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TELECOMMUTING FROM THE BEACH

A new definition for office casual...
By Greg Forest


My Office in Negril

I must be a contender for a Darwin Award (www.darwinawards.com). That’s the award for folks of less-than-stellar intelligence that do pretty dumb things such as drying your pet in a microwave. In a time when global warming is becoming the new global boogey-man; when the earth temperature and sea levels are predicted to rise, where do I look to plan my "telecommuting" future? A place at sea level and in the tropics - global warming ground zero. If Al Gore is right I am doomed to being an evolutionary dead end.

I returned a couple weeks ago to Negril, Jamaica to try and do a few days work (another check in my Darwin column as Jamaica is a place much more suited for play). The experiment was to find out what percentage of my day-to-day work could be done from a beach overlooking a tourqouise sea. How much of my job requires a "hands on" approach? The results were mixed and although technology did a lot of the heavy lifting, someone has to feed the duplcator and laser printer back home.

 

Most of my day is spent in front of a computer and much of that time in a word processor writing things like this article. The balance of my time is spent editing video or audio, building web sites and duplicating CDs and DVDs which is an impossible task remotely so I won’t touch on it.

THE TECH

There are primarily five major tools necessary to even think about telecommuting and we will look at each one separately. They are a laptop/notebook computer, a fast and reliable Internet connection, Skype or similar application, LogMeIn or similar, and whatever your specialty toy of the day may be; mine being primarily off-computer storage.

The Notebook and Connection - I am using a 5-year old Sony Vaio as my old trusty workhorse. It is not a screamer by any benchmark, a Pentium P4 1.7 MhZ with 512MG of RAM. It has a wimply 20GIG hard disk and I had to put in cards to get wireless 801G network and USB 2.0 functionalilty. On the other hand this computer has been rock solid since the day it came out of the box and I am reluctant to upgrade. On the work productivity side it doesn’t have enough muscle to run Call Of Duty 4, but can handle all office work and even a bit of multimedia. If I throw an external 150GB hard drive into my walk-on luggage, I can handle a pretty good pile of data.

Obviously you can’t telecommute without the "tele" part of the equation. A dialup connection just won’t cut it unless your job is just about all text driven. A text-only email will get across the network in no time at all but larger files such as images, sounds and other multimedia just aren’t feasable with a dialup connection. I found that for me the bare minimum is a DSL connection.

 

 

 

The Internet Phone - If you have been following the column you may have noticed my frequent Skype tests and the application has stood up under the rigors of tropical paradise testing. Using my Skype Pro option, when folks back in the U.S. dial my 830 area code business number, the phone rings in Jamaica. If there is backgound noise, I tell the client I am mixing a reggae project. Thank God they can’t smell the background. Voice mail, three-way calling, caller ID and all the digital features worked perfectly. Transparent contact with customers is high on the priority list and Skype makes it easy. If the customer is a Skype member the return call is free anywhere in the world and most of the rest of the planet is 2 cents a minute - a sum not likely to break even my meager bank.

The Remote Desktop - Here’s an Internet link to make note of: www.logmein.com. Although the name looks like a Chinese lunch special prepared with a chainsaw, it is a powerful free application that allows you to take over the desktop of a remote computer from anywhere with an Internet connection. It is similar to other products like gotomypc.com and PC Anywhere with the glaring difference being that the entry level at LogMeIn is free and you can get a great deal done with just a free account.

To get the ball rolling you log on to logmein.com and create a secure and encrypted account. Then you download their client widget to each computer you want remote access to and point to it from your logmein account. When you leave the area, leave computers with logmein running and you will have access to these computers from any Internet connection - free and with no other software than a browser.

The downside of the free account is that you can’t print or pass files directly to or from client to host. As an example I needed a short one-page invoice created for a quickie client I picked up on the beach. The template was at home so using logmein I took over the home PC and emailed myself the contract - downloading it from the mail website to the remote computer in Jamaica where I printed it. If I was a registered user, I would have seen the local area printers and could print directly from the computer in Kerrville to the printer in Jamaica or vice versa. Emailing large files to yourself is not a very elegant solution but the price warrants it for me. Note that all remote control applications only work reliably when both ends of the connection have wideband. The slowest computer in the loop slows all others to its speed.

Cruzing & Portable Storage - If I was going to be doing any real multimedia work I would take a USB 2.0 external drive of some size with me. Although not that fast, the primary speedbump in audio or video production and editing on a notebook computer is drive space, not processing power. For some reason when I see a video or computer graphic file is going to take two hours to render, I cry less on the beach than at home.

I have to mention my newest telecommuting toy - the SanDisk Cruzer Micro Drive. I have had a number of memory sticks and they are sure handy for carrying around files on a medium that can store more files and data than a DVD with a great deal more convenience. The Cruzer takes this concept a bit further utilizing a new Java programming technology known as U3 which pretty much blew my mind. I saw a deal on an 8GB Cruzer on buy.com for $79 and decided it was a good deal for that much memory. When I plugged the unit into my computer I found that it contained a great deal more than storage space. The Cruzer contains a number of Java applications and you can download a pretty good collection of free open source applications from the web. What is mind boggling is that you can plug the Cruzer into any computer with USB, Mac Or PC and the applications will run directly from the Cruzer drive - bypassing the host computer completely except for processing. This means I can plug my Cruzer into a Mac and still view my spreadsheets, email in much the same way as my Windows desktop computer at home.

After about an hour of downloading and installing, I had a complete Microsoft Office compatible suite of applications, my favorite Firefox browser (with imported bookmarks), a time management application, a full copy of the Reaper audio editing software, all the .WAV files for a complete 45-minute 8-track live recording and a couple web videos I had been saving to watch. In short I had 90% of what a producer needs on the road on a stick the size of a Bic lighter that hangs from my lanyard. And even sweeter - I had only used half the drive space. I have whipped out my Cruzer at a couple of concerts and recording sessions to watch the response of the engineers when I boot up a multi-track recording session on their computer using software they don’t have. The Sandisk Cruzer could quite possibly be the only piece of computer equipment you need to travel with if you know you will have access to a computer at your travel destination. If I were doing a writing project only, this would be my preferred solution - computer on a lanyard. On the other hand one of the reasons I picked Jamaica was because of the music. I love reggae, ska and calypso music and was hoping at some point in time to collaborate with Jamaican musicians on some recordings. Recording in remote locations has become easier now that the price of portable gear has dropped considerably.

Studio in a Box - I have tried two different USB-based portable recording systems; the Lexicon Omega and the Digidesign Mbox 2 Mini. Both of these boxes work great - the Lexicon coming with a copy of Cubase 4 and the Mbox with ProTools SE 7.0. I wound up using the Mbox for my travel I/O box running my new found friend Reaper as the software. Although limited to only two input tracks at a time, I left home with drum, bass, scratch vocals and guitar on my Cruzer disc and my Mbox as an input for any unwary Jamaican musicians I could wrangle into my hotel room for a few minutes. The Mbox also has phantom power and decent input preamps so you can take along a good condensor mic if you have room in your carry-on.

Work Ethic and the Song of the Sirens - All these projects being completed using technology sound great in concept. Telecommuting is not just conceptual anymore - each year a larger portion of the U.S. workforce is working from home or other remote locations and most studies show an increase in productivity in this segment of the worker population.

The reality for me is a bit different. Jamming with Jamaican musicians might not be drudgery but bottom line is: work is work. Getting things done requires discipline regardless of where you are working. Working on my 2008 taxes in Excel sounds like something that needs to get done but beconning just outside my Negril window is the Siren Song of Jamaica seducing me into crashing upon the reefs of productivity. I mean who wants to work on spreadsheets when you could be snorkeling, catching rays, oggling topless tourists and drinking Red Stripe? Telecommuting from a beach is quite possible but is it desireable? I need to get my head checked for even considering it. Looking at the web site of the hotel I stay at, they hit the nail on the head when replying to the question of why they don’t have wireless Internet across the whole property instead of just around the office/reception area, "Why would we want to do that Mon? And ruin a perfectly good vacation?"