Sunday, August 30, 2009

News from the Mobile Front

Someone recently asked me where I lived.  This is a interesting question, since for the last year I have not really had a permanent residence.  I pretty much live out 5 suitcases and a plastic Tupperware tub.  After this gig is done in Portland I plan on dropping that to 4 suitcases and a laptop bag.

Since I live alone and travel alone I can travel pretty light.  Currently I have a extended stay hotel in Portland that I live in and rent by the month.  My current contract ends in May of 2010. At the time I will decide if I am staying in Portland or moving on.

My work is now pretty much contract work.  Go in take a gig for 3 months to a year and move on. I spent 10 years in Boise putting down roots, and I have no desire to do that again, so I am planning on staying mobile.   I also like the nature of contract work.  I can be very technical, solve the problem and move on.  No need for the politics of a company or the drama.  I enjoy the technical challenges of developing software, not so much the politics. 

As for my collections, when I lived in Boise I had a extensive CD, DVD and Book collection.  Around 5000 hard bound books, over 1000 music cd’s and over 1000 movies.  Now that I have pretty much gone mobile and all these collections are digital. 

I currently have over 40,000 digital books.  This includes books in EPUB and Kindle (mobi) format.  Both public domain works and books I have purchased.  As I mentioned before I really like http://oreilly.com/ for technical books since the have them in a variety of formats, but I also get a lot of technical books from APRESS as PDF’s and Amazon.com for my Kindle.  I try not to buy any physical copies, since those are hard to carry around :-).  Most of my older science fictions I get from Baen books.  Other books not available in EPUB format I but from Amazon.com and have them on my Kindle DX.  My current electronic book collection is a little over 15 gig in size.

I have over 12,000 tracks of mp3’s I buy from Amazon.com.  Most of these are classic rock, but I admit I  have some pretty weird albums in my collection :-).  I have my album collection stored on my two laptops, my 512 gig passport and finally the main copy is on my IPOD classic (120 gig). My current music, audio book and podcast collection is about 100 gig in size.

Movies I get through either net flicks or purchase them from amazons video on demand service.  My digital movie collection on Amazon.com is now about the same size as my old collection used to be.  Most of these I leave on the Amazon servers.  Only a few have I downloaded.

My software is stored as ISO images.  All my software from Microsoft I get from my TechNet subscription and store it as ISO images.  I then mount this using Magic Disc (a very cool utility that gives me a ton of virtual CD’s). If the software comes on a CD then where possible I take a CD and copy it to an ISO image and then mount the ISO image.  I store the CD’s in my CD case.  These are my biggest headache currently.  I am trying to get all my software digitally so I can get rid of the CD’s.  Sadly the biggest issue is the software CD’s for portability.  Sigh…

Email and document storage is all courtesy of Google apps.  I have several gigs of email on Gmail and am quite happy with it.  Everything else is stored on my laptops and my passport.  This combination makes it very easy to have all my primary files available digitally.  Digital pictures I keep on a a 16gig SD card and then stored on the passport and the IPOD.

So there you have it.  Over a year and most of my life is nothing but bits stored on local drives or in the cloud.  Kind of scary when I put it that way :-).