Donating to EDN yesterday for Earth Day put me in a giving mood, and I remembered coming across a micro-lending site called Kiva.org where normal people like you and me could help finance small loans to needy entrepreneurs located around the world, usually in third-world countries.

I decided to head on over to the site and open an account. After opening up an account I funded it through my Paypal account and made three loans of $25 denominations each to people from Nicaragua, Samoa, and Tajikistan! You can see my profile page here: http://www.kiva.org/lender/TravelingProject. The loans are usually used to help these entrepreneurs start up a new business or make improvements to their existing business.

I think helping people through Kiva fits perfectly with this blog, not to mention it makes me feel good knowing I’m helping less fortunate people. Being an entrepreneur at heart and the focus of this blog being about traveling around the world, I think there’s no better way than to help other entrepreneurs from around the world through a non-profit organization like Kiva! In fact, I think Kiva makes such a perfect fit with this blog that I gave it a permanent section on my sidebar to help promote it to my readers!

Maybe in the future I can travel to see some of these countries, and actually meet the people I have helped face to face; documenting the whole trip to share with readers of this blog! This is something I just might have to really think about and look forward too!

Today, April 22, 2008 is Earth Day 2008!

A brief history: Earth Day was first started in 1970 as a nationwide grassroots demonstration on the environment by U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin. At a conference in Seattle, Washington the Senator first proposed the nationwide environmental protest to thrust the environment onto the national agenda. On April 22 of that year, 20 million Americans took to the streets to demonstrate for a healthy, sustainable environment. Groups that had been fighting against oil spills, polluting factories and power plants, raw sewage, toxic dumps, pesticides, freeways, the loss of wilderness, and the extinction of wildlife suddenly realized they shared common values; and the movement took off! Fast forward to the present, Earth Day 2007 was one of the largest Earth Days to date, with an estimated billion people participating in Earth Day activities from places all over the world! -Excerts from Wikipedia

As a travel enthusiast, appreciating our planet and concern for keeping the environment as healthy as possible comes naturally. If we don’t start protecting our beautiful planet, many of the sites and places I have the luxury of visiting on my travels around the world won’t be the same or even exist a few decades down the road. This is why I like to celebrate and spread the word about Earth Day! In addition, it is always good to give a little back to mother Earth on this day! This year I decided to make a little donation to Earth Day Network to do my part in protecting the Earth and environment. The screenshot of the Thank You email can be seen below. Although it was only $50 dollars, as this project grows I’ll be making more donations in the future!

My $50 Earth Day Donation Pictured Above

Earth Day Network (EDN) was founded by the organizers of the first Earth Day in 1970 and promotes environmental citizenship and year round progressive action worldwide. Earth Day Network is a driving force steering environmental awareness around the world. Through Earth Day Network, activists connect, interact, and have an impact on their communities, and create positive change in local, national, and global policies. EDN’s international network reaches 174 countries, while the domestic program engages 5,000 groups and over 25,000 educators coordinating millions of community development and environmental protection activities throughout the year. You can check out the Earth Day Network here http://ww2.earthday.net, and I encourage everyone to make a small donation if you can. If your a little short on cash you can still do your part on Earth Day by planting a tree!

If you haven’t heard already, just this month Delta Air Lines and Northwest Airlines announced they approved a merging which will form the largest airline around the world based on traffic statistics. Delta Airlines and Northwest Airlines are the third and fifth largest airlines in the United States. Under the merger arrangements, the new company will be headed by Delta and keep the name “Delta Airlines”. In essence, it seems Delta is taking over Northwest Airlines in this all-stock merger valued at $17.7 billion dollars. The merger still has to be approved by the companies shareholders, as well as go through an antitrust review before the merger becomes final, but I don’t see any reason why the merger would be blocked at this point.

I’m not sure how the merger will affect ticket costs, but since there are still many more major US airlines I doubt it will really have a big impact on the travel industry as a whole when it comes to ticket prices. If you ask me, I think the merger was due to the rising costs of fuel and the current state of the US economy. Just last year both Delta Airlines and Northwest Airlines filed bankruptcy, and I think they needed to do this to keep both companies afloat.  If anything, after the merger  I think the new company will be able to offer better services to its client.

I’m such a gadget junky and have gadgets laying all over the place that another piece of equipment I forgot I had was a Sony MiniDV Digital Camcorder pictured above. The Sony DCR-TRV22 is a great digital camcorder with a 2.5″ LCD screen, color viewfinder, 120x digital zoom, and memory stick capability. I’ve owned this camcorder for a few years now, and haven’t used it as much as I should be using it. There’s no better time than now to put the camcorder to use. I think it will be a great addition to my travel equipment, and offer some great multimedia streaming videos of my travel adventures. The big thing on the web nowadays is online videos, so I might as well keep up with the times!

I’ll be adding a section in the “About” page of this blog that lists all my travel equipment with facts about each one since it seems like as this project moves ahead I might end up adding to my collection of wonderful gadgets regularly. I think new readers will be interested to know what type of equipment I use also, and keeping all the information in the “About” page will be much easier than having it scattered around in various blog posts.

Some of you might be wondering how is it that I have a chance to travel to different destinations throughout the year. Don’t I have a family? Don’t I have a job to make a living? Don’t I have any responsibilities?

The answer is “No” to the first two questions, and “Somewhat” to the last question. I’m able to travel because I am a single 29 year old man with no wife or kids. Ever since I was young I never really was into the long-term relationship thing, and I always had trouble settling down. I’m a really free spirited person that gets bored fairly quickly when things in my life get monotonous. As far as a job goes, I use to work for a Fortune 500 telecommunications company after graduating from college. I got my degree in Information Technology and worked as a Network Administrator for 7 years. A few years into working 9 to 5 jobs I realized that type of work wasn’t for me. At the time, I was generating some side income on the Internet, and decide I would try to make it full-time by working online. I left my 9 to 5 job about two years ago to fulfill my dream of working online for a living. It only took a few months to find out that it was very possible to make it! Since then, I have been able to structure my lifestyle around becoming completely mobile, and being able to work anywhere in the world from a computer. I’ve set things up in ways that make it able for me to not be stuck in one place, like having all my mail forwarded to wherever I’m located in the world by a private company that accepts my mail for me. Pretty neat huh?

Whenever people ask me what I do, and I try to explain it to them they always end up having a confused look on their face, so whenever I get asked the question I just tell people I work with computers. Anyway, I thought up the “Traveling Project” because of my free-spirited personality that I mentioned earlier. To me there is no better job than to be able to travel around the world and blog about it! It keeps my life interesting and there definitely is no more monotony in my life!

As promised in my last post, here are some pictures I took on the island of Guam. Guam is located in the South Pacific Ocean and is a territory of the United States. The island is located almost directly on the equator and has a hot, humid tropical climate. In a future post, I’ll share more pictures of Guam, as well as write a travel review about the island on a later post; this post is just being used as an example to show readers the quality of my photography.

I took some of the better quality photos I could find to post here. I tried looking for my Hawaii photos, but couldn’t find them. They might be on one of my external hard drives that are hidden deep in the darkest corner of my closet somewhere, but these images should suffice for readers to get an idea of the quality to expect from my photography during my travel adventures. I added some captions using Photoshop:

I thought it would be a good idea to talk about my photography experience and equipment so readers know what to expect when I post pictures for this project. Actually, after finishing up this post I have some sample photos laying around of the beautiful tropical islands of Hawaii and Guam. I’ll dig them up and post some of the pictures in my next post.

I’ve been using the Canon PowerShot A570 IS as my camera of choice ever since I started getting into photography, which was only about a year ago. If I can remember correctly, I purchased the camera for about $175.00 online. The Canon PowerShot A570 IS isn’t an SLR camera, but it does have manual mode which I do use to shoot my pictures. Using the predefined or automatic settings just doesn’t create great pictures when compared to snapping photos in manual mode. I actually love this camera and think it shoots photos for Internet use comparable to the more expensive cameras that are in the $1,000+ price range.

As far as my photography experience, I’ve been doing travel and scenic type photos for about a year now, and I feel I have a pretty good eye for taking awesome outdoor scenic pictures. We’ll let you, the readers, decide though when I post some of my photos in my next blog post. Within the next few months I actually plan on purchasing a second, higher-end Canon SLR digital camera and maybe some equipment so I can use the camera underwater, and a lens or two! I guess you can say I’ll be a Canon lover once I purchase some Canon lenses.

I do have some Photoshop experience, and I usually do enhance the colors of my photos so it makes them pop a lot more, but that is basically the only type of photo editing I will ever do to a photo.  When editing photos I still use Adobe Photoshop 7.0; yes I’m too cheap to upgrade, and lazy to learn the newer Photoshop versions when the version I currently use does the job just fine.

So there you have it, I use very basic photography equipment, and I in no way consider myself a professional photographer, but I do think I take some damn good photos and you’ll be able to decide for yourself when I post some photos in my next blog post!