I mentioned the other day that Anastasia and I are going on a sea cruise in a couple weeks. My family is all going and taking us along—I think there will be 18 of my family members on this cruise, from my 91 year old grandmother to my 6 month old nephew.

I was wanting to blog and upload photos of the trip while happening, and have been researching the ship's Internet café. I finally found their price specs, and it looks like it is going to be too expensive to blog much. Take a look at these onboard Internet café prices . . ouch!

Anastasia is a great photographer and we are going through Alaska's inside passage, which I have heard is spectacularly beautiful. I figured that, even with my digital camera, she would get stunning photos that would be great to post on my blog.

To give the cruise credit, they have a WiFi option and I could even bring my own laptop. So, I started thinking about bringing my laptop and how I could also post audio and video to my blog.

I am going to be bringing my MiniDisc player and making sound recordings (my sometimes activity while Anastasia is seriously photographing), and I figure someone in my family has a digital video recorder they are bringing. My laptop is all set up to encode RealAudio and RealVideo.

But, this is going to be my single one-week vacation this year, and bringing my laptop just seems like too much of a drag. I know, if I have it with me, I am going to be on it too much—especially if I have WiFi access!

Also, writing, image, audio and video production takes a lot of time. When I was in Cape Town, South Africa in 1999 for the Parliament of World Religions, during the day, I was tape recording and photographing presentations (some really good ones: the 14th Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela) and many of the musical arts events (e.g., Taiko drummers, Olatunji, Tibetan monks). But, then I was staying up all night encoding the audio, transferring and editing the images, writing up my impressions, linking up everything and uploading it.

So, I am not going to have the multimedia blog vacation this year. But, I think I will write a little program that let's me update my blog via a web browser or web-email, so I can at least send a daily one-liner from sea (er, at $1 a piece).