Homepage of Sean Geiger
Revised: 2003 April
17
Hi there – I am
finally back from my big World Trip, lasted from March until the beginning of
December, 2002. The trip started in
Japan, and continued through most countries southwest until India, with a few
stops in the Middle East and Europe.
See the Itinerary link to see the approximate
route I took. If you’d like to contact
me please email me at
(pardon the difficulty in reading
the email address; this web page is automatically scanned by spam mailers, and
this is a method to foil such automated scanning attempts).
(this is a picture of me at the Phnom
Penh riverfront in June of 2002)
WORK
** Summary: basically I’m an electrical
engineer who has spent a lot of time in high-frequency electronics and wireless
communications, in a mix between the commercial and aerospace fields. I have also worked with digital electronics and
have done a lot of work with hardware (including PCB design). Since I have finished my
travels, I am presently seeking a job.
** Here are links to my .DOC Resume (MS Word format), .HTML Resume,
or the inelegant but ever-reliable .TXT Resume
(a resume is also known as "curriculum vitae" or "CV" which
is Latin for "life story").
HOBBIES
(no link here, but the hobbies are soccer,
soaring, bicycling, traveling, and all manner of things technical)
TRAVEL
** My
(more-or-less accurate) 2002 travel Itinerary
** A
large-scale Asia map (452 kB) with my route traced
in red
** A
large-scale world map (194 kB) with my route traced
in red
** Currency
exchange rates
** Visas: Visa requirements vary, and are not always as
constrained or easy as indicated at the U.S. Government State Dept list of foreign
entry requirements (link to State Dept. website). Useful travel information from other
travelers is also available by means of the Lonely Planet’s free traveler message
posting service on their website, called the Thorntree.
** AVI
Movie files: To those whom I’ve sent .AVI movie files, you might need to
download an additional codec for your movie player application to view these
movies properly. My camera, a Canon
Powershot S110 Elph digital camera, records movies as a series of motion JPEG
still pictures, and connects them together as a movie. This is not how most .AVI files are created
(and played back), so there must be a special codec to be able to play back
this format of movie. I have found two
such codec applications for Windows: m3jpegV3.exe
v3.0.0.9 (438 kB) available from Morgan Multimedia on a 60-day free
trial basis, and PICVIDEO2.EXE (749
kB) available
from Pegasus Imaging (on a free
basis if you can put up with annoying lettering on the display screen -
otherwise it's only $18). I have found the Pegasus Imaging product to work
perfectly with Windows 98, whereas the Morgan product doesn't.
Alternatively, you
can convert the .AVI movie files to the smaller and more commonly-accepted MPEG
format (as is commonly used in modern satellite television systems). There is a free converter called TMPGEnc Version 2.57 (1042 kB) and its project file, VFAPI plug-in for TMPGEnc project file (367 kB) available from (the Japanese
company?) TMPGEnc.net. I haven’t yet tried converting any files
using this method, so do so at your own risk of wasting valuable time.
** If
you’re in an Internet café abroad, how do you know how to change Windows
settings when everything is in the local language?!! The most important thing to remember is CTRL-Shift will toggle
between Roman and local alphabet characters. I took a few pictures of screen settings
to show how to do a few things:
Windows_in_Chinese_step_1_how_to_change_from_Chinese_to_English_characters_also_use_ctrl_shift
Windows_in_Chinese_step_1_how_to_make_secure_socket_layer_email_work_in_Win98 (for secure email)
Windows_in_Chinese_step_2_how_to_make_secure_socket_layer_email_work_in_Win98 (for secure email)
3-character_Extension_visibility_change_part_1
(104 kB) (e.g., making
".jpg" visible or not if you are renaming digital pictures)
3-character_Extension_visibility_change_part_2
(89 kB)
CF_card_reader_driver_installation_step_1
(57 kB)
CF_card_reader_driver_installation_step_2
(56 kB)
CF_card_reader_driver_installation_step_3
(59 kB)
CF_card_reader_driver_installation_step_4
(58 kB)
CF_card_reader_driver_installation_step_5
(59 kB)
CF_card_reader_driver_installation_step_6
(60 kB)
CF_card_reader_driver_installation_step_7
(52 kB)
** Some
of the more interesting (and terrifying) things about many Asian countries are
the traffic rules, or more accurately, the lack of them. If you keep your wits about you when
crossing the street and stick to traveling in cars or busses, then you won’t
have any problems as a traveler – I’ve been careful about this! Check out this article on the incidence of
Asian accidents from the Taiwan newspaper the China Post: Asian_traffic_accidents_article_China_Post_2002May16.jpg
