Technology, mobility and a Pomeranian.
(The following blog entry was originally posted on Blogger on 05/05/13)
My wife's brother and his family live in Zurich (they've been there about 20 years), and my wife and I felt we'd put off a visit to them long enough so we made the trip in mid-November. My wife's family is Swiss, and have dual citizenship. I'd never been to Switzerland, and I'll tell you, it's a pretty impressive country. But if you decide to go there anytime in the near future, brace for sticker shock. Wow. Take NYC prices and add 25%. However, after seeing Zurich, Basel, Lucerne, Baden, and the little towns along the train ride south and into the Alps (like Pontresina for example), I now get it. Go if you can. The Alps alone are absolutely awe-inspiring.
That's a segue to my next set of ramblings. One of the things a lot of marketers, manufacturers, companies, contractors, and many others have been focusing on for the past 3-4 years is mobile technology. It's almost as hackneyed a phrase as "social media" but has stayed high on the list of trending topics for a good reason. The increasingly fast adoption of smartphones and tablets is really quite startling. It's just hitting its stride now, with more growth on the horizon.
Being a graphic design professional, I probably won't see a tablet powerful enough (or large enough in screen size) to do serious design work anytime soon, but it's coming. Us designers were probably the last of the business computer buyers to buy laptops powerful enough and RAM-upgradeable enough to become our primary work machine. (Digital video editing was probably one of those too.) The MacBook Pros that came out in the past year that allow expansion to 16 GB of RAM have now supplanted the desktop Mac. Just plug it into an external monitor and you're ready to do your work. And if you don't need the monitor, unplug and go. Love it.
So taking into account our frequent trips this year once again proved to me that it is possible to work remotely with mostly an iPhone and an iPad, and when needed, a MacBook Pro. Adding a foreign country layer to the digital mix, made the trip to Europe just a bit more challenging. Here's how it went down.
First thing I needed to think about, and verify with my brother-in-law, was the power plug type used in Switzerland. If you've been to mainland Europe, you'll know that the required power plug is a 2- or 3-prong, 6-sided polygon shaped plug. I had one for my laptop and/or iPad already, but not for the iPhone. That one's unique: you need USB on one end. You can't buy them here at the local Apple Store. Once we got to Switzerland however, we took a tram into the city center, and while, uh, "sightseeing", I located their little Apple Store and I grabbed one for a cool 19 francs (about $23 or so). Ok, I confess -- the main reason for the sightseeing trip that day was to go to the Apple Store. There, I said it. Anyway, once all my plugs and adapters were Swiss-compliant, it was only a matter of getting WiFi access for doing work (which my brother-in-law had), and decent cell service speed for the iPhone for keeping on top of business emails. I was actually a little surprised that Zurich is only 3G for mobile. With my AT&T international plan, that's the best I ever got. Still, it worked reliably well.
For the small amount of actual client work that I had to do while on vacation, I'm still amazed and impressed that I can access our office server and client files remotely from anywhere. With internet access, I could log in to our office NAS that holds our client jobs, artwork, logos, etc., and related graphic assets. Aside from the relatively slow speed for basic network tasks (like opening and saving files, renaming files, exporting PDFs, etc.) the technology worked very well. And the 6-hour time difference actually worked in my favor. I could coordinate jobs with my office for an hour or so in the evening Swiss time, while it's early afternoon NYC time. And if anything was needed first thing in the NYC morning, I just cranked through it late on a Swiss night, and it was waiting for my team in the morning. Working remotely went very smoothly for the 10 days we were abroad.
On a personal note, my wife and I added a 2nd family member in July 2013 — a boy Pomeranian to play with our little girl Pom. They're both adorable, but causing a bit more sleep-deprivation than I'd anticipated. The boy just got neutered so that brought a special form of guilt. But it's necessary. He's all healed up now.
And with that, I'll say "later" and wish you a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Cheers from NYC!