Travelling Workplace, Part 2

This weekend, we had another interesting traveling workplace experience. We were going camping at Topaz Lake in Nevada, so we decided to drive up on Thursday evening. Usually traffic is bad leaving the Bay Area that we thought it would take us several hours altogether to make it there, but we just thought that we would stop when we were tired of driving and spend the night in the motor home.

Instead, traffic was so light that we wound up making it all the way to the campground in only five hours, so we thought great, we can work from the campground tomorrow. However, shortly before my 9am meeting we realized that not only did we not have Internet service, we didn't even have cell phones service! Around 8:15 we battened down the motorhome and the dogs, and started to drive back towards civilization. So much for my hope of working while overlooking a scenic campground.

While we were able to get cell service just a few miles out of the campground, we needed to find a place to stay for the day in our traveling office. It took us about half an hour to find an open parking lot. We cut it a little close; actually I started the first few minutes of my video conference using my 3G laptop card, while Dawn was still trying to find a place to park. The people on my video meeting could tell that we were still driving, but they just asked whether or not *I* was driving!

So instead of overlooking a peaceful lake while we were working on Friday, we sat in that the drug store parking lot all day long. Fortunately, there was a Starbucks! Although it didn't work out quite like I'd planned, I was still able to participate in all of my meetings and conferences. I was even able to log into and use Second Life, which really surprised me that I had that much bandwidth.

Travelling Workplace, Part 1

I saw this article on cnn.com today:
Next phase of working at home: Leaving home 

As part of the discussion on where people are working, right now at this very moment I'm sitting in the parking lot of a restaurant in Davis, working from my motorhome. I'm using a high-speed Internet card for my laptop (getting 3G); here's what speakeasy.net  said about my current connection:

• Download Speed: 1640 kbps (205 KB/sec transfer rate)
  
• Upload Speed: 967 kbps (120.9 KB/sec transfer rate)

My work phone line is forwarded to my cell phone, and I was even able to video chat with a co-worker a little while ago.

Also, speaking of "co-working," check out this place:
Cubes and Crayons

This is where I think the growth in workplaces will happen; specialized work places where people, who can actually work from anywhere, but have certain specific "life needs," like child or elder care, or even are looking for a specialized work place, like one optimized for graphics design, writing, conference calls, etc. 

Or where "your co-workers for today" are specially picked, like for dba's, proof-readers, communications specialists, etc.

Anyway, just random Friday thoughts... have a good weekend!