Going Portable – Part One: Why?

This is the first of a multi-part series on how and why I’m creating a system I’m referring to as my “Portable Office”. These will be posted on Saturdays for the next few weeks outlining software and services I’ve used to accomplish this.

Back in the fall, I lost my laptop. Not physically, mind you, but the power connector on the back burned out. When this happened, I lost easy access to all of my data, my bookmarks, and, of course, my applications and all of the setting stat go along with them. Being that my work requires me to be online, losing access to my computer, and all of my data, was a devastating blow to my efficiency, productivity and communications.

At the time, I was relying on desktop applications and settings. All of my email, appointments, contacts and bookmarks were stored locally. All of my hacks and tools such as keyboard shortcuts and text replacement applications were set up in a way that worked best for me. My music collection, as well, was all managed via iTunes and ratings and playcounts helped me form dynamic playlists which synced to my iPod. On the subject of iTunes, nearly 100 (at the time) podcasts, and a dozen or so video podcasts were managed there as well. RSS feeds from blogs and the like all came into Thunderbird.

Understandably, when I lost my laptop and the above, I was quite shaken.

Sharing Machines

In the weeks that followed, I began sharing machines with other people floating from one keyboard to another. Eventually, I did settle down on a desktop machine (which ws my fiancee’s desktop) and began to establish myself once again… Though a little less permanently as plans of re-building my desktop, or replacing my laptop were in the works.

Life, unfortunately happened, and plans fell through. To this day I’m still using her desktop as my primary machine, but the hardware I’m matters less and less over time.

During my time floating from machine to machine I began to make more use of web-based services. Doing the work that I do, I was well aware of the services that existed, including on my own server (Squirrel Mail, for example) but I hadn’t made a lot of use of them. It was during this time that I began to experiment with different start pages and settled on Netvibes, and also when I, rather unintentionally, stopped using devices that needed a specific machine to sync to. Yes, this means my iPod.

Making The Decision To Switch

As the start of this year rolled in, I began researching what it would take to run my life off of the web exclusively. The thought behind this was that I could be anywhere on any machine and access anything I needed. This plan very quickly fell through when I realized the wealth of applications I would loose access to.

I then decided to move everything I could to the web. This meant that anything I could find a reasonably decent web service to migrate to, I would. Bookmarks, photos, email, contacts, appointments all had great web services out there and I began researching them all. While doing this, I began keeping a closer eye on what I do on the computer and the applications I used. Some things, I found, I could already do online more efficiently and effectively by moving them online. Others required modification on my part, or a lot of conversion. Others still were not possible.

I added the option to run applications from a portable hard drive. This now gave me a much more broad set of items to research, but it meant that the things I couldn’t bring online, I could now take with me. I wanted to travel with this drive and have my ENTIRE office – everything I need to do business, and do it well – at my side at all times from any machine I landed on. It was a big dream, and a lot of work to research. But it was the ultimate portable office – and it was now my goal.

Check back next Saturday, June 23rd, to find out where I turned to for help and how I selected the services and applications I’d use.