After two weeks on the road, it’s the simple observations that bring clarity to the home office adventure. Like…

– Sponsor or no, the Verizon Mifi ‘personal hotspot’ won the day — hands down. It was a true fan favorite and winner of the HOH’09 Product of Choice. Hey, anything that keeps the hoards from beating me up for my Internet connection is worthy of praise. Teleworkers and road warriors alike will find this tool extremely useful.

-Yes, family, we WILL survive two weeks without a TV. And we did. We talked, played more Yahtzee and Racko than we ever thought possible, and watched burning embers in the fire pit. And yes, we surfed the Web. A lot. Truth be told, we watched a few DVD movies on Zack’s HP laptop. But that’s NOT TV.

– Open a bag of animal crackers, and a dog’s nose knows. “Food, food, food…”

– “Yes, Mom, Spaghetti-Ohs make a perfectly suitable breakfast.”

Belkin Clap On Surge Suppressor

– Success is in the gadgets you choose. Like the Belkin Clamp On surge suppressor that, well, clamped on to the edge of the bunk and supplied power to all our gadgets (no small feat, given the number of gadgets we employed).

– When plugs aren’t available, old-fashioned cigarette lighters will work. Just the ticket for the Scosche reCoil retractable car charger for iPod and iPhone.

– Netbooks beget adaptors and accessories. And manufacturers are responding. The Targus Netbook Accessory Kit includes a nifty USB hub, a travel mouse and a slip case for netbooks with screens up to 10.1 inches. Read More »

With the cloud, what can your netbook do?

To meteorologists and remote workers alike, The Cloud is a beautiful thing.

One makes his living off cloud formations. The other has discovered a mobility, flexibility and an untethered experience working in the cloud. These include teleworkers, telecommuters, road warriors and others released from place-based work.

For those not clear, the “cloud” — according to Wikipedia — “is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure in the cloud that supports them.” In other words, all your applications — and even your documents, if you want — are stored and hosted via a computer with an Internet connection and a Web browser.

So with a laptop or netbook, and our Mifi broadband Internet personal hotspot, I have worked – literally – from anywhere. Or as techies call it, Out There. In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve also used some apps that I’ve downloaded to my laptop. But they’re free, and more useful and utility-driven than those that come for free with Windows.

Among the applications I’ve used most have been: Read More »

The week in review: Ten days of tweets for Home Office Highway. It’s a great way to recap the trip…

1. I told the tweeps at the Disney Entrepreneur Center today about ‘florists’ going on line. Then USAToday sez, http://short.to/l5ds

2. Remember, people – Social Media is all about your consumer, listener, follower or friend. The good vibe you get in turn is just gravy

3. See? This is how you tweet via mobile – sharing ideas & observations

4. Wow! What a crowd at the Disney Entrepreneur Center! Gotta love biz owners eager to learn!

5. Folks at the Disney entrepreneur center are about to get a dose of social media for small business. Remember: it’s about them, not you. Read More »

Packing wisely makes the difference between success and frustration on the road.

To paraphrase the once-almost-ubiquitous line from a popular credit-card commercial, ‘What’s in your backpack’?’

Whether a family cruise or a two-week road trip, I make sure to pack my backpack with all the essentials needed to create a home office from the road. And with every trip, I find something new to stash in my travel case. I’m sure road warriors and teleworkers go through the same exercise.

Along side my MSI Wind netbook and Verizon Mifi personal hotspot, Below are the 10 (or so) must-pack accessories I carry with me:

– My laptops and netbooks don’t have card readers. So I carry a card reader and USB flash drive so I can import the scores of photographs I’ll shoot each day. Read More »

Finally, a 'hotspot' that's easy to use, small as a business card - and a true 'cloud'.

More on the Mifi…

It’s every home office, telework and road warrior’s lament. At least those with kids (and a wife in search of ‘net-time): How to get online, without attracting attention from the little scoundrels, who’ll then want the Internet-connected laptop for their own.

Of course, RV parks across America promise “Free Wifi.” Good luck finding a network that works…

Here’s one review of the MiFi personal hotspot. Specifically, Daniel Terdiman said of mobile hot spot, it “converts the carrier’s EV-DO signal into a Wi-Fi connection that up to five people can share. I had already used the MiFi to provide a signal for the iPod Touch at the very beginning of the trip so that, while sitting on a boarding airplane, I could download a large file from iTunes…Now, I realized that by turning the MiFi on and sticking it in my back pocket, I could become, in essence, a walking hot spot, allowing me to get online on the iPod Touch, no matter where I was. That meant that I could use the Skype app to make a phone call, run several other apps for one reason or another, and look up good places to eat using the device’s browser…”

My two cents: This device has made working remotely seamless and breezy. Read More »

Night surfing with the Verizon MiFi and the MSI U123 netbook.

Years ago, surfing in public meant first paying $15 an hour for a user ID and password hand-written on a scrap of paper so you could log on to some cyber cafe’s network.

Now, it’s as easy as hitting the MiFi, powering up the netbook — and in less than a minute, you’re up.

This year’s home office highway is shaping up as an exercise in simplified surfing. Last year, setting up a network meant powering up and wiring in a router the size of a cigar box. This year’s “access point” is a business card-sized device that enables five Internet devices — netbooks, laptops, MP3 players, an iTouch — to log on simultaneously. Read More »

Working on the turf outside the mobile home office

When I tell people that we’re embarking on a two-week workation adventure in a 25-foot recreational vehicle — “balk” is the best word to characterize their surprise.

Cramped. Constricted. Confined.

Confused.

But working from an RV traveling the American South is anything but any of those.

I guess a workation is what you make of it. With broadband wireless, netbook and laptops, and all the trappings of modern life — tucked neatly into a late-model RV, we’ll have what we need to stay connected and for me to get my job done.

Want crazy? Camping retailer REI says the sale of single-family tents were up 17% this June over last. That’s crazy? Where will you put the 23-inch TV?

Surely I jest. I grew up tent camping throughout Florida. Good times.

But still need convincing about the beauty of RV’ing, tent-camping and even the use of air-conditioned cabins? Read on in this article from USAToday on the surprising pleasures of modern RV’ing… Read More »

You can learn a lot — and be scared to death — by reading book reviews.

I was in my home office flipping through Newsweek’s 50 Books to Read Right Now looking for books to take on the road trip.

I came across No. 4 on the list: The Big Switch: Rewiring The World, From Edison to Google, by Nicholas Carr. This bestseller is touted as “the best read so far about the significance of the shift to cloud computing” by Financial Times.

Fair enough. Then The New Humanist chimed in: “Carr may take a somewhat apocalyptic view of the vast technological and social issues which a move to utility computing will raise, not least those of privacy, ownership and access, but he makes a compelling case for its desirability in a world where the network is pervasive. Whether we go gently into this world is, of course, up to us, but with the insight offered here we will at least be prepared to understand the consequences of our choices earlier in the process rather than later. ”

Truth be told, we all live in the cloud. Teleworkers who log on from home. Road warriors who access the corporate server via a customer’s conference room. Home officers who open the HP at some Starbucks to check Gmail or Google Docs. Moms on AOL. Dads checking their fantasy league stats. Bloggers blogging, tweeps tweeting, friends Facebooking.

We all live in the cloud.

Read More »