After spending most of my life as either a city dweller or a mountain hermit, I have now opted for the in-between, the idyl of small town life in a tourist destination. I have moved to the middle of a city block. There are houses to the right of me, houses to the left: a retired car dealer, a widow, a forty-something executive couple, a retired diplomat, a few clowns and jokers, notably a gang of 20-somethings that parties every weekend night until someone throws up and guests roar off on their motorcycles. There is a local radio station that mixes small town news with “hey dude” commentary about the 70s drug and rock scene. Recently the local newspaper featured a story about an encounter between a vehicle and a very large sow.

Over the past 20 years or so, Sonoma, California has gained the status of “tourist town.”

On The Connected Traveler

Take a look at a demo (with a short piece on sustainable tourism) of our new edition of “Travel and Tourism: Opening Doors for Your Future,” an interactive course that introduces the Travel and Tourism industry as a serious career path to high school or entry-level college students, people who are about to enter the workforce or those who may be seeking a new career. We have added a Library/Personal Edition on DVD and a Flash video-based e-Learning Edition that can be found online at http://learntravelandtourism.com. The course is both educational and motivational, loaded with timely information about how vast and important the travel industry is, its history, sustainable tourism, future trends, its various sectors and how they work together, and the wide variety of career opportunities it offers.
It is the successor to the “World of Many Faces” video/workbook that my good friend Renton De Alwis put together in 1994, which was used in universities, schools and companies around the world and still is in many libraries

I have enough trouble with real reality, but add software (in this case, something with the unfortunate acronym/name FLARToolKit) and the mind unreels. Try living in your own cartoon here, at this site developed by GE to demonstrate wind and solar energy.

My first impression of India was high culture plus high chaos. But then I hadn’t been to Kerala, a multicultural waterworld in India’s southwest.

Watch HD Video on connectedtraveler.com

I wish I could say that I made a living as a blogger,  but I do put wine in the flagon by producing projects such as Travel and Tourism: Opening Doors for Your Future, an interactive introductory course in Travel and Tourism, which we have just released. It is the successor to “World of Many Faces: An Introduction to the Profession of Travel and Tourism,” a program used in more than 100 institutions around the world for more than ten years. This one is a significant update in both content, with an emphasis on sustainable tourism, and technology. We produced it in high definition TV and it is playable in that format in large classrooms. But it can also be scaled down for Web and even mobile phone use.  Have a look at an HDTV preview of it in Flash 9 . It is proof that we have come a long way in streaming video even in the past few months. You must have a 1.5 m connection and Flash 9 installed to watch it.  CLICK HERE

Click below for the Apple TV/iPod low def version.