Dear Low End Mac Community all over the world, whether you are
roasting away during a record European Summer (global warming? No,
temperatures in Germany higher than in Portugal should be welcomed, as
it reduces the need to actually travel to these parts), sweltering in
the U.S. while your President is enjoying week three of another one of
his Holidays (and I always thought that U.S. citizens were only
entitled to 13 days off. Oh well, he's the , isn't he? I'm sure that
the 42 percent of total presidency time he's been at his various
resorts so far he's been eagerly telecommuting with 
his Lombard
PowerBook, playing Total Annihilation with Dick Cheyney), or
shivering in the antipodean winter of Australia and New Zealand, I bid
you a hearty welcome to this most nonsensical of Low End Mac columns.
(This sentence makes sense. Just read it again!)
As I mentioned in the "spaghetti paragraph" above, it is the time of
the year when presidents and mere mortals like you and me turn their
thoughts and hearts towards those few weeks (well, it's actually six
weeks in Europe and the UK, but as this is an international column,
we're not going to rub it in) when we follow our hearts desires and
venture towards beaches, mountains or naff holiday parks (or in my
case, do a couple of extra shifts in Emergency Rooms to finance that
hole on your credit card statement that the new iBook left) to relax
and rejoice, try to ignore any sensible dietary advice, or just get
laid (as I am quite happy with my girlfriend, the latter obviously
doesn't apply to me, but I thought I raise a few eyebrows just to gain
some profile).
Some of us even take their iBooks with them, and this is where the
problems begin: The iBook this column was typed on was bought in London
(United Kingdom, a small but pompous little island in front of the
European north coast, for the geographically challenged) and was
obviously fitted with all the trimmings that you would need to use it
in a British environment: AC adaptor, keyboard, and modem cable all
designed for use on this last bastion of anti-europeism, where they
only comply to European standards when threatened with a hefty fine
from the European court or another trade boycott.
After trying it out in numerous E.R.'s between Myrthir Tyrdfil and
Weston Super Mare, I decided to do the ultimate test and take my iBook
through a couple of days of vacation on the mainland, where there are
countries by the bucketload (some as small as the Bronx or Queens) and
try to connect it to the Internet as often as I can.
The first problem you'll encounter is the abundance of different
systems to hook up your modem to: Every country has it's own system to
plug a phone cable into the wall, so you'd better travel with one of
these "continental phone travel adaptor collections" that you'll find
at Heathrow Airport (but not on the continent). After that
problem is solved, you want to charge your iBook - again, only one of
the "continental AC adaptors" will help.
So now that you've got your computer charged and plugged in a phone
line, what ISP are you going to use? In the good old days we all had
Compuserve accounts to access CS and the Internet from everywhere in
the world, but since they were bought by AOL and were more expensive
than European fuel, a lot of people said good-bye to them (do they
still exist?). So, who're ya gonna call? Do a little long range call to
your ISP wherever your from? If you're from Namibia or Tashkent and
take your holiday in Australia, that might be a mightily expensive
thing to do, as you are probably only going to establish a 2400 baud
connection over these crap phone lines - and downloading your 250
HTML-enhanced messages (90 percent spam) is going to take you an hour
or two, wasting enough money for an intercontinental flight.
Either you use your hotel's ethernet (if you're so lucky) or you
chuck the iBook in a corner, swallow your pride, and join the
gazillions of teenagers using chatrooms at one of the large Internet
cafe chains (like "easyeverything": the money on my account please,
stelios), but don't forget to redirect your email from your personal
account to one of the webmail services (everything but Hotmail,
obviously).
Prepared with this bit of advice, you should be able to enjoy this
year's holiday in Europe just as we Europeans do: Being drunk all day,
staring at half-naked French women (or men, depending on the sex or
lifestyle you prefer), and playing Cro Mag Rally on your iBook.
Prost! 
