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Jason Kester


126 Blog Entries
14 Trips
250 Photos

Trips:

Central America
Australia
Africa, 2003
Middle East, 2003
Pre-Thailand Roadtrip
Southeast Asia, the Trans Siberian and Scandenavia
Southeast Asia Again 2006
Surfing Oz in the Hooptie
Southeast Asia, 2000-2001
Building Blogabond
Europe, North Africa 1998
Living in Spain
South!
Morocco for no apparent reason

Shorthand link:

http://blogabond.com/Jason


Hey! I wrote Blogabond so I guess that makes me your host. Welcome!

I spend about 9 months a year on the road, chasing the sun around the world in search of good climbing and surfing. I carry a laptop along with me, and take on small programming contracts to take care of expenses.

The lion's share of Blogabond was written over the winter of 2005/2006 on Tonsai beach in Thailand. I spent the winter there, climbing rocks in the sun for 4 months. Along the way I'd skip the occasional happy hour to implement new features from my bungalow. Since then, about a dozen of our users have made the pilgrimage to Blogabond TransGlobal Headquarters at Andaman B7.

If you're headed out there for the winter, look me up. We'll grab a bucket!


Big Weasel!

Biguezal, Spain


Hey! I have absolutely nothing new to report, except for the fact that I've now been to one of the three silliest named places on the planet. Biguezal is only a half hour from our place, so it was an easy one. I've already done Heol y Cyw in Wales, and I'm not really sure what the third place is, but I bet somebody will suggest it to me.

The folks are in town, and we've been showing them around the countryside. They've fired up a blog of their own, so if you honestly care what my parents are up to, you can go read that.

Spain still rules.


permalink written by  Jason Kester on September 21, 2007 from Biguezal, Spain
from the travel blog: Living in Spain
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Pobre Mi

Rodellar, Spain


San Fermines just kept going, and after 6 days of wassailry we'd had enough. Time to pack up the car and head south to Rodellar for a few days of climbing.

Got back last night to clean streets and quiet sleep. Nice...

permalink written by  Jason Kester on July 16, 2007 from Rodellar, Spain
from the travel blog: Living in Spain
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San Fermin catches it's breath

Pamplona, Spain


Pamplona has finally settled into its groove, and San Fermin continues apace, but somehow not as franticly as it was the first couple days. Everybody knows they're in for the long haul, and they're pacing themselves a bit better now. Don't get me wrong, it's still basically insane, but at least people have stopped peeing on our front door.

Caught the encierro from inside the bull ring on Day 3. It's standing room only at 8am, as the fighting bulls are put away and they start releasing younger bulls into the ring to play with the crowd. These young bulls have their horns nominally padded to keep them from poking through anybody, but they are still capable of tossing anybody that strays too close (or doesn't run fast enough).

It's a pretty simple game, really:

1. See how close you can get to the Rampaging Bull

2. Attract the attention of the Rampaging Bull to impress your friends.

3. Land.

4. Try to get up and escape before the Rampaging Bull tosses you again.

5. See how far you can remain from the Rampaging Bull.

The nice thing about Sanfermines mid-week is that you can walk around in the daylight and not be immediately doused with gallons of Kalimotxo. You may get smacked in the head by some guy in a big mask, but for them most part it's a pretty family friendly time. After the fireworks are finished at night, the place transforms back into party mode and you'd best just roll with it. We had 3 separate marching bands colliding under our window at 3:00 this morning. It's probably best if you don't plan to sleep much this week...


permalink written by  Jason Kester on July 12, 2007 from Pamplona, Spain
from the travel blog: Living in Spain
tagged SanFermin, Fiesta and Encierro

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San Fermin Day Two - Family Style...

Pamplona, Spain


Day One of San Fermines was Huge. Thousands of wassailing wastrels in red and white packing the back alleys of the old town. Elbow to elbow carnage of spilled drinks and shouted enthusiasm. I need new clothes!


After a late night, we were all up bright and early for the Running of the Bulls. Carnage ensued, and eventually we made it back to the place in search of siesta.

Pamplona actually cleans up pretty well, and 40,000 gallons of water later the streets were safe for parades and marching bands. This is the part that makes it into the tourist brochures. It's actually pretty cool!

The sun is setting now, and spirits are starting to kick up again. There appears to be a crowd of lads in the square cheering enthusiastically for the Blogabond She-Squad on the balcony. I think I'll have to go investigate...




permalink written by  Jason Kester on July 7, 2007 from Pamplona, Spain
from the travel blog: Living in Spain
tagged SanFermin and Fiesta

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!San Fermines!

Pamplona, Spain


San Fermines just kicked off here in Pamplona, and the town is going nuts! It's just after noon, and already we're down 3 liters of Calimotxo from where we started. Just spent 10 minutes dumping buckets of water off of our balcony and onto the crowds in Plaza Del Castillo.

If you're not yet in Pamplona, get here. Now. I'll buy you a drink (or at least dump one over your head).

permalink written by  Jason Kester on July 6, 2007 from Pamplona, Spain
from the travel blog: Living in Spain
tagged SanFermin and Fiesta

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Moving the HQ

Pamplona, Spain


So it's official. I'm livin' in Spain! Signed a year lease on an apartment in Pamplona, and am now sipping my Cafe Solo' on the terrace overlooking Plaza del Castillo. It is all good here.

There is tons of great climbing within an hour's drive of this city. We've been sampling a bit of it, but mostly we've been trying to sort out little details for the apartment. Helen has gone into Nesting Mode, and is busy finding kitchen towels and throw pillows and all sorts of stuff it would have never occured to me to buy. I've been trying to get phone lines and DSL set up in broken Spanish.

San Fermines is about a month away, and I'm starting to think about gathering a pile of Blogabonders here for the festivities. See how many of us can get gored Running with the Bulls! If this sounds like a good idea to any of you, let me know and I'll find a way to make it happen.


permalink written by  Jason Kester on June 3, 2007 from Pamplona, Spain
from the travel blog: Living in Spain
tagged Blogabond, Apartment and PlazaDelCastillo

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¡Pantalones Pantalones!

Onate, Spain


These last few weeks have gone by fast. Flew to England, bought a new car, packed Helen's entire world into said car, booked a ferry ticket and drove to Portsmouth, visiting everybody we knew in England along the way.

Here's the plan in a nutshell: I needed some time off work, and Helen needed to get out of America. Frankly, I needed to get out of America too, since I seem to work so much better from a little terrace overlooking a square. I like my walls made of stone.

We've been looking at places to live in Europe, but haven't settled on anything for certain. So now we're just going to roadtrip around for a while until we find a place worth stopping. I guess the requirements are a cool town with a good vibe, plenty of climbing nearby, and of course, a fast internet connection so that I can work. Once we find all that, we're gonna stop for a while.

Now we're in the little town of Onate, having done the whirlwind tour of Basque crags around Vitoria-Gastiez. This is a really cool town, and the climbing up the hill in Araotz looks pretty good. If the rest of the climbing around here is as good as what we've seen, we might not make it out of Spain!


permalink written by  Jason Kester on May 20, 2007 from Onate, Spain
from the travel blog: Living in Spain
tagged Climbing and RoadTrip

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Votes, Photos, and Discussion

Portland, United States


This weekend, I've been blowing off a bunch of paying work so that I can put some new features into Blogabond. This is stuff that's been bugging me for a while and I think it will make the site just that little bit more usable.

First, it always bugged me that when you clicked on "Photos", you didn't get to see any Photos. Just a bunch of links. That was lame. So yeah, we need to put some pictures up there, but which ones? I dunno. Guess we can't do that until we do...

Voting. Yeah, check out the bottom of this post. See the little "This Rocks!" link? Click on that, and you'll give this post a little karma bonus. If enough people click it, maybe it will boost my profile up onto the homepage. Democracy in action!

So yeah, every post and every photo on the site now has one of those little vote buttons. You can vote photos onto the "Cool Photos" list, and vote people onto the "Featured Traveler" list.

And finally, I've messed with the discussion forums a bit so that people can actually figure out what they do. Try it out. Click the "Talk" link up top and ask your fellow Blogabonders a question. I bet you'll get a few replies.

Anyway, let me know if you like any of this new stuff. And hey, I'm off to Europe in a few days. If you're touring around France, Switzerland or Italy, let me know!


permalink written by  Jason Kester on April 22, 2007 from Portland, United States
from the travel blog: Building Blogabond
tagged Blogabond, Photos and Community

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BMail and stuff for the People!

Los Angeles, United States


First off, I want to quickly thank all you lot for helping Blogabond take off so quickly. Our user base doubled over the holidays, and then Doubled AGAIN in February! Somebody must have been spreading the word. You guys rock!

I've been quietly putting new features live for the last few months, and leaving them out there for you all to discover. So you may have noticed that your blog entries are autosaving themselves behind the scenes, that you can hide your draft entries until you're ready for the world to see them, and that you can add new places to the world map.

But this week, I finally got around to putting up a few major features that have been in the hopper for a long time. Blogabond was always intended to be a place for Independent Travelers to hang out and share stories, but until recently it's been sorta tough to get a conversation going with anybody on the site. Sure, you could leave comments on one of their posts, but unless they happened to check it they might never see it. And if they replied to you, how would you know?

So now, everybody gets a little Mail link next to their name. You can send private messages to anybody on the site. If you've got an account, you can check out your Inbox under the My Stuff tab, and if you've given us your Email address we'll even forward along any direct communication that you receive. So if you read my entry about Monkey Bay, Malawi and want to know if it's worth going, you can shoot me off a private message and ask me about it.

We've also got Buddies now. You've seen this idea before, so I don't need to go into detail, but yeah, you can now start collecting friends on the site and keeping tabs on what they're up to. Less digging around trying to find stuff. Thus, more better.

There's another feature teetering at the brink of being pushed live that will let you compliment users on their cool blog entries and photos. Once we get a bunch of votes for stuff, I'll probably scrap the idea of "Featured Whatever" and just let you guys decide what belongs on the Home page by voting on it. So if you want to displace The Hulk from his seat of glory, you can organize all your friends to come onto the site and vote on all your stuff. (Or I guess you could also just let the system work itself out so that things floated to the top on their own merit. But that might not be as much fun.)

Anyway, thanks again for helping to make Blogabond a reality. Keep up the suggestions!

Jason


permalink written by  Jason Kester on March 21, 2007 from Los Angeles, United States
from the travel blog: Building Blogabond
tagged Blogabond, Community and Buddies

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Astroturfing Robot Spiders!

Portland, United States


Woke up to 30 variations on this in my inbox today:

"As though I wanted will meet personally the author of clauses articles on your site, and personally to it him will get acquainted. But unfortunately I live in other country and I have no an opportunity to go on the world. Success to you the dear expensive friend. "

It looks like the SpamBots have finally found the comment links on Blog entries.

This one was especially fun, as it started out by simply commenting on a dozen different blogs, praising the author's "clauses" and offering ESL advice on how to better the world.

Then it started including helpful links to Porn.

I've put up a simple spam filter that should stop this sort of thing from clogging up the comments in the future. There's an off-chance that some of you may have trouble posting comments if you don't have Javascript enabled on your browser. Keep me posted if you notice anything strange.

Anyway, I've gone ahead and left a few of the more harmless comments to a few people's blogs. So if you're lucky, you might get an inspirational message like this in your comments:

"How many I was in a network the Internet, but your site my loved liked,favourite! Thanks."

Consider it a gift from the (hopefully) short-lived Astroturfing SpamBot!



permalink written by  Jason Kester on November 15, 2006 from Portland, United States
from the travel blog: Building Blogabond
tagged Blogabond and Spam

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