Out here in Thailand, there’s no news of the olympics at all. We haven’t found it on tv yet, but hope in Chiang Rai we can find a sports pub to watch the final hockey games. Luckily I just found a great iPhone app from Bell of all people, and it’s wicked.

Pulling up the events screen I have to say that we’re a bit jealous that we’re not in Vancouver right now! There’s so many concerts, Kid Koala (above), Dj Numark and tons more. If they had released all the free concerts earlier we may have rearranged our schedule a bit.

It also makes it easy to check out the games that are playing, and times.  It used my iPhone’s GPS to synch the Vancouver time to our Thailand time. This’ll make it easier when asking places if they’re open at 8AM so I can watch the game!

If your in Vancouver or traveling around and want to keep up with how many Gold Medals Canada is getting, I recommend this application for your iPhone. Just in the itunes app store.

Why is there no Skype application for iPhone in Canada?

Staying in touch while we’re on the road is something that we’ve been putting a lot of thought into. Obviously we have our blog here, email and facebook, but sometimes we’re going to want to hear peoples voices and see their faces. We’re going to be traveling with our MacBook and have iChat, but we don’t want to be carrying it with us everywhere we go.

I have an iPhone that I’m in the process of getting unlocked, but paying international rates on the cellular network will get real expensive very fast. Great if we need to make a call, but there had to be something better. Last month Skype announced that they were bringing out an iPhone application, this was exciting news! The ability to use Skye on the iPhone would give us $0.02 per minute international phone rates anywhere we could get WiFi.

It was released everywhere, except Canada. That’s right – the iPhone SKYPE application was cancelled in Canada, for rather questionable reasons that they refused to elaborate. You can’t download the application with a Canadian iTunes account, which is B.S. I had written it off but I just read about Skype again over at Eurocheapo, where Matt from Nomadic Matt was doing a guest post.

Inspired I started to search for iPhone hacks that would let me install it, and there were a ton of complicated workarounds including random credit card numbers. But what if you just created a new account and said your in the United States? What would stop you from doing this and downloading the app? Surely Apple in it’s hipster genius wouldn’t make it that easy, would they?

Apparently Apple hipsters are easy. In iTunes simply log out of your iTunes account, select create new account. There’s a box that says “click here if you are not in Canada”, select US and create an account. Put a US address and postal code found on google… and voila. When the credit card information comes up, simply put “none”, and your good to go.

No third party software, hacking or anything like that. Once you’ve downloaded the app, sync your iPhone and logout. Works with an iPod Touch version 2 if you have a microphone attachment.

Are you currently using Skype? I’d like to hear about your experiences using Skype while traveling and the voice call quality from overseas.

Scott won a contest at his job. He is one of the 4 top outbound sales reps in his company and gets to select 1 pre-selected prize package worth $2000 each. 

The Prize Package choices are:

Macbook Air & Iphone
46″ Flat Panel LCD plus Blue Ray Disc Player
32″ Flat Panel LCD, Play Station 3, Surround Sound System
Custom fit Calloway Golf Clubs
Burton Snowboard Package

All really great prizes! We narrowed it down to the Macbook Air as we already have a 46″, 36″ would be nice for the bedroom but we won’t need that until we get back, Scott already has golf clubs and again won’t be using them this year, and snowboard package is sweet since we want to start but again, not till we get back….. where the Macbook Air we can use on the trip as it’s super small and light weight!

However, when Scott told them his prize choice he was made aware there was a typo that it was supposed to be just a regular Macbook and iphone. They said they can still buy the Macbook Air with no iphone and you would have to pay the difference as it retails over $2000 once taxes and such get added on.

Sigh… So now we have a dilemma… We were just originally going to travel with my current Macbook…. but then the option of bringing something lighter came along and that sounded like a great idea. My current Macbook is over 2 years old and has 2 small “cracks” which can easily get dust exposed into the inside hardware if it was exposed to a really dusty area. I’ve often wondered if it would actually last on our trip.

So, does size and weight really matter and we still take the Macbook Air and just pay the difference?

Or do we take a brand new regular Macbook plus iphone? (which we would sell the iphone for some cash to pocket) 

Or do we take something else?

Decisions, Decisions…

Best part… we have to decide TODAY! yikes.

VS