Travelling with little more than a laptop and a modem
Original article date: February 2002
Life as a road warrior, travelling from hotel to hotel with little more than a laptop and a modem, is supposed to have got easier from a connectivity-with-home-base point of view. But for the most part, it seems, it’s still not really sorted.
If you’re part of a huge company with Lotus Notes and a freephone number to dial, then you don’t really have a problem. But for most of us who travel it’s a bit different.
Typically, when I arrive at a US hotel I’m faced with a choice. If my own ISP has a dialup number in this town, then I pay 50-75c once for a local call and do the rest for free. If my ISP doesn’t have a dialup number here, I could always pay the going rate for a ‘long distance’ call to another part of the US which is supported by my ISP, but that could be 80c or more per minute. And believe me this stacks up, and hotel phone bills of hundreds of dollars are easily possible over a week.
I could subscribe to another ISP – one that offers a freephone number from anywhere but bills me by the minute (7c per minute is typical). But that is little different from getting a calling card and using it to dial out to an area where my original ISP has a dialup number.
If I was feeling extraordinarily patient, I could mop up the spare evening minutes in my cellphone monthly plan by connecting at 14.4 kbaud via GSM.
With cost and speed, then, being the problems, the enemy of the road warrior is file size. The super-fast lines going into companies and homes mean that most don’t even need to consider file size, but for the road warrior, it’s a major hassle. Yesterday, I had to send a guy a 4MB file. When he replied to say “thanks” from his high speed connected office, the original 4MB file was attached to his email! Consider that the average remote user connection speed is 2Kbytes/second: a 1MB file takes ten minutes to download.
There are a lot of simple things that folk can do to shrink the size of files they send to their mobile staff. An easy thing to do is to zip files up. Secondly, think about company logos in documents. Recently I received an email where the inserted graphic of the company logo was adding 200KB to the document size. I snipped it out, resaved it as a JPEG and reinserted it, and saved 190KB. And I can’t see the difference between the old and the new.
But does your logo need to be a graphic file at all? I used to work for a company that implemented its logo as a special in-house font. By writing ‘ABC’ at the top of a document in this special font, you got the full pictorial logo, and yet the document only grew by a handful of characters.
A more radical measure would be to consider not actually sending the document. Why not, instead, get it onto an ftp server or a web-based drive, and then just send people a reference to where the file is. They may not even need to download it, but at least if they do they can do it on their terms.
Looking for help
For the road warrior, not many email packages offer much help in combating file size. It is not that easy in most packages to view headers of emails before accepting the message, unless you’ve set up a cunning rule in advance. But you could find an ISP that allows you to check your POP3 mailbox on the web – you’ll be able to see exactly what messages are awaiting you, read the important ones, and bin anything you don’t want to download.
A few more tips for long distance laptop travellers. At some point, you will want to use your laptop in an airport – even if it’s just to recharge between legs of a flight. First, to save battery life, unplug unwanted peripherals, turn down screen brightness, and use standby mode when you pause rather than going through a long reboot. Second, carry an extra long mains lead and a three-way adapter. Then, when you find that the only electric socket there in the whole airport is nowhere near a seat and two other laptop users have beaten you to it, you’ll still come out on top.
And a final tip for the road warrior? See the sights while you’re travelling. You’ll regret it one day if you don’t.
February 2002