Ravi Blogs about IT Topics

We had a fabulous nine days in Portugal. We spent most of our time in and around Lisbon and three days in Sao Miguel, the largest island in Azores. Lisbon is a fun city, with a lot to do. In the event you did not know, Portuguese occupied India and Sri Lanka for a short period of time and there are pockets of Portuguese influence even now in these countries. Goa in India is a famous place that once was a Portuguese colony. We saw several Indians in Lisbon and we attributed this to the old connections. A couple of them even helped us buy train tickets properly…Technology in Portugal was better than I had anticipated… When I got off the plane and turned my blackberry on, I got the phone and data connection immediately. I was not expecting the latter to work, because I had only signed up for international phone service. However, fearing that I will end up paying a lot of money for data connection, I immediately turned those apps off…

In all the hotels we stayed, we could easily buy wireless connectivity for 1 hour, 2 hours or 24 hours at 3,5 or 10 Euros respectively. It was very reliable and easy. You sign up and get a user name and password that is valid for the period that you signed up for. I tried to connect to other unsecured wireless access points, but was unsuccessful. I found one misconfigured AP and logged in as the admin and found the problem and was about to fix it, but then it struck me that I really don’t want to do this in a foreign land… So I immediately backed off… And the whole was still open when I tried on the last night.

The cell phone connectivity was excellent all through… We stayed in Sao Miguel, the largest island of the Azores in the middle of the Atlantic. No problems… I used to take long walks in some pretty remote locations, but the signal was there. The most amazing thing was that people were talking on their cell phone while traveling in the metro, their underground subway!!!

Another thing that caught my attention was the use of wireless devices in almost all roadside cafes. They use them to enter your order and print your check right from it when you are done.

We also took a ton of pictures, which I diligently transferred every day to my laptop and then over to Google Photos. Whenever I had time, I also started tagging each photo with its location. What a wonderful feature this is!!! However, when you are talking about doing this for 50-60 photos every day, it can get annoying…

So during one of my walks, I thought of an idea that I thought was brilliant… A GPS enabled digital camera (and video camera) that recorded the location as meta data along with the picture. Then when you upload this to Google Photo, it will be automatically update the location. It turns out that GPS enabled cameras already exist… They are pricey and I have been able to find only a couple.

Just to be ahead of the game, you heard this one here first… I would love to have a video camera that records audio, video, location as well as the smell. That would be great and would really bring back memories…