Last night I got to talk to my brother in Thailand on the phone for a half an hour at 3 cents per minute. He had internet access and was using a headset connected to his computer, dialing through Skype, and rang the house phone where I'm staying with the Havard's here in Mishawaka. The audio quality was no worse than any landline call you would make across the street, not choppy, no lag, no echo. Wow! He has also been using his account on Flickr to post a ton of awesome pictures from the trip. Check out the nice feature of how Flickr organizes by date the picture was taken. If you click on a particular month you even get a thumbnail for each day.
Yesterday I came across a very cool free resource... so you know how designers can find online libraries of fonts as well as high quality, high resolution graphics and photographs? These are usually pay sites. Well check out stock.xchng . Wowsers. Don't be scared off by the required registration... it's all free! Looks like I won't be needing to take a digital camera to any of the tourist traps that I plan on visiting in my lifetime, I can just mooch better pics of said locations from this site! Makes for excellent browsing for awesome desktop background images. It's like Webshots on steroids. It's like discovering Google Maps after having just used MapQuest . (ps- Google Local now offers that map functionality fully integrated ..) Stumbling across that site set my mind rolling on free stuff. I just realized how my professional focus on open source software has been an extension of an interest in free stuff that I had back in high school . (for t