I noticed a couple of weeks ago that Adsense ads had stopped displaying on my London and Sydney websites and I had no idea why. I hadn’t received an email-of-doom to tell me I had been banned from the programme and all of my other sites were still working fine, so I was baffled. I made a couple posts to some web geek forums and nobody could shed light on my problem. I emailed Google and after no response for a week, I was ready to throw in the towel and accept that two of my sites had been banned and more might be on the way. Scary stuff.

My Adsense login email address had changed awhile ago for reasons I forget and realised today that I hadn’t checked the new Gmail address (that I never use), I had only checked the old Yahoo address. Yesterday I had a look at my Gmail account and, surprise, surprise, there was an email sitting there from the powers that be at Google about my websites, the reason it was banned and what I could do about it.

The reason the ads were pulled is because I had a ‘Partner Sites’ heading with a couple of text links under it and then an Adsense unit under those. According to Google, and I can see where they’re coming from, this is misleading as it makes the reader think that the Adsense unit is a partner site since it falls under that heading. I was told that only ‘Sponsered Links’ or ‘Advertisements’ were suitable headings and that I had to change this within 72 hours. If I didn’t respond in 72 hours, I was told the ads would be permanently pulled from the offending site.

As I hadn’t seen the warning for over three weeks I was way above the 72 hour limit and kind of crapping myself. I sent a borderline begging email reply saying that I had only just checked this email address, I had been a member of Adsense for over five years with no offences, that my site was full of quality content etc etc. I had a reply within the hour saying that if I made the changes, my Adsense would be reinstated on both sites within 48 hours.

Less than 24 hours later, Adsense is back on my London site and soon to be back on my Sydney site (I made a mistake with the code which didn’t fix the problem straight away). After hearing horror stories of Google banning people without any notification whatsoever, I’m really impressed with the speed of their replies and extremely happy they’ve been flexible with me about the 72 hours thing.

You can bet that from now on I will be paying closer attention to the Adsense terms and conditions and that I will be checking that Gmail account from time to time! Most of all, this experience has reminded me how easy it is for Adsense to be taken away and how important it is to diversify across as many income streams as possible.

Has anyone else ever run afoul of the Adsense gods?

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Spending over four months in a place will always make leaving a bittersweet experience for me. On one hand I loved Haiti, the work I got to do there, the people I met and the feeling of home I was able to establish. On the other hand, I will forever have itchy feet and after several months in one place, I almost always long for some new challanges and adventures.

So as Haiti has drawn to a close for me I am left with amazing memories and great friends. We had our last meeting a few days ago and it was a tear jerker as everyone took a moment to stand up and speak their mind about what their volunteering experience in Haiti meant to them. The best part for me was listening to the young Haitian guys speak about how Hands On had changed and affected them and then listening to the foreign volunteers say the same about the local guys. Haiti is a screwed up kind of place but the young guys I was able to work alongside really give me hope for the future of the country, as cheeseball as that may sound.

We finished off the deployment with a party for 200 of our closest friends complete with chicken, drinks, speeches, hugs, tears, dancing, singing and this slideshow that I put together from some of the photos taken since Hands On first arrived in October.

I’m looking forward to Nicaragua and reactivating my brain with a bit of language studies but I will miss Haiti and think about it often.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

I’m about to leave Haiti for the second time after over four months living in Gonaives so it’s time for another country wrap up. Haiti doesn’t even rank as a tourist detination, let alone a place to come to hang out and work for awhile but, if you find yourself here for one reason or another, it is an interesting, dynamic place and not at all as bad as ‘they’ say it is.

Pros

• Cheap for eating - If you stick to a diet of things that are in season and in the markets (avacado, mango, eggplant, tomatoes, zuchinni, onion, plantain…) and are able to avoid the tempation of imported Western goodies then you will be able to eat very cheaply here. This is far easier said that done, though.
• Fascinating history and culture - Haiti was the first country to cast off the chains of slavery and establish itself as a republic and this is an important part of the country’s identity. The mix of Christianity and vodou is another really interesting aspect of Haiti and all of the festivities that go along with these things mean that the streets are often filled with revelers.
• Not as unsafe as you would think - I can’t speak for anywhere but Gonaives which is the second largest city in the country and possibly one of the more screwed up places but I felt totally safe there. People often shout at each other but I never saw a single fight and I never personally felt intimidated by anyone.
• Great people - Desperation will mean that many people and children will ask you for things and money but once you get past this and get to know individuals, you will meet some very inspiring people. I worked alongside about 30 young Haitian guys who were among the the hardest working, smartest, and most polite 20-ish year olds I’ve ever encountered. People in the streets were always happy to help and often led us all the way to our destinations if we were lost.
• Creole is relatively easy to learn - If you’re at all gifted with languages then Creole should be a pretty easy language for you to pick up. It’s similar to French but without all of the stuff that makes French really hard like masculine, feminine, and all those very conjugations. Plus people who speak even a small amount of English are keen to practice and also eager to teach you their language.
• Decent internet connections - Hotels in Port-au-Prince seem to be well equipped with wifi and other random signals seem to float around as well in the most unlikely of places. I was able to get online at our base in Gonaives and while it wasn’t always super fast, it was a decent connection. I never got a video to upload to You Tube but I did manage to stream some live video, download songs and upload using FTP with no problems.

Cons

• Very poor and desperate place - Poverty in Haiti can’t be avoided unless you live in a huge NGO compound and never leave. It’s all around you and people will ask you for things all the time. A favourite for young children is ‘give me one dollar’ and adults will often ask for items like your sunglasses and watch.
• Instability - While Haiti felt safe for me on a personal level, there is still a threat of uprisings and riots that are out of anyone’s control. Food riots occurred last April in Gonaives and, while we were there, some students were attacking schools because teachers stopped working since the government wasn’t paying them. There was also a gasoline shortage at the end of December. Kidnappings are something that get a lot of attention but the targets are almost always rich Haitians rather than your average visitor.
• Expensive accommodation - For some reason it is really difficult to find hotel accommodation in Haiti for under about $40 per night. Norm’s Place in Labadie is the exception at $25 per night but overall the accommodation prices seem to be out of whack with everyday living costs. I did have some friends who rented a concrete room for $60 per month but they definitely got what they paid for and it probably wouldn’t suit most working traveller types.
• Unreliable power supplies - Power in Port-au-Prince and Gonaives seems to die at the same time each day. In Gonaives it went off at around midnight and stayed off until about 10am the next day. Fortunately, we had an inverter to cover the downtime. If you don’t, access to the internet and other power hungry things will be restricted.

I really loved my time in Haiti mostly because I got to do some hard but fun work and built friendships with a lot of fantastic locals. It’s not an easy place to be and home will often seem very far away but for someone looking for an escape from the norm and a bit of a challenge, Haiti is certainly worth a look, even if you just pop over from the beaches of the Dominican Republic for awhile.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Haiti? For working online? Yep, Haiti! I spent over four months in Gonaives, Haiti with a surprisingly fast and only sometimes tempermental internet connection. Things seemed to disconnect when the wind blew but besides that, the connection was great. Skype was possible, I downloaded some songs, and we were able to stream You Tube and music without any problems. The problem with Gonaives, though, is that it isn’t a very nice place and probably not somewhere you want to spend an extended amount of time unless you like dust, garbage fires and coughing.

So where in Haiti is nice, I hear you asking? Labadie! It’s a small village an hour west of Cap Haitian down a bumpy, horrible road and once you reach the end of the road you need to take a small boat around the headland to get to the village. Labadie is a bizarre place because that’s where the cruise lines stop to let their passengers enjoy Haiti in a walled off area of beach that they call Labadee. In actuality, the beach they stop at is called Coco Beach by the locals and the real Labadie remains off-limits to cruise passengers. They are forbidden from going ashore under the guise of it being unsafe. The reality is that the cruise ships have a captive audience on their super strange walled off beach and why would they want their passengers spending money elsewhere? They have leased the beach for 99 years from the Haitian government and the real Labadie doesn’t see any of that money despite having to put up with massive cruise ships in the bay as an eyesore.

Ignoring the insulting beach fiasco, Labadie is a great little village set in a beautiful bay with leafy hills rising up behind it. It’s the only place it Haiti I’ve ever seen with trash cans (although that doesn’t mean they’r eever emptied) and it has a steady supply of hamburgers from the cruise ships that visit three times a week. The locals are friendly and happy to chat, drink or play chess with you and it’s just a chilled out escape from the chaos of the rest of the country.

I stayed with some friends at Norm’s Place. Norm is an 80-something year old guy who landed in Haiti over 30 years ago and built his hotel from scratch using old ruins as a base. He’s a character and always happy to talk your ear off about how he was the reason women started wearing pants. An odd story but fitting for the surroundings. There is a beach right out front of the hotel, the rooms are huge and beautiful, local art is all around you and, most importantly, there are hammocks.

Actually, I suppose the most important thing is internet and this is the only downfall of Labadie. Norm’s Place has wifi but it is pretty unreliable and I never got it to work while I was there. But if you have a connection through a mobile phone or you are able to work offline or only with an occasional connection then this place would make a great, peaceful stop.

At $25 per night it’s a bit pricey but that’s actually cheap for Haiti. The country is bizarrely expensive for accommodation and the cheapest places in the capital city Port-au-Prince are $40. So Labadie, for Haiti, is a bargain and it’s a stunning, friendly, remote and relaxing place and worth a look if you find yourself in the area.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

I’m not sure if this is a sign of my full on transition to a flashpacker but these days I am happy to pay more to avoid extra hassles. This can be anything from airfare to airport pickups to getting a single room at a hostel.

In the past when I would search for airfares online I would almost always go for the cheapest, no matter what. I wouldn’t even glance at the other options and I never went to the next page of fare results. Now I tend to value good connections, early arrival times and airlines I hve miles with over the ultimate cheapie. Often better flights aren’t tha much more expensive, it’s just that, in the past, I wouldn’t even look.
I’m currently planning my exodus from Haiti and have been looking into Nicaragua as my next destination. I could fly Spirit Air on two separate flights for around $400 plus a night at a hostel in Fort Lauderdale or I could pay $500 to do the trip with American Airlines in one shot and get airmiles to boot. In the past I would have gone Spirit Air all the way just to save the extra $50 but now, that amount doesn’t seem like much to sacrifice to get me to my destination as quickly as possible.

This new attitude of mine doesn’t just apply to airfares. I plan on spending a night or two in a hostel in Managua and will be springing for a single room and even an airport pickup. The old, backpacker me would never have gone for these options. The single room is $20 which is more than I want to pay but my logic is that I have been sleeping in a dorm room for five months in Haiti on an air mattress and think I deserve a couple nights of good sleep before returning to dorm land. The airport pickup is only $15, Managua has a reputation for being dangerous, I speak zero Spanish and I would be due to arrive after dark so this choice might be a no-brainer.

Are you more likely to go cheap all the way or is paying more for a bit of comfort something that has snuck its way into your travel style like it has mine?

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

I’ve done two of these volunteer stints now with Hands On and as this one winds to an end, I have the same problem I had in Bangladesh last April - what to do next? Volunteering here in Haiti and having my day planned, meals cooked, accommodation looked after and friends around has certainly become comfortable and moving on from what feels like home will be strange. I’ve loved it here but I think I’m done with Haiti for now and ready for something and somewhere new.

I have been trying to get onto some yachts for a bit of sailing but there are no spaces at the moment so it looks like Central America will be my next destination starting with Nicaragua. My plan at the moment is to head to Leon where I’ve been in touch with a guy who runs a hostel there about WWOOFing. I don’t have all the details yet but they can use people and I think the work will be on a farm they’ve started in an attempt to provide fresh produce for their local cafe. They’re into sustainable living and all that stuff that I want to learn about so that is an added bonus.

The WWOOFing thing would be great but my priorities at the moment are to study Spanish and work on my websites. I really need to get some languages into me… I’ve been putting it off for way too long now for one reason or another. I want to put in a good few months studying Spanish before I start exploring the rest of Central and South America. Knowing the language opens so many doors and I don’t want to miss out on this any longer.

Then of course there’s all this work I’ve been neglecting for months. I am almost done my London Olympics site, I need to do my taxes and I’ve got loads of ideas I want to get to so if it comes down to making a choice between working and WWOOFing, the farm will have to wait for a while. I’m hoping I will be able to fit everything in but that might be a bit ambitious, especially considering my body is about to break down after four hard months in Haiti and two boozy weeks in Australia.

I intend on kicking around Central America for the next three or four months at least so any suggestions on Spanish schools, WWOOFing or volunteering opportunities, cool hostels that might be good places to work or anything at all, let me know. Of course, if anyone is due to cross paths with me and wants to meet up, get in touch!

Oh ya… happy Paddy’s Day!

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Meeting loads of new people while on the road is a great thing, but what I really love about travelling is getting to meet up with new friends again later on their own turf. I think anywhere you go is always better when you’ve got a mate to show you around so you can escape the tourist trail and really get under the skin of a place.I’ve spent a bit of time backpacking and working in Australia already so it doesn’t really hold that much appeal at the moment as a tourist destination for me. I’ve gone there twice to visit friends though and it’s a guaranteed great time. So when a couple of good friends I met in London in 2002 and lived with for two years decided to finally get married, I really wanted to go to their wedding in Perth. Adding to the appeal was that about 15 friends from my London days (mostly from Australia) would be attending as well so it would be a huge reunion weekend that might not happen again anytime soon.

I didn’t think I would be able to go at first because I was expecting to be in Buenos Aires in February and flights between the two are ridiculously expensive. After changing my plans and sticking around in Haiti though, suddenly flying from Miami became an affordable option and I decided to worry about money later and just go for it.

What most excites me about having this lifestyle is the possibility of heading to events and meeting up with friends all over the world whenever the opportunity arises. True, my carbon footprint and bank balance will both be terrible if I keep deciding to jet off to the other side of the world for weddings like I did a few weeks ago, but having the option to go where I want when I want (at least now while the bank balance is healthy) is an amazing thing. So when weddings, parties, sporting events, concerts, friends travelling or anthing like that pops up, I will always be tempted to include it in my travel plans.

Flying from Haiti to Australia for 12 days might seem like a crazy thing to most people but I don’t regret it. Catching up with everyone was great and it’s possible that I might have had too good of a time because I feel more tired and drained now after my ‘holiday’ than I did before I left. But it was worth every penny and I’d do it again in a second.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

I am not a blogger. I love writing on this blog but, at the moment, I think one is about all I can handle. It amazes me how people out there are able to publish several blogs with quality content and, while I wish I was one of those people, I’m not.

I currently have Nerdy Nomad focused mainly on earning online and web development stuff and have another blog, Wanderstruck, that is purely travel updates for family, friends and stalkers. I think two blogs is one too many so I’m thinking seriously about scrapping Wanderstruck. It sort of sucks because I love writing about my travels but when I don’t feel like writing, that blog looms over my head and seems to nag at me to keep it going, even if I don’t feel like I have something interesting to say. I hate having a blog that never gets updated but I hate it even more when I feel pressured into writing for the sake of writing so I think I’m going to close down the operation.

Because I still want to document my travel tales, I am thinking about taking Nerdy Nomad in that direction a bit more. It won’t mean that all of my internet geek stuff will be replaced with travel posts, but it will mean there will be some interspersed in there along with photos from my travels. I won’t write something on every place I go like I have been trying (and failing) to do over on Wanderstruck, but instead I’ll write travel stuff when I feel like I’ve done something interesting enough to warrant a post.

What do you guys think about this? Are most of you here for mobile working/internet/web development stuff or would you find a handful of travel posts each month along with photos to be an interesting addition?

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

I flew with American Airlines this afternoon from LA to Miami and was surprised to see them offering wireless internet in the air. It’s called gogo and was only available on the flights between LA and NYC or Miami but that’s a start.

The annoying thing was that my laptop battery was nearly dead but I was willing to fork over the $13-ish fee even for an hour of net in the sky just for the sake of trying it out and writing a review. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t work! My wireless networks list told me I was connected but my browser wouldn’t bring up the sign-in page. Oh well.

I had three seats to myself today on the flight from Brisbane to LA and still couldn’t sleep a wink lying down so I think it’s confirmed that sleeping on planes is pretty much impossible for me. Having the internet would be a surefire way to keep me entertained and, hopefully, productive. In flight wifi would be something I would buy on every long haul flight if I’m travelling alone so I’m curious to see which other airlines will be offering this… and if I am actually able to get it to work.

Has anyone else encountered a wifi connection in the sky? Is this something you’d be interested in or do you prefer to veg out in the air and do your wireless working on the ground?

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

I’ve been talking about building a site for the London 2012 Olympics for awhile now but have only really put a lot of work into it over the last few days. The first day was hugely productive here in Brisbane. With my friend at work and the house to myself I had no distractions and set up almost the entire navigation system. The second day was a bit of a bust with the internet not working all day but I thought of a few new ideas, wrote a bit of the content and did as much work offline as possible. The third day saw me in a hotel on the Gold Coast while my friends were at a wedding and I hammered out most of the pages and just need to fill them with content that doesn’t really exist yet because its so early.

The result after only three full days is a site nearing completion that I think will be really helpful for people heading to the Olympics in 2012. The reason I think I was able to hammer out a good site in such little time is that, having been to the Olympics in both Athens and Beijing, I know what sorts of things I was looking for and I am assuming that people going to London will be after the same information.

I’ve decided to steer clear of a blog format and don’t want to be an up to the minute news source or site with the information of every possible athlete as there are people out there that can do that a million times better than I can. I have narrowed my focus to two things I know well – London and the Olympics.

What I Know About the Olympics

Having already been to two Olympics I can think back to all of the information that I wish I would have had before I went. I used this strategy when building backpacking and working abroad sites too and it seems to have worked well. The assumption is that if I am searching for certain information, so are other people. The things I wanted to know before going to Athens and Beijing were all practical: venue location, transportation, dates and fixtures of the events, and cheap but central places to stay. Rather than trying to be everything to everyone, I’ve decided to focus on these practical aspects of the Games and leave the sport by sport, minute by minute reporting to the professionals with news teams.

What I Know About London

Having lived in London for five years, I know a fair bit about getting around, tourist attractions, different suburbs, good places to eat and how to do things cheaply. I think the combination of events information with logistical city stuff will be something that people coming to the Games in 2012 will find really useful.

Because the London Olympics has an end date and because of the grey area as far as copyright stuff goes and the possibility of a nasty call from a lawyer one day, I don’t want to put too much work into this site. I’m hoping to launch it once I write a bit more content in a couple of weeks, get it out there into search engine world, and see how things go. I think I’m in this early enough to hopefully reap some rewards down the road without a lot of work from this point.

So if it works… doing what I know well will be a definite strategy in the future.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!