I got to the airport at 4PM for a 6PM flight to Amsterdam.

This was to be my first European trip from NYC, and I was revelling in the idea of arriving fresh and early in the morning without having to go through London or Frankfurt. NYC is big enough to have direct flights!

But when I got to the airport it was all screwed up. I'm not on the 6PM -- I'm on the 11PM. I'm already feeling jetlagged and haven't even left my home timezone yet.

Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh.

At least they have a nice lounge to hang in.

 4/26/2011; 4:22:34 PM.   .

Today's the travel day. It starts this evening in NYC and ends tomorrow morning in Amsterdam. 

On arrival, a SIM card will be waiting for me at the hotel, from maxroam.com. I got a bunch of recommendations for that service, and Pat Phelan from the company helped me out. I m

I also got upgraded my AT&T account to include international roaming. Just as a backup. I've become very dependent on having a map app in my cell phone as I get around in NYC. I can imagine it'll be even more useful in a foreign city.

Just for fun I bought a pre-paid American SIM from T-Mobile for the Nexus/S. 2GB data and unlimited everything for $70 for one month. That's less than what I pay for the iPhone. But I never use it as a phone, and I don't expect to use the Nexus either. And I use Google's chat instead of texting. I don't see myself giving out this number to anyone. Heck, I don't even know it myself.

These days it's all about the data plan. Funny how that one isn't unlimited!

Also included in my kit is a small MacBook Air, and a white iPad 2. The Kindle stays home. Probably going to leave the Verizon Droid home too. Can't see it would be much help, except on the way to the airport and coming home. And I have the Nexus for making calls.

Also bringing a bunch of power adapters that I think work in the Netherlands. Should I bring an Airport Express? Hmm. Probably not.

Excited to be traveling with my new electronic entourage.

Other stuff to read: Adam wrote a kickass blog post last night about his experience subscribing to all the people he follows on Twitter in Blork. If you've been following the development of the minimal blogging system here you should read his post carefully.

Andrew Shell wins the prize of the first add-on service for Blork users. It made Adam's experience above possible. We love you Andrew, and will never forget the early role you played in bootstrapping this coral reef.

Jay Rosen is blorking now. And making excellent feature requests. You can hear about it in the podcast we did yesterday. I think it's the best RBTN we've ever done. All the others were punditry. This one was a user and a developer going back and forth. And today there are new features in the product based on this discussion and Ted Howard is looking into ways of replicating the FriendFeed experience for Jay.

As we used to say when podcasting was booting up: Users and developers party together. Yehi!

 4/26/2011; 11:00:53 AM.   .