For what I expect will be the last time of the year, I´m flying to Buenos Aires, Argentina for an NVIDIA event. This is the third time I have to go to Buenos Aires in the last 30 days and makes me feel that I should move to Buenos Aires in the future. It will be a short trip, I´ll depart on Wednesday and return on Thursday.

On other trip tid bits, I out to the United States the 31st of December. I will arrive to LA the first day of 2008 to meet my friend David Hayes and why not, maybe even go for a roadtrip to Tijuana, Mexico. The 6th of January I will arrive to Las Vegas during the morning, that day I have a quite busy Sunday meeting with manufacturers before the show. During that week I will attend CES and the classic post-show parties. Finally on Saturday I´m out to San Francisco for El Jobso´s keynote.

But that´s news I´ve disclosed before. I´m now preparing my trip to CeBIT, Hannover. It will be my first time in CeBIT and what´s best, my first time in Germany. I expect to be there for the whole week and then leave to Brusells, Amsterdam and Rotterdam for some quick sightseeing and then back to Miami, where I plan to stay for a night for a quick meeting.

I also plan to attend Computex in Taipei, Taiwan, although we haven´t bought tickets yet. This is because of two reasons. The first is tickets are still to expensive (sweet dates are just 60 days before travelling) and because we are still not sure if only attending Computex, or stay a week after or before in Taiwan or maybe China. Asia is definitely not close to Southamerica, and air tickets are so expensive we really need to do as much as we can during our trip.

During 2007 I earned something around 70.000 miles (that includes 25% bonus, and doesn´t include a couple of trips I didn´t do on OneWorld), I expect next year to earn at least 100.000. So it will be a pretty busy year =)

I just finished a pretty weird monday. Anyways, my weekend was great, on Friday we went to Creamfields, where Chemical Brothers and Carl Cox did their thing. A friend gave me some VIP tickets, and for our luck, it had a full open bar, so we had a great time and of course the night end up quite crazy. On saturday I went to a BBQ where we had a great dinner, and after ir, we had a special guest, our old friend Jack Daniel.

Tomorrow I´m heading back again to Buenos Aires, Argentina. This is time I´m atttending Intel Editor´s Day which will be held in Rosario, Argentina. The event starts on Wednesday and our bus to Rosario departs very early, so we are leaving one day before.

I will have to go back to Buenos Aires on the end of this month, 29th and 30th, and if things go well, I should go in between this week and the 29th trip.  Because Chile is so small, many manufacturers decide to throw their press events at Buenos Aires, which is a bigger market, and fly journos there. It´s a good trick, an probably cheaper, although we´ve arrived late to more than one. That´s why it´s always better flying the day before.

PS: Slashdot only moved something around 2000 uniques to our site. Not too bad although less than we expected.

This has been crazy. If someone thinks that working at the internet full time is an easy job, he is completely wrong. Now that I´m full time internet, I´ve been working three times as hard. Good news is that we´ve already seen some reactions to this. I´m going to all press events and doing lots of networking, I have meetings almost everyday and we´ve been published full articles everyday. TecnoSquad, our one year old Consumer Electronics blog, achieved a PR6 rating and BotonTurbo our one month videogame weblog is averaging over 2.5k uniques a day. We have a new design ready for TecnoSquad which we should be installed during new year´s eve and ChileHardware will receive a new face lift which I hope will be ready for CES 2008 / MacWorld. As you can see the sun is shining and things are getting even better.

Nowadays I´m at Buenos Aires, for a Nokia event. I´m staying at the Faena Hotel, according to some, the best designer hotel in the world, and definitely the best in Argentina. This is full John Chow CES style! I also fixed some meetings during my stay here. I really hope to have some more time for blogging, I hope. One the meantime, feel free to check our GeForce 8800 GT review, the only analysis on this card in the hispanic world.

On my way back home, my flight from Dallas to Santiago was oversold. Before leaving anyone behind, the airline had the obligation of asking for volunteers to give out their seat. Of course very few people will do it without something in return. This is why American Airlines offered U$800 cash vouchers for future flights in exchange of a seat on the plane, and considering it was a weekend and no I had no hurry to get home, I stayed a night in Dallas and catch the next plane to Chile, which would had a conection at Miami.

The next day, whe I got to Miami, the plane was oversold too, and again I stayed a night in Miami (barhopping at South Beach) and got the final flight home with U$1600 in airtickets in my pocket.

Today I spent my vouchers – 80% of their cash value – buying tickets for CES 2008 and MacWorld. I´ll fly during new years eve, stay in LA for a week and then fly to Vegas for CES and after that to San Francisco for MacWorld.

Although I think he is full of shit, I´m looking forward for El Jobso´s keynote, I´ve never attended one.

My trip is over, I just arrived today after a two day extension. China was great, we had lots of fun, and the guys at MSI gave as a great tour at Shanghai and Kunshan. Lots of drinking, eating and working, not too much sleeping,  but I´m used to it. We crashed the bar every night and nobody stopped laughing and drinking till 2 AM. You can see lots of pictures in my Flickr Set.

On the way back to Chicago I almost lost my flight, but it was worth it, because we took the Maglev with LG (Lars-Goran)  from Tweaktown, and my pal Jorge from ToxicoPC. After time travelling – my flight came out on friday at 4PM Shanghai local time and arrived at the same time Chicago time zone – I took my connection to San Francisco. There I spent the weekend on a shopping spree till Monday and attended IDF.

IDF was fun, lots of news and it´s always interesting meeting Senior Fellows from Intel. After my trip I stayed for a night in Miami where we went bar hopping to South Beach. Beautiful looking girls and great clubs. There are many stories that a single post wouldn´t be enough,  and unfortunately I didn´t have the time to blog during the trip.

BTW I got an iPhone, unlocked and working in Chile =)

As I told you in advance, I´m preparing my next big trip. This time I´m heading to Shanghai, with my next stop being San Francisco, and finally arriving home after two weeks. We already reserved and purchased the tickets, I´ll be leaving on September 9th, and my first stop is in Miami, afterwards I connect in Chicago and finally there I take my intercontinental flight to Shanghai. On the way back I will stay a week at San Francisco, CA, where many interesting things will be going on, TechCrunch20, Intel Developer Forum and we should meet a manufacturer or too. I´m right now picking my seats with the help of SeatGuru and requesting some upgrades for my domestic flights. I´ve never been to Shanghai before, even though I went to Shenzhen once, so I´m really looking forward for this trip, although it means a 36 hour flight.

I´m back from my short vacations, I went to two cities, and travelled in car and bus. It was very relaxing and I just chilled, eat and rested. My first stop was Pichilemu, Pichilemu is a small town south from Santiago, and it´s an attraction for surfers all over the world, because it´s waves are very big although quite cold. My second stop was Viña del Mar, Viña is just a 90 minutes drive from Santiago and is a very big city. I stayed in Reñaca, which is not that much fun – mostly a tourist trap – but we went to party to Viña both nights. Overall I enjoyed my short vacations and I feel very inspired to continue my work. You can check out my pictures at my Flickr, which some of you have noticed, now posts my last pictures in the right column.

In the southern hemisphere we are only a month away from winter vacations, this is two weeks for your own pleasure. Winter vacations are common between students, not between professionals, considering I didn´t have vacations during summer – I went to CES – I plan on having my own getaway during July.

Machupichu

I´m planning to go to Machupichu in Peru. The idea is flying to Arica, Chile´s northest city, crossing to Tacna, Peru´s southest city, and then taking a bus to Puno. In Puno we plan to stay a day or two and the take the traing to Cuzco, Machupichu´s closest city.

This will be my first trip to Peru, with this one I will have visited 12 countries in total, still 191 to go

I saw a post where John Chow showed his mobile office, this was a while ago, but after checking out Bob´s mobile office I decided to write this post I had pending.

When I´m the road I take only the necessary stuff, I like to travel light, is the only way to do it. The most important para is my portable computer, a rather old Asus 12,1″ inch Centrino system that is about to get retired. I also carry a Kensington Travel Adapter, which can make it too almost all electric outlets in the world, a pair of Sony headphones, a really portable battery charger and my cellphone. The other four cases, carry my presentation cards, travelling documents and spare credit card, USB flash drives and flash memory and finally some notebook accesories.

As I told you, I wouldn´t go to Computex but our website was going to send someone. I was cool with that, in fact I decided it. But as always, things didn´t go as planned. My partner lost his flight and didn´t make it to Computex.

The problem is the next available flight would arrive on Thursday leaving only two days for covering the show. Well travelling from Chile isn´t exactly cheap, so we decided to cancel everything.

Covering the tradeshow wasn´t really our primary focus, but being there, letting manufacturers know you care about checking out their newest products and investing in content is always a good thing. People that work in hardware companies tend to move a lot from their jobs, that is why you need to keep track of them, not only through e-mail but also meeting with them.

I´m really upset with this and that´s why we decided some things. We will start making reservations for CES 2008 in the short term and this time I´m not going alone. We are also going to visit CeBit next year and send over a team for Computex, Taipei. It´s also very probable I will have to go to the Valley at least once before the year ends for meetings and stuff…

You know what they say, what doesn´t kill you, makes you stronger.