It is not easy being a digital nomad

I’m out of a comfort zone I didn’t even realise mattered to me. I thought I already was location independent really. I work on a laptop and I have for the last 6 years. It travelled up and down the country twice a month all the way through the degree and I worked at both houses, no desk at either, and on the trains.
Now I live in one place but I don’t have a desk so I just perch where ever I can in the house. Occasionally I even stick the laptop in it’s bag and take it somewhere else to work. So I didn’t feel particularly tied to one place, till now.

This latest trip is a bit of a try out for more extended absences from base. Instead of taking ordinary holidays this year the idea is to take extended trips and work for parts of each day. And I’ve been surprised to discover it’s really not that easy.

Mobile Broadband

This is great when it works well but seems strangely intermittent. It may even be affected by the weather! I can get 2G connection some of the time but it’s too slow to do much of what I need to do. The 3G connection is faster but rare.

Location

This leads directly to the issue of where in the house I can work. Some rooms are better than others for comfort or convenience and some for the connection. Everything is compromise. There isn’t an ideal solution.

Work

• Email is fine, reliable but a bit slow to open.
• Multi-tasking with lots of tabs open is not possible
• Blogging’s hard, but not impossible thanks to MarsEdit. I can create drafts and upload them when I’ve got a good connection.
• I can’t add photos very easily, upload takes too long & connection gets lost. Hence no photo in this post, gave up on the 3rd attempt.
• Quickly checking facts and adding links is a bit of a challenge.
• Research for new posts is out of the question

Time Travel

It’s really a bit like time travelling back to a world before broadband and always on internet.

It’s not like coming away and knowing you’ll have no connection. Then there’s not temptation to do any of the ‘normal’ routine of things and the online world is soon forgotten.

The Up Side

On the plus side, like having no internet, it makes it easier to concentrate on a single task, like a piece of writing. On the first day I finally got round to writing a short e-booklet about Classroom Displays I’ve had rattling round my head for months.

Not to mention the walks by the creek, little egrets, the wind in my hair, charming Cornish pubs, watching the surf, green everywhere, birdsong, rabbits in the hedgerows and the pot, and dark nights with no light pollution, no traffic noise, no tubes, no hoards of people.

All of which I would illustrate with a photo, if only I could upload one!

Better preparation

Trouble is that I ran out of well researched things to work on. That’s got to be the major learning from this.

I can work on stuff in draft and upload in a batch, things can get done but I need to do far more preparation and research in advance.

This is a challenge as it’s not my usual way of working. I expect there will be lots of creaking, groaning and moaning till I get used to it.

Why bother?

I’m a bit of a nomad at heart. I’ve never lived in one place for a huge amount of time and I don’t really feel the need to put down roots. I like not having much stuff and being able to just pick up and go. I always wanted to own a yurt (ger) from being very young. (I blame a project I did about Mongolia when I was in junior school !). I love to travel, love the feel of being in different places.

When we work out how make it work we’ll be able to combine work with longer trips and travel more. It’s bumpy just now but it’s got to be worth exploring.

Now to see if I can post this, wish me luck!

Update  – comments now open

Wordpress for Beginners

Wordpress for Beginners – why should you use it?

Wordpress is ideal for anyone starting out on line. It is so easy to use. The interface is as simple as Word or writing an email. I’m not really very techie but I edit Wordpress sites, like this one (!), all the time.
Have a look at this screenshot of the blog interface to get the idea.

See how easy it is?

• No complicated code to learn, (no need to use html)
• Easy to change the look and feel just by changing the theme with a single click
• You can easily add images and video

Wordpress for Beginners – where to start?

There are 2 kinds of Wordpress sites. The ones you pay to host on an independent web host (I tend to use Bluehost) and the kind that are hosted for free on Wordpress.com.

Rather than going straight into setting up an independent Wordpress site you could try setting up a free one on Wordpress.com (http://wordpress.com/).
Try to register http:/replacewithyourkeyphrase.wordpress.com/. Note – your key phrase is likely to be something people would naturally type into a search engine like google when looking for a site on your subject.

You can use the Wordpress.com site to play around with the Wordpress software to see if you like it and then if you do decide to go the independent hosting route link to your main site from it. This will then also give you a valuable link back.

Wordpress for more advanced users

Although it is often used for blogs Wordpress can be used as a content management system (CMS) giving you a complete, complex, professional standard site that you can easily edit and update. Not only that, the search engines like Wordpress giving you a SEO (search engine optimisation) advantage straight away.

Confidence, Poetry and Life: Interview with Sage Cohen, Author of Living the Life Poetic | Confident Writing.

Joanna’s got an interesting post about poetry over on Confident Writing. I like the suggested method for unlocking your creative juices and finding your poem.

Put your pen to paper and keep it moving for ten minutes without stopping. Then put your notebook away without looking at it.

The next day, pick up your freewriting and underline every word or phrase that looks interesting or surprising to you. Choose one, and write that down as your first line. Maybe you want to also include a few other phrases from your freewriting too…

It reminds me a lot of the ‘reflective splurge’ method of reflection that I used such a lot during the degree. (Gillie Botton)I’d almost forgotten that this same way of working could be used to tap into a more artistic form creative writing. (Another unexpected cost of the degree).

I used to really enjoy writing poetry, especially the discipline  of fitting words to my chosen form. I was quite keen on sonnets and haiku. I’m going to have a play with this idea now. I might post the results of my experiment tomorrow.

I spent my birthday in a charming and unspoilt part of Essex, the Dengie Peninsula, in the tiny village of North Fambridge.
We walked, relaxed and marvelled at the myriad of wildlife in this very special area. In just a 24 hour break we saw avocets nesting, little egrets, male bullfinch, buzzard, sparrow hawk, shelducks, oyster catchers, mallards, mute swans meadow pipit, lapwings (doing their tumbling mating display), Canada geese, numerous meadow larks (also doing their mating display). More brown hares than I could keep count of, including close sightings whilst in the hide and 5 hares sporting in a field near by. Oh and a common lizard on the sea wall path! Frogs in the ditch behind the room, numerous enough to wake me up through the night! Lots of blue tits, great tits, robins and blackbirds.

The Dengie Hundreds

The Dengie Hundreds in 1610

Thanks to a Flickr group for the area I knew that it forms part of the Dengie Hundreds. I didn’t know much about what this meant and I became quite intrigued.

After a little research I found out that a Hundred was a region of administration in some parts of England. They were smaller than counties and bigger than manors. According to wikipedia:

a hundred had enough land to sustain approximately one hundred households headed by a hundred-man or hundred eolder. He was responsible for administration, justice, and supplying military troops, as well as leading its forces. The office was not hereditary, but by the 10th century the office was selected from among a few outstanding families. In England, specifically, it has been suggested that ‘hundred’ referred to the amount of land sufficient to sustain one hundred families, defined as the land covered by one hundred “hides”.

Andy was interested as it turns out they originally held sort of parliaments that met under a tree, just like the Basque ones and one we saw in Asturias. (See Andy’s Gernkia blog post for more details)

In fact the area we live in was once part of such a Hundred known as Beacontree Hundred, what was once the Beacon tree now being somewhere under Barking bus station!

Other Hundreds

So we began to wonder how universal the idea of the Hundreds and their regional parliaments was. My hunch was they were probably Anglo Saxon in origin as at first I thought I’d never heard of this idea in Scotland. Then I remembered a place in Dumfriesshire called The Isles of Tinwald and that the Manx parliament is called the Tinwald so that might suggest something similar.
A bit of digging later I’ve discovered that the Hundreds were indeed Saxon in origin and were established in the Saxon controlled areas of what became England from around 600 AD and were later imposed in some parts of Wales. They met under a tree partly because trees  were  hugely symbolic to the forest dwelling Saxons and had religious connotations even after the introduction of Christianity.

In the North Lands…

(Excuse the Noggin the Nog reference!)
Further north in the Danelaw similar demarcations were introduced. These were called wapentake and tended to meet at a fork in a major river rather than under a tree. Later some of these, though not all, became Hundreds such as the Salford Hundred.

Some parts of the south of Scotland were under Norse rule in the early Middle Ages, hence the Tinwald and place names such as Torthorwald, and quite possible Applegarth from which some of my ancestors hail.

And the Point?

Learning about something just for the joy of discovery and knowing not because there’s any ‘need’ but just for pleasure. Work based learning might be important and valid but it isn’t everything. Sometimes learning is just an end in itself.

I don’t watch much TV but I just happened to see Susan Boyle’s performance on Britain’s Got Talent last week. At the time I thought she had a great voice and found it quite amusing that the panel of critics were so shocked. But I didn’t find it extraordinary that some one who looked like a very ordinary middle-aged woman might have a stunning voice.

There’s a couple of good reasons why my reaction might not be the same as that of the panel (or a couple of million youtube watchers).

First up I live with a very talented but certainly not famous singer songwriter (Andy Roberts) so live music is a regular part of my day.

Second I have attended folk clubs (like Havering Folk Club) all my adult life and occasionally seen the most unlikely people burst into song with voices that are as good as anything on the professional stage.

Finally I grew up in a Scots family where people of all ages, sizes and shapes sang, were expected to get up on any occasion and sing well, and there was nothing surprising about that. (I was the surprise, as I alone in my family don’t have a good singing voice. I learned poems instead!)

I think that it’s great that Susan Boyle is having her moment but something she is supposed to have said troubled me. She wants to be like Elaine Paige, but no one ever gave her the chance. Well, I’m not sure anyone ever ‘gave’ Elaine Paige the chance either. I think she had to take all the chances she could, work very hard, learn to sing in a way that protects her voice so she can sing 8 shows a week, learn to act, and create the Elaine Paige we know today. For every Elaine there are hundreds of talented singers, with wonderful voices who did all that, who took their chances and who didn’t make it. There are also thousands who have amazing voices and aren’t famous at all. They can’t all be West End stars and many of them wouldn’t want to be.

I suppose my point is that it’s not really about having talent. It’s about what you choose do do with it. Susan Boyle made a set of choices which led her to one life, she may now have changed direction (or not) but it’s not her singing talent which will decide that. It is everything else that goes with that choice.