Experimenting with living life as a digital nomad

Call me old fashioned but I've always been a desktop PC kind of person. My main workstation at home is a custom built system with a decent CPU, ample of hard drive space and a pair of monitors (one of which being a "retina" style right resolution monitor). I've always enjoyed using my PC at home but I'm generally far less productive when working from home. There simply are too many distractions at home-- the bed being near by beckoning me to take naps, the fridge stocked with good food to snack on and the comfortable chair that I sit on at home which entices me to relax (which include watching videos and listening to music instead of doing something productive). Also humans are creatures of habits and I've simply lost the habit to do any sort of productive work at home. Home is where relaxing happens.

For the last 3 years, I haven't really used a laptop since I never seemed to have good experiences working with them. They ended breaking down after 2-3 years of use and being caught without a PC for weeks while the laptop is in repair (not to mention the high price of repairing them) had led me to start using desktops instead which overall have far better bang for buck in terms of performance and are cheap to repair.

I've had the pleasure of using a 2008 MacBook Pro for the last 3 years. The only problem with this laptop is that the battery only lasts for 2 hours, leaving me with a brick of aluminium after the spirit leaves the battery. Interestingly enough, I went to a programming conferree last year and was the only person that switched to using pen and paper to take notes after the juice on my laptop had died. How times have changed... and how I've not kept up with laptop technology.

After much waiting (mainly because of the production delays for the new low power CPUs that Intel was building and that Apple had intended on to use in their refreshed brands of MacBooks and MacBook pros) I've finally shelled out some significant cash to buy myself a new MacBook pro.

With spring conducive to hopping on the bicycle to head out to new places. I've started exploring the city again with the laptop stashed in my backpack, hitting small cafes along the way. The change to working in new environments and then changing them whenever I feel like it is great. Done with the coffee somewhere and need to stretch my legs? Just hop on the bike and head to the park. Have an idea or something that I want to work on? Find another cafe and buy a coffee and work away.

This is exceptionally wonderful when the weather is good. There are some challenges however: 

• Not all Wifi connections are good
• I've run into subnet collisions when using my VPN (meaning I can't connect to some resources at home)

Other then that, I've found a few nice cafes to work out, check mail, communicate with people and generally enjoy the outside. Getting out of the house is a wonderful thing and I highly recommend it to everyone that has predominately worked at home or in a normal office. It might not work for everyone but it's something nice to try.

Later on when I figure out how to post pictures from my iPhone in to this blog then things may get more interesting in the future (well that is what Facebook is all about right?).