Traveling light, with little tech
Posted March 19, 2010
I’m out of town again. It seems like I’ve been traveling a lot lately… at least in the past two years. As always the case, I have a lot of work to do when I go, so it requires me to take a lot of tech with me. Because I am traveling and I may potentially see a lot of things, I have to take my camera with me. So, between the Macbook Pro, the DSLR, the phone, the iPod, and all the accessories and chargers that go with it, traveling is no small matter.
This little short trip takes me to Philadelphia again. Why Philly again? That will be left for a future post. This time, I made some decisions. I left the DSLR at home and just brought the little point and shoot. The big question is, what about the computer? I do a have a project that I have been madly coding away to finish. I made an interesting decision to bring the netbook and not the Macbook Pro. One of the reasons why I decided to do this is because I knew I would be walking around a lot and a part of me thought about the potential of something happening while walking around a big city. As far as that potential is concerned, for the record, I haven’t threatened or paranoid at all this trip, but I must say, walking around with a netbook is awesome as far as the weight is concerned.
Now for a little technical (or as some would like to say, geeky or nerdy stuff). Would the netbook be powerful enough? So far, it’s been alright. At times, it’s a little maddening to wait for things to load. On top of that, it’s Windows! As far as Photoshop is concerned, I’ve been using the ever popular GIMP. The night before I left, I had to make sure that I synced up my work from my Macbook Pro to this little netbook using SVN. The big difference is of course the difference in screen size. My workspace has been reduced from a 15.4″ screen to a 10.1″ screen (although I am borrowing my friend Matt’s monitor).
With all that aside, it’s been an interesting experiment to live a little bit lighter on the tech side, although if you consider what I still travel with, I still have quite a bit of tech with me. Maybe the iPad isn’t such a bad thing at all. 🙂 I know I wrote that long blog post concerning the iPad: iWant vs iNeed, but I’m starting to come around to seeing the potential usefulness. In other words, I’m making more excuses for myself to get one (which I still feel that I will hold out as long as possible on getting one).
One thing is for sure… I’ve definitely been traveling a lot lighter. I’m definitely taking less pictures as well. You gain some, you lose some.
Until the next destination.