Back in October 2010, Apple upgraded the features of the Macbook Air and suddenly I was confronted with the huge temptation of the fast responsive ultraportable version of my old 2007 MacBook.

The biggest change was the Solid State Drives. The beautiful part is they have no moving parts.

I’ve been doing lots of barefoot running on and off over the last couple years. Imagine running around all the time with an ultraportable laptop. It would be great to be able to run to a coffee store, whip out the macbook air, and get to work.

This would be perfect for a nomad that travels the world and lives out of 1 backpack. With an ultraportable laptop that has SSD, he could run any time he wanted.

Check out Tynan’s blog posts, exactly what I’ve been thinking about
Run, Don’t Walk
Get Rid of Half of Your Stuff
Nomad gear

It seems that when I decide to travel abroad, I suffer from some cognitive dissonance. I have reasons to travel yet I feel bizarre for “abandoning” north america.

My main reasons for travel ultimately comes down to geo-arbitrage and experiencing a new environment.

By geo-arbitrage, I’m talking about enjoying a higher quality of life with a lower cost of living.

For example, I can quite easily live comfortably in the philippines or thailand for $500/mo. In the philippines I once was renting a 4-bedroom house for $225/mo. Getting home cooked meals is cheap too. In Bangkok, it is even easier to get great affordable meals from street vendors.

What kind of life can I have in Canada with an arbitrary budget of say $700/mo? You might ask “Why limit yourself to $700?” but my view is that it is a great opportunity to have most of your income go into savings. Then later on, one can be truly wealthy. Food costs for one person in Canada is easily $250/mo if not more. Renting a tiny suite in an exciting location would likely be $450/mo. That’s already $700. Plus the costs for everything else is higher, entertainment, activities, transportation, clubs, whatever. Life is not fun at all with a such a tight budget.

Comparable, in an exciting city like Bangkok, with many expats, and a totally different culture and language in Thai, lots of opportunities, can enjoy life to the fullest with $700/mo most likely. Why not?!

Today I figured out skyscanner. I saw it all the time before, but never realized how powerful it was.

This is the formula of power:
http://www.skyscanner.com/flights-from/(airport code goes here!)

You can use sky scanner to find the cheapest flights from a specific airport to anywhere. This is a huge boon if you are 100% flexible in your travel & you have budget requirements.

Another thing that I also figured out is that finding cheap multi-city flights is the ideal thing to do because these flights can later be converted into extended stayovers at the purchase site you end up at (ebooker, vaya, orbitz, whatever). Basically just choose the multi-city option and re-input the flight details, but stick a few days in between. Probably have to play around with different days, but you can usually get at least 2 day stay overs for free or a few bucks more.