The Scurvy Dog's Puerto Rican Blog

Plaza Las Americas, San Juan, PR

The Largest Mall in the Caribbean..

I’ll be the first to admit, I’m not a mall person, but this is one beautiful, immaculately maintained mall. Its just off the Las Americas Expressway at Roosevelt. Every conceivable retail franchise has a presence here. I was able to go directly to the AT&T store and get a SIM card for the unlocked GSM cell phone I brought with me. There was a US Post Office too where I finally scored some postcard stamps. The Sears Craftsman area looked just like any I have ever been in… spooky.

I was also surprised to discover that the ‘Ponce Museum of Art’ had a small gallery set up in the mall. The main museum in Ponce is currently closed to the public for structural renovation. So this was my only chance to see any of it. I will detail that in another Post.

Update: The Ponce Museum of Art is now open to the public.

There was a wonderful antique shop with thousands of interesting things. Much of it, reasonably priced. There was a dedicated area for local Artesanos too, selling hand-crafted wares from all over the island. You could easily spend a day just working your way through this ‘mega-mall’.

I was politely told that photography was not allowed in the mall so these shots were had before that.

If you can’t find what you need here, you need to go home.

San Juan, PR: 87F, 65% Humidity and Loving it!

More in-depth posts will follow, but I wanted to get this one out before it got too late. No hassles along the way, so that’s a good thing. Jet-lag was not bad either, since I had been up 36 hours with only a short nap on the run from Seattle to New York. Needless to say, I slept-in a little.. missed the free ‘Continental Breakfast’, no biggie. The staff at the Howard Johnson Hotel are great. I’m in an area called Carolina on Isla Verde Avenue. The beach is a very short walk from here and saved me a bundle. So far, so good. I’ll rate them at the end, but I like the place. Its very close to the airport, but a good ways from “Old San Juan” or the Tren Urbano transit system.

To acclimate myself, I walked a few blocks to check out the local scene around 1PM.. then over to the beach. The Isla Verde and Carolina areas are well patrolled by the local cops and is considered very safe for folks on vacation.

Hotel Construction with Colorful Bus in the Foreground in Isla Verde Near the Airport of San Juan, Puerto Rico

You always need to be vigilant no matter where you are and Puerto Rico is no different.

This IS the Low Season, so I was not surprised to see how deserted the beaches were.

There is lots of commercial property under repair or construction right now. I admit I’m not up on the local news regarding the status of tourist developments. As long as this weather holds, I’ll be home in a month.

I’m Leav’n on a Jet Plane, don’t know when I’ll..

Let the adventure begin (3 days and counting)..

Que Pasa Tourist Guide and Three Maps of Puerto Rico This will be my last post from Alaska.. the next one will be from San Juan.. late on Wednesday, the 26th (if things go according to plan).

I’ll spend 19 hours in transit, cross 4 time zones and switch planes twice, to get there. Did I mention how much coach class sux?

I find it slightly humorous and a little annoying that the Que Pasa visitors guide did not show up until last week. I had requested it from the Puerto Rico Travel Companies Web site, a couple months ago. Back when I could have used it to plan my trip. Its dated June to August 2009 which means most of it will not be current by the time I get there. It is loaded with valuable info and gorgeous photos. Que Pasa’s content, for the most part, is aimed at an upscale crowd with lots of money. I’ve been involved with all aspects of producing travel guides like this. It is ‘top notch’, but of little value if it cannot be put in the hands of those who need them in a timely way. My 2 cents.

The maps were scored at book stores in Anchorage so I was able to check them out in advance. Each is very different from the other.

One last note- I got a very good review by a Web site on Puerto Rico in this last week before I leave. A big thanx to “Paradise Lost”. A ‘thought-provoking’ site that exemplifies the pride the locals have for Puerto Rico. I truly respect what they are trying to do. I have added them to my “Links” panel in the right-hand column. Thanx again, Roberto, the Scurvy Dog.. Arrg!!

The “Intro Bloopers” Reel

Shooting the “Intro Video” to my Blog was fun, but it did have its moments of frustration. It was my first.. there were mistakes.

For those of you not familiar with viewing videos on the Internet, here’s a couple of tips-

If you are on a ‘dial-up’ Internet account, I suggest skipping the videos completely.. they are huge files and will take (almost) forever to down-load. Do you have an hour or so to wait? You could go eat dinner, run an errand or go for a walk and come back when its done. If on the other hand, you have a high speed connection (DSL, cable modem or some such thing), go for it. It should take only a few minutes to down-load.

When you start a video, there is a ‘progress bar’ at the bottom of the frame that tracks the down-load. There is also a ‘play/pause’ button immediately to the left of the bar. As soon as the video starts to play for the first time, stop (pause) the video.

The vid will continue to down-load even though you have paused the play. You can see the progress of the down-load as the bar slowly turns red. Once the bar is mostly red (3/4 or so), restart the video to watch it without interruption. Once it has completely down-loaded (a solid red bar), you can watch the vid over and over without reloading it, without the jitters or breaks.

I also encourage you to ‘rate’ my YouTube videos or leave your own comments (good, bad, or otherwise), but that’s optional. Enjoy!

Blogging, WordPress, Artisteer and GeekSpeak

This effort originally started out as conventional HTML. I designed and crafted a full set of interface graphics with ‘rollover’ features for all key categories and sub-categories. Then I would have assembled it in Adobe’s Dreamweaver. I had a specific ‘look and feel’ I was trying to achieve. I have previously used Adobe’s GoLive and HotMetalPress to build sites. KISS, is my driving design principle (Keep it Simple, Silly).

MyPOV: I think its important for a viewer, surfer to feel like they are ‘somewhere’ when they are on a site and have a sense of having left ‘somewhere’ when they step off a site. A strong sense of ‘presence’. All at a subliminal level. Nothing heavy handed. Small, optimized files are important too, or they will leave before they ever arrive.

That said, its very hard to update such a static site or make serious interface changes without major revisions. That’s when I started looking at Blogs and Travel Blogs and disassembling them to figure out what tools they were using.

Free Blogs with Conditions-

ALL free Blog and free Travel Blog services reserve the right to use YOUR content, i.e.- photos, video and text as they see fit without any restrictions. And in a few cases, reserve the right to even resell your work for profit. Once I found a Blog service that did NOT do that, I signed up. It’s not free, but the bonus is, my work is protected AND any ad-revenue generated from MY content, my hard work is mine, period.

Switching to a CSS Blogging format meant tossing out 90% of the work I had already done. At least I was able to keep most of the ‘look and feel’ I had developed previously. I chose WordPress to host my Travel Blog, but there are several others of equal capability. There are dedicated Travel Blog services out there, for sure, but WordPress is not one of them. Another huge set of benefits I cannot over stress is, CSS- (Cascading Style Sheet) Blogs make key word content ‘tags’ easy, adding/changing categories easy, getting it posted to the popular search engines easy, adding cool features (widgets) without knowing a bunch of code easy.

One last important point- Blogs require NO special software to update your site and can be done anywhere on any computer… as long as you have access to the Net (via a Browser). Doh!

Normally, you would score a theme (template) off the Net and make it your own. There are hundreds of them out there for free. Because I wanted to create something different, I finally tracked down the only software tool out there capable of designing a theme from scratch- ARTISTEER. It’s a WYSIWYG Windoze program recently ported to MAC and is still in Beta testing (as of 07/09), but it worked. I was able to create a custom ‘Look’ and then export it to my WordPress site to ‘flesh out’. This was a huge exercise in frustration, but I’m extremely happy with the end results.

Please, I cannot answer specific questions about any of this. If you have ambitions of doing your own blog, there are tons of resources out there for free. Everything I know about Blogs, I got off the Net.