there for two days downing sweet tea and sucking down packs of cigarettes for sustinance, finally finishing a somewhat coherrent story.

Now the pain-in-the-ass part. I went to an internet cafe to do image research. Indonesia does not have the fastest internet backbone in the world, and the servers that contained the information I wanted were also very slow, and the access speed at the Net cafe was plodding along. Before I got everything I wanted, 12 hours passed. My butt hurt. But at least the Cafe had good food, no walls, and a view of two Balinese temples across the street. I had lots of time to look around. I also had an audience, because the cafe had only opened two weeks earlier and the manager had no computer experience. I trades some guidance for free online time.

I carry along a few pieces of software with me on a trio of CD-ROMs. Unfortunetly this cafe did not have a CD-ROM player. Instead, I had the joy of downloading two pieces of software off the web. To get Netscape Navigator Gold and Cute FTP took two hours, fourty-five minutes. Luckily, the cafe already had Adobe Photoshop, so I could manipulate the size and format of the images at will.

Lack of a CD player also complicated the text entry. In order to get the story from my Newton to the computer at the Cafe, I e-mailed the story from my Newton to myself, and then used the Cafe machine to read my e-mail from my ISP in New York, and copied the text into Navigator. So the rest of the Balinese Painting site was built with Netscape Navigator, and put up on my server with Cute FTP.

The web pages took about three days to completely finish and edit. I think there are still tons of typos and the like, but I think someone will edit it eventually. I look at it as a draft. But I'm pretty proud of the work, as acedemic as it is.

5. ISP on trip
I use IBM.net as my ISP. They have a reasonably large list of countries and access numbers. In Indonesia there were four, in Malaysia there were two. Here in Thailand there is only one, and I cannot seem to make it work, so I have to call Malaysia instead.

The telephone numbers aren't the biggest problem for connecting. I'm staying mostly at guest houses, and they are run by local families, few having telephone service. So I tried to go the the telephone Wartels that dot all the tourist areas. They are happy to let you hook up your computer, but their phone lines go through their billing computers. Everytime the billing computer makes a notation of another billing segment, it tends to damage the modem connection between the Newton and the ISP. And because there is only limited access to telephones at home, people are wary of you rearranging cables on the back of their fax machine. Explaining that my little computer is just like a fax machine rarely helps.

The fastest connection at any location on my trip has been an ISDN connection in Cairns Australia. Most all of the other ISPs I encountered were 28.8 or 33K access. We, in the states are blessed by speedy connections.

6. Customs
I've had no hassles at airport security. You'd figure with all the wires I have with me someone would be curious, but not yet.

7. Random Stuff
Most everyone on the backpacker circuit has a Hotmail account. And most everyone truly hates the excruciatingly slow speed they can access their mail at. Although it is really much easier than what I usually go through. When I can't hook my Newton up and go to a Internet place, which are reasonably easy to find in tourist areas, I have to reconfigure the mail software to read from my pop server in NYC. That's easy if the computer has Netscape Navigator, but near impossible with the watered down versions of Expolorer or Navigator personal. And the Cafe owners get all edgy when you start messing with preference files and the like.

I have found that going back to the earliest software for the Internet, Telnet and Pine, let me do most things I want with e-mail. And nearly every PC has it pre-installed. The only problem is I don't get to sit somewhere wonderful and compose witty notes, I have to sit in some steamy box-like room and pay between 2 and 32 dollars an hour while I type. (Indonesia was the cheapest at $2 hr., but at a first class hotel in Bali they had six gorgeous terminals, all empty, available at $7.50 US for each 15 minutes. An outrage!)

Its getting easier to be wired out here. Most of these guys are just starting up, and many don't have any experience, just a computer and modem. Today I got connected at little non-descript restaurant, kinda a lunch line on some random street in Phuket Thailand. A local kid had got a phone line installed and hooked up a PC next to the Coke cooler, put a sign out front and offered the service. Kinda like the turn of the century version of a Lemonade stand. They're growing up everywhere.

8. Part of my original Agfa Spec
Here's a list of stuff I gave to Agfa on the outset of my trip, including a complete equipment list and proposed story lines.

The story lines so far:
The digital backpacker (the hacker packer, the digital traveler)
The story of preparing, reviewing and developing technology allowing digital images and text to get from a backpack in the woods to a server in Wilimington, Massachusetts and New York City. How it all works on the road, and what's encountered along the way. This is an update of a standard travelogue, but transmitted regularly from the road.

Digital photography
How is digital photography catching on around the world? We will have A collection of photographs from the trip route for use in any promotional programs Agfa has for them. The photographs will be rights free, but photo credit should read "James Waldron." This story line will deal with the feasibility of using digital photography in all lines of visual arts and personal entertainment.

Design around the world
These are short articles describing noteworthy graphic, industrial, architectural, functional, computer, and civic design from locations along the route. These descriptions, some accompanied with photographs will be submitted according to what comes up, or in conjunction with introductions or meetings secured by Agfa, I.D. Magazine, or other partners devleoped during the project.

The trip schedule:
These dates include currently secured airline flights and expected arrival dates.

27-Nov Depart New York City
29-Nov Auckland, New Zealand
31-Dec Sydney, Australia
5-Feb Bangkok, Thailand
6-Feb Bali, Indonesia
20-Feb - 28 Apr by land and water from Sulawesi, through Jakarta, Singapore, Kualalumpur and Penang, Malasia, Phuket and Kosumui, Thailand 29-Apr Rangoon, Burma
6-May Bangkok, Thailand
13-May Hong Kong, China
18-May By train through Southern China, exit via Hong Kong 17-Jun Surat Thani, Thailand
1-Jul Katmandu, Nepal
22-Jul Delhi, India
5-Aug Frankfurt, Germany
8-Aug Stockholm, Sweden
29-Aug Moscow, Russia
14-Sep Frankfurt, Germany, Zurich Switzerland 28-Sep Athens, Greece
11-Nov New York City

Estimated trip distance: 37000 miles by air

Technology:
Agfa ePhoto 1280 digital camera
Compass Information Systems "Tibet" software
Apple Newton MessagePad 2100 Personal Digital Assistant
enRoute email
NetHopper web browser
Megahertz 28.8 modem
TrueNorth "Gulliver" travel planning software
TrueNorth "Out of Pocket" expense tracking software Merlin "Wordsmith" thesauraus
3 8mb static RAM cards
1 2mb static RAM card
Garmin GPS II plus global positioning device
New Discovery battery charger
Variety of power and telephone converters
Global Internet Service Provider: IBM Global Network
CD-ROMs
Messagepad 2100 software
PhotoWise ver. 1.5
LivePix SE
PhotoVista
Backup of my Apple Powerbook 540c laptop Connection cables
Newton-Mac
Newton-PC
1280-Mac
1280-PC
GPS II - Newton

e-mail address:
primary: waldron@interport.net
secondary: travjim@ibm.net

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