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Thanks to the great folks at Vodafone, I'm able to update this website and stay in touch with my email through a laptop equipped with a PCMCIA card that provides nicely transparent GPRS roaming.

So long as Murphy's law doesn't strike, I could just as easily be sitting in my office at home and doing this -- bloody marvelous!

Spending seemingly endless hours sitting on a cramped 747 also gave me plenty of time to try out the little FreeStyle MP3 player, and what a godsend it turned out to be.

The Qantas "onboard entertainment system" is a great idea but although the technology is there, they need to have a long talk with whoever selects the movies and games being offered.

No action movies and the best game was a lousy implementation of Solitare that makes the Windows version look positively outstanding by comparison.

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One of the first things I did when I arrived was pick up a new SIM card for my mobile.

While roaming is very convenient, it's also horrendously expensive if you intend to make any number of local (to the country your visiting) calls or intend to receive incoming calls from back home.

Thanks to this new SIM, I can now make local calls for as little as 5p (NZ 14c) a minute and it costs me nothing to receive calls from NZ -- I'm happy!

The GPRS data roaming in this laptop also means that I can receive and reply to any emails you're sending to my Aardvark address or via the contact form on this site. To make life simpler, I'm using the useful webmail interface provided by 2day.com, which means that my regular spam filtering isn't in the loop. Boy, is it a shock to see just how much spam I actually receive (but normally never see) in a day!

One interesting aspect of the trip was the time I spent taking a look at the anti-SARS infra-red detection system used at Singapore Airport.

Believe it or not, (healthy) caucasians appear in white while (healthy) Asians appear to have a greenish tinge to them. If you've got SARS or are running a temperature for any other reason, you appear read and a truck-load of armed guards carry you off to a quarantine facility.

The girl operating the system said that they hadn't had to call the men with the machine guns yet -- although they were clearly nearby in a "locked and loaded" state ;-)

Well that's enough drivel for today as I am still somewhat jetlagged.

The next, hopefully somewhat more coherent) edition of Aarvark should appear sometime tomorrow.

Note also that since I'm spending someone else's money with this GPRS connection, I won't be updating the daily news headlines until I return.

If any Aardvark readers have an opinion on today's column or want to add something you're also invited to chip in and have your say.

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