One of our favorite travel bloggers recently took the 7 link challenge and after reading further about it, it sounded like a fun idea. So, both Jason and I have compiled and completed the 7 link challenge. Please join us on a trip down memory lane…

Our First Posts

Jason’s First Post – Random Thoughts From My Cube With 14 Weeks To Go

Sharon’s First Post – Cutting the Keyboard Cord

Posts We Enjoyed Writing

Jason - The Great Adventure of Lunch in Haikou – This experience was so ridiculous that as soon as I came back from lunch I started writing. I had so much fun writing this post that the initial draft was waaay too long!

Sharon - The Top 9 Things about China that Shocked Us – This was one of my first posts and also the first time I truly felt that what I was writing about needed to be written!  Mainland China was our first stop into culture shock, so I will forever read this post and remember that feeling.

A Post Which Had A Great Discussion

Sharon - Dating in Korea – This was one of my more recent posts and developed a nice discussion panel in the comments section.  I asserted many of my own opinions on dating in Korea, and although they were just observations, many people agreed/disagreed with me on them.  It’s great knowing that people take what I write seriously, even if some of my writing does drip with sarcasm.

A Post on Someone Else’s Blog I Wish I’d Written

Jason – Nomadic Matt – “Why Americans Still Don’t Travel Overseas” – There were actually two parts to this post, here’s part 1. This is a topic I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about. Matt’s post summarized the arguments well.

Sharon - YouOffendMeYouOffendMyFamily – I recently discovered this blog while searching for information on Koreans and their insane drinking habits, only to find an entire website’s worth of fun stuff.  One of them being a link to the “6 Most Terrifying Foods in the World”.

Your Most Helpful Post

Jason – “Visa Requirements for Asian Countries” – This list took a long time to compile and I’m proud of how helpful it is. Visa requirements are an annoying aspect of travel and I hope this helped (and will help) people planning on traveling to Asia.

A Post With A Title You Are Proud Of

Sharon – “Rock the Cat Ba (Island), Vietnam” – It’s obvious that this title parodies the song “Rock the Casbah” (and is also extremely corny) but it just makes me smile each time I think about it.

Jason – “Geoarbritage – Holy &#!% that’s cheap” – It took me a long time to choose the symbols that looked right. I think it’s the exclamation mark that really makes it look right.

A Post That I Wish More People Had Read

Sharon – What is this, a trick question?  I guess if I were obligated to answer this, I would have to say “14 Engrish Signs to Make You Laugh” just because I think everyone in the world deserves to know how awesome these horrible translations are.

Now I ask you: what’s your favorite blog of ours?  Do you even read our blog?  If your name is Holly, you probably do.

Random Thought of the Day: How awesomely random is this?

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This post is quite a bit different than our typical posts. In fact, I will not be offended if our regular readers go ahead and skip this post. In the following post, I’ll be explaining how to create anonymous email addresses for users of your website (similar to the one’s used on Craigslist) using Google Apps and a PHP script.

First off, I want to briefly explain why I wanted to create this tutorial. I recently created the anonymous email feature for candidates posting their profiles on KeysToChina.com (a new side-project). While doing so, I looked for tutorials on how to create the feature. Unfortunately, most of what I found was outdated and unnecessarily complicated. Hopefully, in the future, someone looking to implement a similar feature will be able to use this tutorial to create anonymous email addresses for their users.

High-Level Solution

The high-level solution to creating anonymous email addresses with Google Apps is to use the “catch-all” feature in Google Apps to send all email into a single inbox. Then, create a script to periodically check the address and forward on all emails based on who the email was sent to by looking into a database that links the anonymous email address with their real email address. (Whew!)

Catch-All Email Address in Google Apps

With each domain I own, I use Google Apps to manage email — it’s free and I highly recommend it. However, a feature that I was unaware of is a catch-all email address. With the catch-all email address, any email sent to your domain address that does not correspond with an existing user can either be automatically thrown away or placed into a user’s account.

To begin, set up an email account in Google Apps that will only be used for the catch-all anonymous user emails. Then in Google Apps, go to “Service Settings” > “Email”. Under catch-all address, enter the email account you’ve setup:

Important: Make sure to login to the catch-all account and enable IMAP (found in Settings), as you’ll need that enabled for the script below. It’s disabled by default.

Setting Up An Anonymous to Email Mapping Database

The database setup is a simple one-to-one setup. With each real email address, you’ll want to setup an anonymous email address that will be associated with that account. So, for example:

Anonymous email-address: Candidate-733727@keystochinajobs.com
Real email-address: Jason.Demant@gmail.com

Creating A Script to Check the Catch-All Email Address & Forward the Emails

Now that you’ve got an account setup to catch all of the anonymous emails and a database mapping the anonymous addresses with real email addresses, you’ll need to write a script to check the email address and forward the emails to the appropriate place. You can open the email account using IMAP:

Source code

#!/usr/bin/php
<?php
 
require_once('class.phpmailer.php'); //Used for simplicity
require_once 'dbinfo.php'; //The database name, login, etc..
set_error_handler("customError"); //I created a custom error
 
$login = 'catch-all-email@YourDomain.com';
$password = 'HardToGuessPassword';
$server = '{imap.gmail.com:993/ssl/novalidate-cert}';
$connection = imap_open($server, $login, $password);

Now that the email account is open, you’ll need to see if there are any new emails. If there are, you’ll want to see who the emails were sent to, match the recipient to their real address with your database mapping, and forward on the email:

Source code

$mailboxinfo = imap_mailboxmsginfo($connection);
$messageCount = $mailboxinfo->Nmsgs; //Number of emails in the inbox
 
for ($MID = 1; $MID <= $messageCount; $MID++)
{
  $EmailHeaders = imap_headerinfo($connection, $MID); //Save all of the header information
  $Body = imap_qprint(imap_fetchbody($connection, $MID, 1)); //The body of the email to be forwarded
 
  $MessageSentToAllArray  =   $EmailHeaders->to; //Grab the "TO" header
  $MessageSentToAllObject =   $MessageSentToAllArray[0];
  $MessageSentToMailbox   =   $MessageSentToAllObject->mailbox; //Everything before the "@" of the sender
  $MessageSentToHost 	  =   $MessageSentToAllObject->host; //Everything after the "@" of the sender
 
  $MessageSentFromAllArray  = $EmailHeaders->from; //Grab the "FROM" header
  $MessageSentFromAllObject = $MessageSentFromAllArray[0];
  $MessageSentFromMailbox   = $MessageSentFromAllObject->mailbox; //Everything before the "@" of the sender
  $MessageSentFromHost = $MessageSentFromAllObject->host; //Everything after the "@" of the sender
  $MessageSentFromName = $MessageSentFromAllObject->personal; //The name of the person who sent the email
 
  $toArray  = searchRecipient($MessageSentToMailbox); //Find the correct person to send the email to
 
  if ($toArray == FALSE) //If the alias they entered doesn't exist...
  {
    $bounceback = "Sorry, your message sent to $MessageSentToMailbox@$MessageSentToHost does not appear to be correct."
 
    /* Send a bounceback email */
    $mail = new PHPMailer(); // defaults to using php "mail()"
    $mail -> ContentType = 'text/plain'; //Plain email
    $mail -> IsHTML(false); //No HTML
 
    $the_body = wordWrap($bounceback, 70); //Word wrap to 70 characters for formatting
 
    $from_email_address = "Support@KeysToChinaJobs.com";
    $mail->AddReplyTo($from_email_address, 'KeysToChinaJobs.Com');
    $mail->SetFrom($from_email_address, 'KeysToChinaJobs.Com');
 
    $address = "$MessageSentFromMailbox@$MessageSentFromHost"; //Who we're sending the email to
    $mail->AddAddress($address, $MessageSentFromName);
    $mail->Subject    = "Candidate Inquiry"; //Subject of the email
    $mail->Body = $the_body;
 
    if(!$mail->Send()) //If the mail fails, send to customError
    {
      customError(1, $mail->ErrorInfo, 'keys-anon-email.php', 'sending the email');
    }
 
  }
  else //If the candidate address exists, forward on the email
  {
    $mail = new PHPMailer(); // defaults to using php "mail()"
 
    $mail -> ContentType = 'text/plain'; //Plain E-mail
    $mail -> IsHTML(FALSE); //No HTML
 
    $the_body  = wordwrap($Body, 70); //Wordwrap for proper email formatting
 
    $from_email_address = "$MessageSentFromMailbox@$MessageSentFromHost";
    $mail->AddReplyTo($from_email_address, $MessageSentFromName);
    $mail->SetFrom($from_email_address, $MessageSentFromName);
    $address = $toArray[1]; //Who we're sending the email to
    $mail->AddAddress($address, $toArray[0]); //The name of the person we're sending to
    $mail->Subject    = $EmailHeaders->subject; //Subject of the email
    $mail->Body = ($the_body);
 
    if(!$mail->Send()) //If mail fails, go to the custom error
    {
      customError(1, $mail->ErrorInfo, 'keys-anon-email.php', 'sending the email');
    }		
 
  }
  /* Mark the email for deletion after processing */
  imap_delete($connection, $MID);
}
 
imap_expunge($connection); // Expunge processes all of the emails marked to be deleted
imap_close($connection);

With the comments in the code, hopefully the code is pretty straight-forward. I kept it very simple and sent only text emails. Also, to make it easier, I’ve used phpMailer. This can be downloaded here. The download includes great examples and helpful instructions to quickly get up and running.

Setting Up A Cron Job

A cron job can be used to automate your check email script. You can set up the script to be run every minute if you want, or only once-a-day. For this particular script, I went with every 5 minutes.

I use Bluehost for hosting, which uses cPanel. Cron Jobs are located in the “Advanced” section of cPanel. The command to run the script via a Cron job is going to vary by account and host, but here’s the command I used:

/usr/bin/php -q /homeX/username/path-to-script/file-name.php

Look on the home page of your cPanel to find out if there’s a number next to “home” and what your “username” is.

Check the Spam Folder!

After creating the script, doing some basic tests and getting things working, everything was going great. I decided to further test the script using my Hotmail and Yahoo! email addresses. From some reason, Yahoo! emails were never reaching the catch-all email account. I searched on Google, posted on the Google help forums, but I couldn’t figure out why only messages sent from Yahoo were never reaching the catch-all email address.

Finally, I figured out that Google was automatically placing these emails into the Spam folder. I didn’t notice this earlier, because Google automatically hides the Spam folder on new accounts. The lesson of the story is, if you’re noticing some emails aren’t showing up, check the Spam folder.

To solve this problem, I decided to create a second script to automatically check the Spam folder. This was easy and only required me to edit one line:

Change this:

Source code

$server = '{imap.gmail.com:993/ssl/novalidate-cert}';

To this:

Source code

$server = '{imap.gmail.com:993/ssl/novalidate-cert}[Gmail]/Spam';

Everything else is the same.

Big thanks to Ben from TechCofounder for helping me figure this out!

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To help get the word out about UnAnchor.com, I’ve had a busy last few weeks writing guest posts and interviews for other blogs. In this post, I’ll share the different articles that have already been published.

Our Interview at JetSetCitizen – This was a fun interview Sharon and I had the opportunity to do. Find out about our thoughts on traveling as a couple, our advice for people considering long-term travel and much more.

UnAnchor.com Interview at Foxnomad – This interview focused on just UnAnchor.com. I discuss the background of UnAnchor, tips for writing high-quality itineraries, and the vision for the site.

Six Things Nobody Tells You About Running Your Own Location Independent Business – A guest post for LocationIndpendent.com in which I discuss the many surprises I discovered while creating & launching UnAnchor.com.

4 Ways Every Traveler Can Make Money From Their Travels – A lot of articles discuss how travelers can make money while traveling, but in this article I wanted to show a few ways travelers can make money directly from their travels. One of course being writing itineraries for UnAnchor.com.

Your Guide to Creating Itineraries (And Hopefully Making Money) with UnAnchor – This was a guest post written for Tech Guide for Travel, in which I give step-by-step instructions on creating itineraries for UnAnchor.com.

In a couple weeks I plan on sharing my results of these guest posts, as well as discussing how UnAnchor.com is going thus far.

Image credit: Giorgio Montersino

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This update comes from Jeju Island – the “Hawaii of Korea”.  We’ve been enjoying some very strange weather as well as hiking, lots of eating and other very typical touristy things. More on this later in the week.

Twitter has become a great tool for us. We share what we’ve been up to, where in the world we currently are and you can get information about what’s going on before it hits our blog. I also share cool stuff I find around the web. Here are some interesting links I recently shared:

Travel Related Links

Adventurous Kate: Best of the Week – Sharon’s article on Korea’s Fashion was recently named one of the week’s best over at Adventurous Kate. There are some other great articles on the list as well.

The Cleanest Race – This is an extremely interesting interview with an American professor who teaches in South Korea and studies North Korean culture. If you’re curious about what life is like in North Korea, this is a great article to learn about it. Warning: It’s really long.

How To Create Your Own Personal Travel Security Plan – Great post from Foxnomad with some very useful security tips. My personal favorite: Put your money under your dirty underwear that you left under your bed.

Visiting Schools in Haiti – My friend Shaneil is creating an add-on dock for the One Laptop Per Child project for his Masters project. He recently traveled to Haiti in order to see how kids use their free laptops. This was my favorite of his blog posts, where he visited a school and interacted with the kids.

Entrepreneurial Links

Mixergy Interview with Paul Singh – Paul is the founder of MailChimp and is building a fast-growing business by only investing money he’s made from the business and has a lot of really helpful tips on doing the same. He’s also an entertaining interviewee.

FounderDating – New site I recently found. If you’re an entrepreneur or an aspiring one and looking for partners, this seems like an excellent program. They have events in Seattle & San Francisco.

JetSetCitizen Interview with Brandon Pearce – This interview basically encapsulates exactly what I’m trying to do (I think). Brandon started an online company, it became his full-time job, and now he’s hired people to run it for him and lives in Costa Rica with his family. Awesome.

For all the latest, make sure to follow us on Twitter, we’re @LifeAfterCubes.

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I now know, for example, that I am more high maintenance than I thought. Back at home, Jason coined the term “ME-OW maintenance” for me, meaning that I am in between low-medium maintenance as a girl (I assure you these are VERY scientific and real terms).  However, I have learned after careful observation that your placement on the spectrum for girlfriend/wife maintenance is significantly different depending on where you are in the world.  Here in Asia, for example, my maintenance indicator makes a wide leap into medium-high maintenance.  The reasons?  For one thing I realized that my Mother has rubbed off on me way more than previously thought when it comes to germophobia and cleanliness.  Let’s just say that Jason did not have substantial warning of my closeted fear of germs until now.  One of the very few things that I require while traveling is a clean room and a decent bathroom (you would be surprised at the odors that come from toilets here in Asia).  This has required us to spend a little more on accommodations than most budget backpackers, but to us (me) it’s worth the sound sleep you get while knowing you are not being eaten by cockroaches and mosquitoes.

The cleanliness issue sometimes goes hand in hand with the economy of the country that we are in.  Cambodia is a much poorer country than China, for example, so sometimes it’s a bit harder to find a good room without shelling out more money.  This has not changed my opinions of the country as a whole, however, especially since many Cambodian and Vietnamese people who manage guest houses seem to have been born with a broom attached to their hands.  (Most of our hotels in these two countries were kept impeccably clean).

The downside to being in such a poor country is how numb you become to seeing families and men with only two limbs begging on the streets.  You get used to ignoring it because there are just so many of them.  However, I don’t think I have gotten used to seeing the children begging, and I’m not sure if I ever will.  I am never going to forget the sight of a dirty child coming up to me and speaking the only English they know: “some money?”  These children are kept away from school just to bring in a few cents for their families from tourists who feel sympathy for a poor child.  It’s difficult to think that I will go back home and return to my normal life after seeing these things on a daily basis.

Another observation that shaped the way I now view Asia is limited to countries that don’t see as much concentrated tourism as Southeast Asian countries of Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia.  So far, the only country that falls into this category that we have travelled is China.  In China, the people would literally stare at Jason as if he was from another planet.  As mentioned in a previous post, the amount of blatant, non-filtered staring was something that took a lot of getting used to for me.  I also realized that it made me kind of sad.  Most of the Chinese people that gawked at Jason will probably never get to travel internationally, therefore they will never get to experience living amongst different cultures and people.  Many of them will never get to go to the family home of their Indian friend, or meet their friend’s Russian parents. The fact that almost the entire country was born with black hair and brown eyes kind of boggled my mind when I saw it first hand; no woman in China (unless they are a foreigner) will never wonder if their pregnant bellies contain a blue or green eyed baby with golden or light hair.  As an American who has grown up around many different types of people, this concept became somewhat depressing knowing that most of them will most likely continue to view all people who don’t look like them as aliens.

Many people we encountered in China, however, were gracious and eager to help us foreigners despite their seemingly negative staring.  Others proved to me that this mentality was, in fact, negative in nature as they would spit as we walked by.  (We were told by a Canadian, who was currently residing in China, that we would encounter a lot of spitting in our direction due to the fact that the locals thought of us as ‘another foreign man dating a Chinese girl’).  As much as I still want to slap the ignorance out of these people, this ideology continues to sadden me.

I could write an entire book on my personal observations abroad, but I doubt anyone would want to read it except maybe my parents.  Maybe.  The point is, this trip has started to mold my views on myself as well as the way I see the world.  For one thing, when I return to the States I will NEVER AGAIN take our western bathrooms for granted.  I will never again take our septic system for granted when I can freely throw toilet paper into the toilet without fear of the water coming back at me like a geyser.  Just an example.

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Geoarbitrage is a popular term used by the travel community, one that I was familiar with but never truly grasped until we arrived in China and now Vietnam. In this post, I give a little background on the term, the amazing way it’s been affecting us, and why it means that traveling may actually be a good way to save money!

After doing some research there seem to be multiple definitions for “geoarbitrage”. The term was popularized by Tim Ferriss, in his “4-Hour Workweek” book.

One definition is to leverage cheaper labor in other countries by outsourcing one’s personal and business tasks. This, in turn, frees up time to concentrate on only the highest value activities. Essentially this means hiring a virtual personal assistant to get rid of the mundane time-sucking tasks you don’t really want to do anyway. This post won’t be focused around this definition–unfortunately, I have yet to hire a personal assistant (other than my free Asian labor, Sharon).

My favorite definition and the focus of this post is this: earning an income in a country with a higher-standard of living and living in a country with a lower-standard of living. To use examples: earning your income in a country like the USA, Canada and Western Europe, but then actually living in South East Asia, or  South or Central America.

Not until I’d traveled through China and now Vietnam did I realize how amazing geoarbitrage really is. Vietnam is especially cheap. Nice hotels are $7-$15 a night. A particularly nice hotel on Cat Ba Island was only $8 a night. Good meals can be had for less than $2 USD. Souvenirs, clothing, electronic accessories, cab rides, fruit–all of these things are much cheaper here, it’s incredible.

What’s funny about how cheap things are is that it has started to mess with our heads. $200,000 Vietnamese Dong (~ $11 USD) for dinner for two is now REALLY expensive. If we walk into a restaurant and prices for a meal are in that range, the place needs to be really special. It’s rather amazing that for most restaurants, two good dishes, rice and a couple beers for $100,000 Vietnamese Dong (~$5.50) is average.

We are now firm believers in geoarbitrage. Imagine working for 40 years in the USA saving for retirement and then moving to Vietnam or Argentina. Your money would go 2x-5x further than it could in America. What would be a modest retirement in America could suddenly be a lavish retirement in Chile.

As a personal example, the past few weeks in Vietnam, Sharon and I have combined to spend around $50 per day. This includes all transportation, hotels, food and other purchases. Granted we’re not buying clothing, electronics or anything like that, but that’s $1,500 per month for two people. It’s difficult to find a decent place to rent in the Bay Area for that amount of money. Not only are we traveling the world, but we’re saving money while doing it.

So what does this mean for you?

Traveling isn’t as expensive as you may think. For us, it’s turning out to be FAR cheaper than we’ve budgeted. Surely, you can make travel expensive, by jetting all over the place. But the benefits of long-term travel mean you can stay in destinations longer reducing your transportation cost. You can take a bus or a train instead of an airplane (a better environmental choice anyhow).

Putting off a long-term vacation because you think it will cost too much? Our finding thus far is it’s just not true. Granted you may not be able to travel to Western Europe, but don’t worry, it’s not going anywhere. See Central and South America first, or India or South East Asia. Save money and travel. I’m starting to sound like an infomercial…

Photo from Vin60.

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In 2008, my goal was to go skydiving, check. This past year, 2009, it was hiking “Half Dome” in Yosemite, check. 2010 was supposed to be the year I started this trip, but we’ve kind of already done that. So, this year, in case you’re curious, I’ve decided to make it rock climbing a real mountain. Why rock climbing? No reason really, just sounds cool.

So, why am I writing about this? I think this is my inspirational post, where I try to get you to do something similar — and make one adventurous goal for the new year.

My anecdotal finding is that the more people you tell about your goal, the more likely you are to accomplish it. When Sharon and I decided to go on this trip, I spoke about it to anyone that would listen. The more people I told, the more committed to the idea I became and the more likely it was going to become a reality.

I would almost guarantee that I will complete my rock climbing goal, because I’ve just published it.

So what’s your one thing that you’d like to leave 2010 with under your belt? Talk about it with other people, or even leave it as a comment on this post; all of these will help make it happen.

Inspirational post…now complete.

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