Drained

Every once in a while, I catch myself writing about writing, which is unfortunate, because the purpose of this blog is to write about travel. But I haven't written much about travel the last couple days--or anything for that matter--despite the incredible trip I went on this weekend. In a strange turn, I find myself writing about, well, not writing.

The lapse is not for want of ideas. This weekend inspired several topics for riffing. But I faced trouble with technology mid-trip. Blogging for me is not a simple process that requires a single piece of hardware. To make my posts visually appealing, I like to bury thumbnail-sized preview images in the text. This fastidious method demands a multi-step process that requires a proper internet browser. All I brought with me on the trip was the phone, and it doesn't make the grade.

Before the trip to Thailand, I had solved the line break problem, which was caused by posting through email, by using an HTML email client to eliminate character limits. But still, using the phone caused me a slew of hangups. Email doesn't seem capable of labeling posts or adding large, hyperlinked photos. Also, I can't caption more than one photo per post, and the images show up small. A simple workaround to these problems would have been to log onto the blog's dashboard through the phone's browser and encode the images through HTML. But this workaround requires the image URL, and the feeble little browser on the phone won't let me get at it. No matter what, a laptop is required equipment. Leaving mine at home made no difference. Even if I had brought it, I need internet access with the laptop to get the URL's. We had no wi-fi in the countryside places where we stayed, and I deleted my tethering application sometime during one of many software resets on that brick of a phone.

Another setback to posting over the weekend in Vĩnh Long was the lamentable lack of batteries. I could have spent more time at least taking notes and drafting outlines if I wasn't worried about running out. The phone is good for short posts, but longer ones burn up power, and I have a tendency to spend four or five hours alone just writing a single post, not including the time-consuming challenge of coding pics.

Besides blogging, I need batteries because the phone is my link to the outside world, a way for me to contact Mike or Lữ if I get lost, a camera, and a Vietnamese-English dictionary. I need battery power, and I run out quickly and often. What's worse, I didn't bring a portable charger this weekend.

To get me through, I leeched battery top-ups from Lữ's computer. But she didn't bring her charger either, and it wasn't right of me to sap her battery when she needed it too. I held off on nicking a recharge until she'd used as much power as needed to share her beautiful photos to her little cousins.

I learned something about myself in those moments when I was low on batteries. I felt a bit like I was stranded on a lifeboat at sea, and the red, blinking power meter was a steadily dwindling supply of drinking water. I can imagine that people adrift on meagerly-stocked lifeboats tend to reevaluate priorities. I realized I'm beginning to get a little technology dependent. Once, I thought any kind of dependency was a bad thing, a limitation, a liability. There's too much we're dependent on as it is; just look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the pyramid describing growth toward self-actualization.

Though the phone, the battery is linked to various levels of the pyramid. I looked down at the blinking red light asked myself, what do I do when the phone dies? How can I manage if I can't take pictures of my travels? Or look up a bus route? Or translate, "I'm lost, could you help me find my way?" How would I get by without immediate access to the omniscient modern day oracle, Google, for song lyrics, engine schematics, and snakebite remedies? And how on Earth did people ever manage once upon a time without the internet, without the cell phone, without being perpetually plugged in with one another? I can't remember. And I don't think I'd want to go back to those liberated times, when there wasn't so much need for a battery.

I find my own psychological batteries are a little drained at the thought of catching up all the stories from the weekend. This trip was a cartwheeling escapade of experience: country living, scenic beauty, natural splendor, exceptional hospitality, and incredible food. All of it deserves riffing. I suppose if I had enough batteries in my phone to post just a few paragraphs each day over the weekend, at the very least I would have less to catch up on now. At least I've got a wall outlet and stories to tell. And I have a feeling, once I'm all caught up, my own batteries will be more or less recharged. Lesson learned. Have charger, will blog.

Code Switching

This next post is going to be something a little bit different than usual. It will be a blog about blogging. Weaksauce, some might say. But some hurdles were cleared in order to make this post, and the end result is going to mean a more visually appealing blog. At least, that's my hope.

Today, (as some of you already know) I posted a preliminary test blog. I wanted to see if I could post through e-mail. Blogger, or Blogspot (I just realized that I'm not really sure what it's called), has a setting that allows bloggers to post by e-mailing their blog to a secret address. Ooooh, it's a seeecret.

But the test results were sub-par. The post was full of line breaks, so it looked jagged and unpleasant to read. Clueless as to the cause, I consulted that glorious modern day oracle, the one called "Google" to tell me the reason for those distracting line breaks, and how I can get rid of them.

As it happens, the Oracle was wise about what causes the breaks. The reason is Google itself. In the plain text e-mail editor, Gmail imposes a 78-character limit on lines of text. Apparently this has to do with downward compatibility with older e-mail clients. Not too sure, not too concerned. Like a tire with a hole, I just want a fix.

The seemingly obvious solution is to use Gmail's rich-text editor, which has no character-limit line breaks. But (isn't there always a catch?) the reason I want to post through e-mail are for those times when my only access to the internet is through my phone. And since Google and Apple don't play well together, my phone has no rich-text support. In other words, the Oracle is telling me to go fly a kite.

Somewhere in the back of my mind there's the voice of this computer guy I knew at Vandy-land telling me, there is a way there is a way there is a way. Uuuusssse the coooode, Luuuukeee.

Actually, he would probably have used less of a Star Wars allusion and more of a Street Fighter reference. But I digress. If I could figure out how to send an e-mail in HTML, I thought the code would bypass the character limit. I found an app that would do the trick and sent a test run to my e-mail account. Eureka! It worked! So I leveled my X-wing fighter, switched off my targeting computer, put my finger on the trigger, and unloaded two HTML torpedoes down the exhaust port of this internet/iPhone frak-up and... dragon punched that beeyatch in the chinny-chin-chin. (Star Wars, Street Fighter, and the Three Little Pigs--I promise, folks, I'll get back to Vietnam with tomorrow's post).

Anyway, voilà, no more line breaks. However, this was not the first of my trials and errors with coding. For the first couple of posts, I used the native picture uploader in Blogger. But I was really unsatisfied with it. Blogger is way behind the ball on design functionality, and there was no way to my knowledge that I could slap a caption on a photo and have them both nested in a paragraph. I figured out an alternate way by setting up my design template with a CSS code (whatever that is). And voilà, I have captions under my pictures nested in the paragraphs. Better yet, I can make the pictures hyperlinked to anything I choose.

But like the Lernaean hydra, computers have a way of spawning two new problems for each solution. I just realized I'm running into browser issues with Internet Explorer. The pages load perfectly on the Chrome browser. But IE is being a royal pain. The captions are halfway or completely missing, the tables have borders, and the title element encroaches on the leading image. If you're running IE, I apologise. I still have to tweak with the code to make it look right. If you're surfing with Safari, Firefox, a mobile browser, or some other program, I hope Riffing Indochina is showing up right. Or at least readable. If you're on Chrome, well, it'll look right until it doesn't. I think Yogi Berra said that.

As a matter of fact, I'm still hoping this post sans line breaks works as well. If it does, than the next step is to figure out how to attach a photo to an HTML e-mail. And if I figure out how to do that, my techie friend's voice in my head will gurgle, code is strong with this one.