Bought my ticket Sunday. Final itinerary is Dallas->Bogota->Lima->Cusco->Buenos Aires->Dallas, with a land trip to Ignazo Falls, into Brazil, busing to Rio, Sao Palo, and south to the Uruguay coast, finally to Montevideo before back to Buenos Aires. If I have time I want to loop through Santiago, Chile and Cordoba, Argentina before I fly out home on Jan 11th.
Anyways, prepping here while I still have access to true broadband, I loaded up my mail client, Evolution, with the last three months worth of email, as well as my trip itinerary in Evolution’s calendar mode.
I made the terrible mistake of updating Ubuntu just a week before I left for my trip; google chrome has weird display problems from time to time, and the software update wiped out my microphone. I was able to get it going again, but I had to rebuild the audio drivers from scratch. The weird display problem doesn’t seem to be going away any time soon unfortunately. It doesn’t cripple the laptop, but it’s something I don’t want to have to worry about while I’m abroad. So note to self, freeze any software updates two weeks before you leave, so you don’t have any surprises.
I think I’m going to move a lot of my movies and TV shows to the spare space on my hard drive; I can always delete them as I need space for pictures. I’ve got about 100gb free on my netbook.