Going Nomadic - Update #1 Halfway There by Jack Krupansky As I described in my previous article, I am in the process of moving from New York to Paris as part of an attempt to live as more of an entrepreneurial nomad. My hope was to have most of the details ironed out by now, but instead I have decided to defer a lot of them. Overall I'm still on schedule to depart in early September. Much of this article describes interim arrangements that will change once I leave the country. I gave up my office on July 1st, right on schedule. I had hoped to give up my apartment at the same time, but I wasn't as lucky and will be stuck with it until August 14th. The biggest disappointment was not being able to wander around for the summer. Giving up my office was a bit traumatic. I was quite used to the pleasant work environment, the phone lines, my fax, my printer, my desktop PC, and especially my 17-inch hi-res Sony Trinitron monitor. I'm now working in my apartment on a Panasonic notebook computer with its 10.5-inch screen. Actually, I'm sitting on the floor on a pillow and the computer is on top of a cardboard box. At least my apartment has a nice air conditioner. I've even managed to switch over completely to Windows 95. Although I had been using it occasionally on my old computer, most of my development work was under Windows 3.1. I still support Windows NT, but since I use only a small subset of the full NT feature set, it's practical for me to develop my 32-bit code for NT using Windows 95. I have both the 16-bit and 32-bit versions of Microsoft Visual C++ running under Windows 95, so I can deliver both 16-bit and 32-bit versions of my products from my notebook computer. In preparation for the move from my office, a couple of months ago I ordered two remote call forwarding lines from the phone company. These lines are not assigned to any physical phone lines, but can be directed to any phone number, including long distance. I had one forwarded to my old office voice line and the other to the fax line. That enabled be to give out the new numbers knowing that those numbers would be valid even after I gave up my office. Each number costs about $20 per month plus the cost of the forwarding of each call (as if it were a local call.) The big hidden cost is that it costs over $100 to change the forward number. As I was moving out of the office I signed up with an answering service and forwarded my new voice number to the service. I pay the business center who owns my old phone lines $250 per month to keep my old voice number and forward it to my new service. That fee also allows me to pick up my mail and make use of other center services. I kept the new fax number forwarded to my old fax line and pay the business center another $50 per month to forward that line to the center's fax machine. I don't like all those extra charges, but that's the price I pay for not planning ahead and setting up the remote call forwarding lines when I first moved to New York. I'll probably continue to use the business center for a few months until I figure out where I really want to send my mail. Since I gave up my desktop machine with its printer I now print by faxing from the notebook computer to the business center's fax machine. This is fairly easy under Windows 95 since the fax is just another printer selection. The quality is fairly good and its not too inconvenient since I pick up my mail every day. I also got an alphanumeric pager through the new answering service. When a call comes in to my voice line they answer professionally and take a message. The message goes into their computer as text. Then they put the message in my voice mailbox. Then they send me a numeric page to indicate that I have voice mail. Then they send a terse alphanumeric message to my pager. It's a great way to screen out annoying sales calls while at the same time be able to respond to important calls within a couple of minutes. Frequently the purpose of the call can be satisfied by reading the alphanumeric message at my leisure rather than talking for a few minutes as I would if I was still in my office or lugging around a cell phone. I did not have a phone in my apartment, so CompuServe access and faxing were inconvenient. I would have to lug the notebook computer out to some service just to check for messages or to send a fax. The simplest arrangement was for me to take the notebook to the business center when I went to pick up my mail and rent a conference room for a few minutes to get access to a modem line. I did this once and although it worked just fine, it was a pain and I felt inconvenienced by having to pack up and lug the machine around and needing to batch up my online access and faxes for a single time of day. I also looked at the value of my time and decided that just the lost time from packing, unpacking, repacking, and unpacking the notebook again was more than the cost of getting a temporary phone line for my apartment. Plus, when I did need to make calls during the day, the extra five minutes to go down to the laundry room to use the pay phone was significant. The answering service also has fax mail boxes to store incoming faxes. I can call in from a fax machine and access them or call in on a phone and send them to another fax machine. This is an interesting idea, but I may just redirect my fax to my client and they will send me an email note for any incoming faxes. Most of my incoming faxes are junk anyway. I still haven't decided what to do with my voice line when I leave the country. The answering service is probably my best option. They can fax me messages on a daily basis. Or I might forward the line to my client and they can send me an email note for each non-junk message. I'll keep the pager for when I'm back in the States. I still expect to visit my current consulting client for a week every six to eight weeks for the foreseeable future. I'll probably have my mail forwarded to them and take care of it when I visit. I'll also be talking to them on the phone on a regular basis and they can alert me to important mail/bills. I'll try to pre-pay a lot of bills so I don't even have to worry about them coming while I'm gone. Web Server One of my few successes over the last two months is actually getting my own web server up and running. Actually, my friend in Vermont did almost all the work with me supplying the funding for the phone line. We each have our own domain names (vermontdatabase.com and basetechnology.com.) I pay $200 per month for the phone line and Internet service. My friend maintains the machine which runs the new Microsoft Internet Information Server under Windows NT. We still have some glitches to work out (e.g., when idle over 30 minutes it disconnects the phone line and then reconnects it.) We have a simple 28.8K modem connection, but for now that's just fine. We have FTP running for file access, but need to work out a few details so I can remotely upload new files, check them out and then replace the old files with the new. We're in the process of evaluating some remote access packages that will run over the Internet. Once we have this in place I will be able to quickly and easily put new evaluation versions of my software on the server for prospects to download. We also still need to get the mail server going so we can receive mail at our domain names on our server. I then want to have my mail forwarded to my CompuServe account since that will be my primary access in Europe. We may also be able to do the forwarding directly from our ISP (Internet service provider.) France I haven't bought my ticket yet and may even delay my departure till later in September. I'd like to go to ENTCON East in Boston in late September, so I need to decide whether to wait until after then or to go sooner and make my first return "commute" after a couple of weeks in France. My inclination is to go sooner and complete the transition. I am thinking of getting an apartment in Paris to cut my expenses and to deal with the computing platform issues. Since mobile computing is still very problematic, I may just get a local desktop machine and a phone line for my apartment and concentrate on working three or four days a week in my apartment and then travel around three or four days at a time without dragging around the computing gear. I am worried that getting a phone line may be an expensive or time- consuming task. A cell phone is probably the safest short-term bet since it avoids the national phone bureaucracy. I may hire a college student in France to tutor me in French and possibly provide translation if I need to interact heavily with anyone. A significant fraction of my first three months in France will be spent learning the language. Nomadic Computer I've been doing all my work on a notebook computer for the last two months. I've gotten used to it, but also decided that mobile computing has a long way to go. And that's before I've had to deal with all the problems relating to getting phone connections in foreign countries. My machine is a Panasonic CF-41 with a 75MHz Pentium, 16MB RAM, 525MB disk, internal CD-ROM drive, and 28.8K PCMCIA modem. The unit itself is about eight pounds. But add in the power adapter, extra battery, floppy, MPEG cartridge (for my client's multimedia work), other junk, and carrying case and it weighs in at fifteen pounds. That's way to much for me to lug around with all my other stuff. Half that weight would still be too much. Maybe I'd be willing to tolerate a total of five pounds, but that option is not available today. The same features as a desktop machine come at a steep premium in price. And then it turns out that the same processor speed in a notebook is nowhere near as fast as the same speed chip in a desktop. That's not surprising to anyone who understands that engineering tradeoffs are needed to meet the space, heat, and power constraints of the notebook form factor. I'm borrowing this machine from my client and I cringe at the thought of paying over five thousand dollars for a machine I won't really be happy with today let alone how obsolete it will be in six months. Short-term I hope to rent an apartment in Paris, buy a cheap desktop computer and then ship it around as I move. Or maybe just leave it behind if I stay there more than six months since it will be obsolete by then and it might be easier to buy a new machine at my new location than to ship the old one to another country. My best plan is to keep the apartment for the full year and waste none of my time worrying about computer hardware. As I was packing my office, one of my greatest pleasures was throwing out all my Microsoft manuals. Virtually all of this material is online or on the Microsoft Developer's Network CD-ROMs. So here I am doing product development with not a single hardcopy manual in sight. Backup I purchased a PCMCIA hard disk which has more than enough space (260MB) to store a complete image of all my files (about 110MB.) I leave the card with my client and they burn a CD-ROM. It's worked fairly well. I really like these hard disk cards. They're impressive and well supported under Windows 95. You can pop it in, use it, and pop it out almost as easily as a floppy without any configuration issues. And unlike a ZIP drive it fits completely inside the notebook computer. Paper Records I sorted through my dozen boxes of files and threw a lot of it away, shipped most of the rest to my client for storage, and now have only five boxes left to worry about. I'll probably just ship the rest to my client and call them if I need to access anything. Or I can just wait until my next "commute" to get any needed papers. I don't think I'll bother scanning and ROMing any my files as I suggested in my last article. European Customers I already have a dinner invitation from one of my customers, a small distributor, in Holland, near Amsterdam, just a train ride away from Paris. I am still hoping to cultivate more European customers to take advantage of my proximity. Conclusions As my adventure/project goes through yet another phase transition some of the old anxieties fade away, some become stronger, and new ones appear. But at the same time new opportunities become apparent and the excitement from nearing the goal increases. When I write next from France, I'll be facing even more unexpected challenges as well as opportunities, both business and lifestyle. Even with all the distractions of planning for this move as well as keeping up with my current consulting work, a part of my attention is focused on coming back in a year and what I will be doing then. Maybe I'll want to settle down in one place. Or maybe not. Too many things can change in a year for me to be able to plan for anything more specific than a range of possibilities. ------ Jack Krupansky runs a one person software business, Base Technology, which develops and markets the Liana object-oriented programming language and CodeScript scripting language interpreter and offers Windows software development consulting. He may be reached at 800-786-9505 (messages), jack@basetechnology.com on the Internet, or at http://www.basetechnology.com on the World Wide Web.