The Joy of Commuting February 23, 2008
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Being Freelance , add a commentIt’s 0630, and the alarm goes off although I am already awake. I have NEVER been a morning person, and this is not natural albeit better now than in January. A few minutes dozing, and its ten to seven. I get out of bed, and the organised personality kicks in. Feed cat, turn on boiler, turn on shower, brush teeth while water heats, loo, into shower, clean, out again. Moisturise, check bag and pack laptop, makeup, clothes, make sure cat has food for the day and out. Drink a glass or two of water somewhere in there. From bed to pavement in twenty minutes flat.
A quick stroll through Somers Town, the park with many gates then the Purchese Road Open Space to St Pancras. Perhaps cold and misty, but still rather lovely, and St Pancras is grand. Come in through the back of Kings Cross, and on to Platform 2 on the far side of the station, via Caffe Nero for a small Americano and muffin, and then onto the train.
Breathe, boot the laptop and relax. The brain slowly engages and autopilot has done its job. I’m on the way to the Cambridge client, but first have to check up on the Virtual Company client. I’ve told them that if they email or call me, I will respond by 1000 the next day, and this is when I do it. Check their progress spreadsheet, email my technical lead if there are any problems, deal with whatever I can.
The train slips quickly out of Kings Cross, and up through North London. Hitchin is the only town I know at all on this line, and we’re there in about half an hour. After that, through Cambridgeshire where it is often bright and misty. The train is empty, and the world slips by. It takes about an hour and twenty minutes, door to desk, but on the train and or pleasant walking, it’s a good way to start the day.
Or, on other days, it is a little different. Out of bed, and head to Euston rather than Kings Cross. Victoria line to Green Park and then a switch to the nightmare that is the Heathrow branch of the Piccadilly line. No hope of working here, let alone relaxing. Getting a seat is a major achievement. Somewhere in the wilds of West London, my supplier’s offices are a fifteen minute walk from Boston Manor. Its normally easy to get there, but getting back can be very very hard. Someone decided to pull the passenger alarm at Finsbury Park on Monday, and so I, and a few thousand of my closest companions (for that afternoon), got to sit for an hour outside Gloucester Road station. If you ever have the urge to pull the passenger alarm, and noone’s dying, just don’t. There are about 1000 people on each rush hour tube, and 2 tubes per station, so anything blocking Central London pisses off about 20,000 people. That’s an awful lot of bad karma.
It is easier to travel sixty miles to Cambridge than ten to Brentford. There is a moral there somewhere.
Moving lanes on the info superhighway December 18, 2007
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Being Freelance,Internet , 1 comment so farEvery now and again, I find myself looking back on over twenty years working in information technology, and am truly amazed at how far we’ve come. When I started working, 300 baud (about 300 bits per second, or less than 40 characters per second) was still very common. Only geeks had home computers, and even as a programmer, I didn’t have a terminal on my desk. One of my early projects was to buy the first PCs for the NZ Ministry of Transport’s head office.
And today, I sit in Cafe Nero on Parkway in Camden, patched into the net using a mobile phone modem, happily surfing away at speeds which would have been very good for home use only a couple of years ago. Its all over the 3G mobile phone network, and might just put the overpriced cafe-based wifi services out of business. For £20 per month, I have enough bandwidth and download capacity to do everything I normally do, except perhaps my recent addiction to watching the BBC online. Its also great insurance if the broadband at home disappears – something which seems more common now that Virgin have taken over Telewest / NTL.
In the last few weeks, I’ve been working much more flexibly, based between home, a client’s offices and a supplier’s. It’s insurance if my broadband goes down and means I don’t need to rely on client’s or supplier’s to give me access to their networks. Most of my work is online now – project team collaboration sites, email and other tools – so to be disconnected for any length of time is difficult.
I decided to use TMobile for this, despite a very similar offering from Vodafone, who have my mobile contract. It was the difference made by a salesperson who talked sense and didn’t try to tell me that having a maximum download of 3Gb per month was the same as unlimited surfing. Yes, 3Gb is a lot, but infinity is more. That maths degree comes in handy sometimes, it really does.
Now, if someone could just invent a way of charging the laptop over the mobile network. The nice people here are going to get tired of me nicking their power.
I am a free woman September 29, 2006
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Being Freelance , 2 commentsMy current contract finished today and so I am once again either carrying out intense marketing and business development activity, or being an unemployed bum, depending on your view of things. Tomorrow, I’m off to France for a week, but after that there’s a very good chance there will be a lot more blogging going on around here.
I’ve decided that this time I will take a few months to see if i can develop my work in a rather different way, with 4-5 clients in any given year rather than one long project. I’ve been revamping the website, putting together lists of prospects and setting up meetings for when I’m back in early October, so I don’t expect to spend a lot of time loafing around in cafes. Probably.
But for this afternoon, I’m sitting in a cafe in Brighton, waiting for some friends to join me in an hour or so, finishing off a little paperwork and watching the world go by. It’s a good life.
