One of the best things about writing full-time is having the opportunity to spend much more time coming up with good ideas to write about for your entertainment. I have been wanting to start a regular feature on jkOnTheRun where I can ramble on about the happenings here at Mobile Tech Manor. This is the first installment of that new feature which is now a reality thanks to GigaOM. New readers should understand that I have referred to my home office as Mobile Tech Manor (MTM) for a long time. MTM is a bustling place where I do most of my writing for jkOnTheRun and it seems there are always cool things going on. This feature is my vehicle for sharing those happenings with you and I hope you enjoy this going forward. You will be likely to find just about anything here in This Week at Mobile Tech Manor as I intend to touch on everything that crosses my office portal. You will hear about new gadgets that cross my path, new programs I try and why and even hear me grouse about problems keeping the office running smoothly. I’ll give you advance warning about new gadgets that I will be playing with in the future. Kind of an open book type of feature and I think you’ll like it. You won’t find lots of photos of gadgets because this feature is not intended to be reviews of equipment, rather it is a window into my world.
This first installment will cover more than a week of happenings here at Mobile Tech Manor simply because so much has been going on that I want to share. No question the big news at MTM is the merger with the GigaOM network and my subsequent joining those great folks to pursue this writing gig full-time. This is a huge life change for me as I have been doing my "real" job for decades and to hang that up overnight and become a professional writer is gigantic. This has been a long time goal of mine and I still have to pinch myself to make sure I’m not just dreaming. I have longed to write for so many years and now that I can do just that is quite heady and I am a very content person. Thanks to Om Malik and all the great folks at GigaOM for making this dream a reality.
Big changes at Mobile Tech Manor
I have made the big life change and the past week or so has seen me begin the process of settling down into my new routine. Working at home is not that new for me as I often worked at home in my past life but now that I do it all the time it feels different. My past experience of home working has driven home to me how important it is to treat this as I would a real job, and that means adopting a routine early on. I get up early just like I always have and I start work right away so that my outlook remains professional and dedicated. The ten second commute to my office is oh, so sweet, I must say. Working at home in front of a computer all day is something that many people do these days and I believe it is important to establish real break times to give your brain a rest. There is no water cooler talk but I find if I get up and away from the computer for 10 – 15 minutes several times during the day that my focus remains tighter when I return. I also try and break for lunch at a consistent time each day so there is a semblance of structure to the work day. This makes sure that when I quit for the day I am truly quit and get on with the rest of my life. This is working well for me and I am so content doing this full time.
Mobile Tech Manor has been hopping even more than it used to before doing this full time and I foresee this will keep up for a long time to come. One of the first tasks I confronted was how my tech needs may have changed with the work change. I still work at coffee shops and out and about often but my work flow has definitely made a big change. I no longer have back to back meetings all over town as in my previous life and that has changed my needs quite a bit. One of the most important pieces of my tool kit has always been a Tablet PC that I used for taking dozens of pages of meeting notes each day. These notes have been my lifeblood and the Tablet PC has provided the perfect platform for capturing my ink notes digitally and keeping them organized and searchable. This tool has made the biggest impact in my professional life bar none and I would be lost without it.
Gear changes in order?
That was in my old life. I don’t attend meetings anymore, other than a lot of conference calls both audio and video. These virtual meetings are almost always conducted in front of one computer or another so I am able to take notes via the keyboard instead of inking them. While I may find a routine that lets me ink notes during these meetings I am finding that it’s not a necessity as it used to be so my tech needs have changed. What I need now is a capable laptop in front of me to get my business done and that opens up a lot more possibilities for me given the current mini-notebook space. I have used five different notebooks for this work as I wanted to get a feel for what works best and my findings are that they all work fine. I am still trying to decide if the MacBook Pro is the main platform or if Windows will be. I am jumping back and forth and they are both working just fine given the type of work I am doing. I have Firefox on both platforms so moving back and forth is pretty easy. The biggest difference has come in the area of email and I’m still trying to work kinks out of that.
GigaOM is a network that covers a lot of cloud computing so it’s no surprise the corporate email is powered by GMail. This makes sense and having all of the corporate email and calendaring in the cloud is a good choice for GigaOM. I am having a hard time personally getting this worked into my exisitng email infrastructure and it will take some work figuring out what will work best in the long run. I still have my Exchange Server (hosted) and that email although it’s not used as much now that I’ve stopped consulting. The server will need to stay in place for some time though as I may need access to my archived email. It’s also the best way to keep my email and PIM information in sync among all the laptops and phones that I use.
I am able to use Entourage on the Mac and Outlook on Windows to access the GigaOM GMail server which is my preferred method. I am still not comfortable working solely in the cloud with email so I rarely access GMail through a web browser. I like using a client to work with my email and I am trying to make this work in conjunction with the Exchange Server and GMail. I am having trouble using GMail with a client though, I’m seeing delays before changes made in the client are reflected in the GMail online server and vice versa. Sometimes it seems that no matter what I do on the client the changes take forever to show up on the server, and that is reflected on the iPhone. Adding the iPhone to the mix further complicates it as I am using it for email all the time now and it is a bit disturbing to think that the main server is not up to the minute accurate. I’ll have to play with this a lot more to figure out what I end up doing to make this work better.
Gadgets that have arrived at Mobile Tech Manor
There are always new gadgets coming and going in and out of MTM and there have been some cool ones recently. The big gadget that has appeared is the iPhone 3G of course. I am using it almost exclusively now with the exception of evaluations I am doing and the iPhone is fitting my needs quite well. It is not the best phone for calls which sounds bad but frankly it works well enough for me. It is a wonderful web appliance though and that’s where it shines. I am doing a lot of my email and RSS feed checking on the iPhone these days because it’s just darn easy. I also bought a dock for the iPhone which has made keeping the phone charged at my desk much easier, Apple really should include the dock with the phone. I also picked up the Bang & Olufsen Earset 3 headphones which sound really great and integrate well with the phone functions. It’s pricey but well worth it for me as I listen to lots of music on the iPhone.
I have received an evaluation Zinc II phone from MWg which is a Windows Mobile 6.1 phone with a touchscreen. The phone is very well constructed and has a slide-out QWERTY keyboard that works well for email and texting. I am not impressed that the Zinc II only has 64 MB of user memory and that MWg went with a QVGA screen. These days touchscreen WM phones need at least twice that amount of memory and VGA screens are the way to go. The Zinc II is a typical WM phone, it works well and does email nicely. It is a good size for using in the hand but it’s a tad heavier than I would like.
The folks at Verizon just sent over two feature phones for me to take a look at, the LG Dare and LG Decoy. The Decoy has the most innovative feature, a Bluetooth headset that snaps into the phone for charging. It is the smallest and thinnest headset I’ve ever used and it is a brilliant implementation the way LG has produced it. The LG Dare is a touchscreen only phone (no keypad or keyboard) like the iPhone that so far is working very well. The HTML browser works nicely and the integrated EVDO for VCast is pretty productive. The Dare auto-rotates the screen like the iPhone and the way they have it providing a phone keypad in portrait mode and an on-screen QWERTY keyboard in landscape is nicely done. Kevin and I had a Geek Session showing them off right after they arrived.
I am excited about a couple of gadgets that will be showing up soon. The Richard Solo Backup Battery for the iPhone is on its way and will revolutionize how I keep the iPhone battery charged and raring to go. The USBVGA Dock is coming too and will make it possible to share an external monitor with any notebook with a USB port. That would be all of them so I can’t wait to see how well it works. It will function as a full docking station with VGA monitor that is easy to connect and disconnect so we’ll see how well it serves that purpose.
Software hitting MTM
I am always trying new software and it’s a great thing when a new program is discovered that makes my life easier and this week has seen a few of those drop in. The iPhone App Store has made it one click easy to try programs on the iPhone and a couple of them have hit my "must-have" radar. First and foremost is eReader for the iPhone, I’ve written a lot about eReader because it’s already become a big part of my life. I also recently tried Carbonfin Outliner on the iPhone which I am getting a lot of good use out of. It is a simple to use outlining tool that I am using for bigger projects, I used it for this article in fact. It is easy to use and yet in addition to an outlining function it can serve as a project manager and task manager too. Highly recommended if you work like I do. Kevin and I have recently tried out new video conference program ooVoo and we’re liking it so far. It will allow up to nine people to participate in a video conference and the free version is fully function with some minor limitations. You can upgrade to the Super version to remove those limitations and conference to your heart’s content. So far we’re finding the video and audio quality is better than Skype’s and the ability to record the video calls is very useful. We used ooVoo to record the Geek Session I mentioned above. I’ve also wasted far too much time playing Enigmo on the iPhone, a totally cool puzzle game that gets incredibly hard very fast.
Until next week
That wraps up the first installment of this new feature and I hope you find something of value in it. I expect future installments will be more focused on the actual gear and processes that I use in Mobile Tech Manor. I’ll probably start covering just about anything too, as I want this to be your window into my world. I hope you like it.
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