Arranging a four-family trip to Estonia, and back to work again

That's it for this time - my family; mom, dad, older brother and sister, their spouses and two kids each have left Estonia. It was exhausting and sometimes tumultuous, but generally enjoyable and so much fun. I solemnly drink every drop the home-made strawberry- and elderberryflower-squashes mom left here.

An extremely compact outline of the family trip (pictures may end up here):

1. A couple of days in Tallinn, staying in two Red Group apartments
2. A couple of days in Tartu visiting the Hanseatic days, Dorpat day-spa etc., staying in the guest house at the family's place outside of Tartu
3. A visit to Ottepää adventure park / Pühajärve Spa
4. A night and two half-days in Pärnu, staying at the Scandic Rannahotell

To enable my family to make the most of their vacation and see the most exciting parts of Estonia and manage information for such a sizable group easily we used both Google Maps to lay out points of interest on a map with links to further information, and a wiki page to store information in.

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We think and hope everyone enjoyed the trip and with the kids saying things like "There are so many more cool things to do in Estonia than home in Sweden!" and "Here is so nice, you can barely believe it's in Estonia" (about Pärnu beach and Tervise Paradiis, to be fair comparing with Australian beaches), we feel that the idea for me and the girlfriend to arrange and coordinate tourist trips maybe isn't such a far-fetched one.

When the family had left towards Tallinn and the ferry the weather rapidly improved so me and the girlfriend stayed in Pärnu and she arranged for us to go sea kayaking (some pics here). It was tough on the arms and got my suntan going a bit too much, but oh how cool and fun it was! We only capsized once, when going in towards the shore and got surprised by waves breaking over us from behind.


The above picture shows the girlfriend getting strapped into the two-person sea kayak by our friendly guide, the second is us having a picnic after dragging ourselves out of the water. Now it's simply back to work again, and hopefully we'll get to enjoy a little bit more of the beautiful Estonian summer!

How to be there for your family - remotely

Let's face it, even if it's not the primary purpose for your family to want you to come visit, if you're anything like me, you will end up spending half your Christmas sitting in front of the family computer, cleaning it to withstand a new season of abuse, setting up and installing things (while trying to make it absolutely fool-proof, anything which breaks will cost you hours of frustrating phone-calls to try set things straight again) and generally... wishing you could spend Christmas doing something nicer but still help your family with all these things some other time.

A little engineering ingenuitiy (to get "call home" including tweaking sshd configuration was my idea), my favourite vodcast Hak5 and Bozteck OneClickVNC to the rescue! Go ahead and read the show notes / wiki or watch the episode.

Essentially I have now emailed a small (less than 1 MB) zip file to all members of my family, with some brief instructions on how to run it (I didn't bother about creating an installer, it's a zip file) and whenever they need my computer support (there seems to be no way I will be able to refuse them), they just send me a message and click the "Call CJ" icon on the desktop.

My mother got all teary-eyed today, partly about this and partly about Skype voice chat - "It feels like you're not so far away, it's really nice!". Yep - Trust your technolust.

Anyway, if either of my dear readers are interested in this, I've also recently managed to set up my own TWiki, it's awesome in itself, where I've got some further helpful info.

(Update: Since working further on this solution, I want to link to the Wikipedia article on remote administration and "remote_administration" on my del.icio.us. Also, it's worth noting that OneClickVNC seems to be free for all use, I will have to see whether it is allowed to modify it)

Besides all this nerdiness, I spent Friday-Saturday in Toila spa and visited the freaky-looking "village of frozen urine" / Valaste waterfalls:



Spa was... very nice. Very nice. Thanks baby.