Mobile Me

So it was out to the country this weekend just gone, visiting the not in-laws, my partners parents.

It’s always relaxing out there but of course I bring my whole office withe me. Laptop, phone, iPod, camera, cables, lenses, backup batteries… What usually happens is that I spend the whole time sitting in the dining room, on the computer, working. This time, I lugged all of my gear on my bike and on the train and never touched it.

Actually, I took one photo and we watched an episode of ‘Damages’ on the train on the way there and another on the way back. Hardly the purpose of me breaking my back whilst peddling carefully so as not to crack, crush or drop my incredibly heavy and delicate load.

So what did I do instead of working? I spent the entire time reading, drinking and smoking on their backyard balcony, what a fantastic way to spend a weekend!

This got me thinking, for starters I should relax like this more often. Despite not sleeping very well last night, I feel much better today than I did on Friday. Secondly, I need a way to work without lugging all of my gear around all the time. It would be liberating to be able to fit all my necessary items a small backpack, perhaps my camera, notepad, phone, iPod and a change of clothes.

Of course this isn’t going to be easy, I am a web developer after all and I couldn’t live full time without at the very least textmate, transmit, photoshop along with all the project files that go with it, but I should be able to get most of my documents, calendar and email online so that I don’t need a computer on short trips.

So in the early hours of this morning, when my body and mind refused to cooperate and actually sleep like a normal person, I set to change a few things with the way I do business.

The first step is to change my email works. At the moment I have an incredible complicated setup involving far too many addresses and far too many mail companies. It’s based around a spamarrest account, a gmail account and my web hosts email provider. It was initially set up so I could control the incredible amount of spam I receive and so that I had finer control over what emails went to my phone.

This is a little unnecessary now, so I hooked up a google apps account and added a few domain aliases. Already three of my email accounts are not only combined, but also available online at any time. I’ll sort the harder to change ones out soon.

Next up is my calendar. Like some of my mail, I’ve got my calendar on my iPod, but this of course requires there to be an active wireless connection that I have access too. This is a lot less likely than a random computer with an Internet connection.

Google apps to the rescue again! The calendar is fantastic and providing you’re on a decent internet connection then it’s just as responsive as iCal on the desktop! Importing my iCal calendar wasn’t too difficult, the only problem I had was subscribing to the calendar – I have to make it completely public if I want to sync it with iCal!

This isn’t what I wanted, so I’m going to deal with using it as a web based only thing, there’s really no need to sync it with my iPod or iCal when I can view it online using my blackberry, iPod or any random computer.

Finally, Google docs. I’ve moved a few of my documents online so that I can edit them anywhere in the world but more conveniently, view them on my iPod or blackberry! I’ve wanted to do this a few times now, I’d even installed VNC on my computer just incase. Google docs removes the need for this and although it’s not perfect, it’s as feature full and robust as I’ll need for my rudimentary document editing needs.

So there we go, it’s not much but it’s a start. I’m going to continue tweaking the way I do business so I am less and less reliant on any particular computer and more and more mobile. Although this all came out of a short weekend away, I do plan on spending less and less time on the computer and more and more time out and about. We’ve also got plans for some extended time away, especially over Christmas and the new year.

Now, back to getting all my email across to my new Google apps account. I’m not really looking forward to this, but it will hopefully be worth the effort.