Im Simon Jones and back in 1999 I travelled the the United States from England. It wasn't my first trip the USA, but this time I wanted to capture my trip in more than the usual two dimensions of pictures from rolls of 36 exposure film.

Remember, 1999 was long before blogs or smartphones. Back then there was no facebook, Instagram, or any social media at all, and if you wanted to take pictures you used a camera that would require you to finish a roll of film then get it developed so you could see your pictures weeks or even months later!

It wasn't unusual back then to see people wandering around with video cameras, filming various moments of their vacations. The bulky camcorders were cumbersome machines that required heavy batteries that didn't last as long as the tape would allow you to film.

I wanted a camcorder so I too could record my experience, but they were expensive and my budget was limited so instead I chose to capture moments with a hand-held tape cassette recorder, which was itself quite large. With that I record soudbites throughout my days with the intention of mixing them into short 'radio shows'for my own personal record.

Using what now seems like archaic methods, I mixed the audio clips on my Apple PowerBook laptop (a 1400c using SoundEdit Pro for you geeks out there). A few hours after recording the audio the finished show would be ready to go online for my friends, and whoever else, to listen to.

In effect these shows were what we now commonly know as 'Podcasts.' Originally distributed in 'RealAudio' format I have since re-encoded the series to MP3 format, suitable for iPods and a whole host of other personal music players.

You can read articles written by me about all sorts of things by heading over to Meanwhile.

For a full track listing of the music used in the shows click here. This site was designed back in 1999. The style has been kept in its original format. All the text within the site (apart from this page) has remained unchanged since it was written and published online back in 1999.