December 3, 2009
Freelancing, teaching, writing
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I gave a talk on Search Engine Optimization and Content Management Systems at Lebanon College yesterday. Yeah, I know, the topic was a little too broad for an hour’s lecture. But it was a decent overview. 
greendalek said that it got his students excited and engaged for the rest of the class, so I think I did okay. I’m glad I brought my computer, though. I’d brought the Powerpoint presentation on a memory stick, and I found that the software on the drive interfered with the computer at the school seeing the files on the drive, confound it. So we just plugged my netbook into the projector and I did the lecture from that.
If anyone was wondering about Powerpoint presentations and netbooks, I can say that mine (minimal animation, no animated media and no sound) did just fine for the talk. I think I want a wireless slide advance thingie (how’s that for a technical term?) for the next time I do a lecture. I prefer to stand in the front of the class.
It makes me more comfortable for the social networking class. Most of the teach I’ve done has been exercise-based. While I’ll have several exercises in the class, it’s going to be mostly lecture-based, and I was wondering how I’d do for lecturing without talking people through physical exercises.
It’s funny how perspective can change. I used to marvel at people who could speak “spontaneously” and fluidly on topics. I ran across a comment once in Double Star by Robert A. Heinlein that sounding spontaneous is often a matter of careful preparation. That’s so true. I kept track of how long I spent prepping for that talk. I spent just shy of eight hours for a one hour talk — and that was on a subject I knew pretty well. Now, if I give the talk again, it’s unlikely that I’ll spend more than an hour and a half or so reviewing and tweaking.
Still, it was fun. I find that I almost always learn more about a subject just from researching for lectures. *chuckles* and looking at this pile of books on various elements of social networking and online interaction at my elbow, I expect I’ll experience the same thing in my class come January.
November 24, 2009
Freelancing, writing
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I’m on a bus traveling down to the airport to catch a plane home. I have a lot on my mind about the trip, and to distract myself, I’ve been working.
I often joke my office is my purse. Okay, that’s not really a joke. I’ve been reading a book to get ideas for a course I’m developing, checking my email (the bus has wi-fi) and generally just doing a lot of the things I ordinarily do as part of my morning’s work.
I’d gotten a netbook with an eye to the fact I travel a few times a year and wanted something not too expensive and easily portable. So far, I’m liking travelling with a netbook. The good battery and the compact machine make it nice for crowded travel. The fact that it’s light to carry and fits in a purse doesn’t hurt, either.
I think my next “big” computer is going to be a desktop I’ll sync with my netbook. The desktop will deliver lots of computing power cheap, for when I need that. Then I can do 90% of my work on my portable machine. As a writer whose work is often web-based, I just don’t need the computing power you’d require for video editing or high-end gaming.
November 21, 2009
Freelancing, writing
2 Comments
A certain very popular publishing company of women’s romance novels has decided to offer a new line of vanity publishing. This link goes to Writers Beware, which might give you a clue to my opinion on the matter. You pay to get your novel published and possibly edited if you’re paying at the higher tier. No, you don’t have the full force of the marketing department behind the book. Neither are you going to be able to count on the big chains stocking the book.
Vanity publishing has been around a long time. As a business model, it’s great for the publisher. The author almost never breaks even.
I’m fine with a business turning a profit, what with being a small business owner and a greedy capitalist meeself, and all. What I’m against is an unethical product that preys on emotional weakness, which this vanity publishing scam does.
I had an interesting epiphany in a Border’s a couple of weeks ago. I’m a very small-time writer. I do technical writing, SEO-type stuff… Any fiction writer who manages to make a living at it would probably call me a bottom feeder, and fair enough. But, this perspective does give me a “marketing mind” in a way that the stereotype of the writer from the coffee shop might not have. It got me to thinking in the YA section of that store. There was a Twilight display with books and merchandise and another dedicated to Harry Potter. I started looking at the newer titles in the section. Right now the trend in YA is dark fantasy and stuff with a Goth feel.
“This is all just product,” I thought, as I was looking around. Product follows trend in the entertainment world, and fiction is most certainly the entertainment business.
I think we’re trained that there’s something holy or elevated about books. In a way that’s true. The printing press spread ideas in a way that had been impossible before. The fact that a book is an expression of a human mind is pretty damn awesome. But not every thought we think is necessarily a priceless diamond. Often it’s just a drop of water. It’s when it’s taken in a wave that the water becomes an impressive force.
We’re also trained to think there’s something holy or elevated about art for art’s sake. Does art have value? Yes. Again, art is an expression of what is not only uniquely human about us, but is often a deep expression of the times in which we live, the joys we celebrate and the pain we mourn. But just because it is an expression of our mind doesn’t mean that art always expresses well.
We have always had to look for gems amongst the garbage when it comes to actual art. That’s not new. Dickens was a hack to the Victorians, remember. So was Shakespeare. Do we remember all the playwrights from the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries? Of course not. Have you ever read some random fiction from Victorian times? Some of it was pretty awful. Most of it was “mix as before” that the publishers hoped would make them a pile of money.
The problem is that this vanity publishing scheme is not going to give writers who otherwise had no chance a real chance at publishing a novel. Unless you’re really great at selling, you’ll never recoup your production costs, much less your time costs of writing the damn thing in the first place! If you’re really great at selling, you have a better chance at the traditional method of publication, where you’ll be paid more anyway. This, like all vanity publishing, preys on people with a handful of dreams and a hatful of ignorance.
Addendum: L’esprit d’escalier gives an excellent analysis of why this business model sucks. As Ms. Brown so eloquently puts it, “Writers sign the back of the check!”
November 15, 2009
Freelancing
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Since my local Border’s has free wi-fi, I do go in to get a cup of coffee and do some work pretty frequently. I’ve noticed that when I go, I’m seeing a lot of business meetings, job interviews, people writing, students working for a class, you name it.
I really enjoy going to a coffee shop to work every now and then. I almost always get a lot done. I would hate to have to work in any one specific place, but it’s nice that this is an option when I get tired of being in one place.
If you find yourself working in a non-office (be it your home office or a classical “real job”) why do you venture out to work? Do you do it often? Where do you go?
September 22, 2009
Freelancing, writing
2 Comments
I have wanted a truly portable computer since I was about 12. When laptops got lighter than ten pounds, I used to fantasize about getting one, but didn’t for a long time until the price on a mid-grade laptop dropped to what I was spending on a desktop.
I was in my late thirties before I finally sucked it up and bought a laptop. Now the one I bought was okay, really, for its time. But it weighs about six and a half pounds, has a crappy battery (an hour if I am very lucky) and it runs hot enough that I really can’t use it without an external notebook cooler. I can use it on an airplane, but I don’t like to. I do use it on the train, but I’m lugging at least ten pounds worth of material and taking it out to use is a bit of a production.
That laptop is starting to show the Blue Screen of Death at about weekly intervals, which means it’s about to go to that Great Computer in the Sky in the next few months. I want to hold off on getting a new laptop for several reasons, and have been in Serious Gadget Lust for a netbook since I first saw one. Because of the gadget lust, I didn’t trust my justification for getting a cheap machine that is not a true replacement for a full-powered laptop.
When I got accused by the World’s Worst Overthinker of overthinking the matter (I think I bored him to tears analyzing it out loud), I just went ahead and bought the damn thing — an Acer AspireOne. It’s the cheapest netbook on the market.
This is what I have been waiting for all my life. I can put the freaking thing in my purse. I get more than three hours on a battery. How much more I don’t know. It’s 3:35 and counting right now and I still have half power left. I can reasonably take this to the park and write. I wouldn’t have to be a contortionist to get it out of an overstuffed bag on an airplane. I don’t have to lug around the heavy notebook cooler. I don’t need something that can run World of Warcraft. I need something that can handle writing a book. I need something that can read a financial spreadsheet. I need something that I can use on the Internet to get email and bid on jobs.
Oh, and I’m writing this piece right now on it
July 25, 2009
Freelancing, mental health
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Okay, taking a break before diving back in to work.
I didn’t make myself a bento for today and was regretting it, but disciplined myself to make a nice, veggie-stuffed wrap for lunch rather than grab something — not that I have much in the way of bags of easy-to-grab food in the house but fruit, anyway. (Confession: Bento are at least in part laziness. I prefer to make it easy to eat properly).
It’s warmed up nicely outside, and it feels like summer. But it does make me want to be lazy and take a nap. Unfortunately, I have way the devil too much work to do and really shouldn’t even be writing this entry. I’m doing it to reboot my brain. All I can say is that I’m happy that my projects are on relatively interesting subjects.
My cat is trying to inform me that I’m deficient in my petting duties by sitting on the arm of my chair and looking pitiful. I suppose I should not whine too much about work. I’m not in a cube farm, fergossake, and I doubt many offices would permit me that most necessary of writing materials, a cat to paw at your hand when it wants love or curl up at your feet while working.
Ahh, the exciting times of the self-employed writer.
May 1, 2009
Freelancing, Work From Home Course
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This installment is late. Mea culpa, I bow in the dust. But I had someone paying me for a lot of my time, and that has to come first. Welcome to my world.
I’m going to tell on myself. I did not have office hours for the first eighteen months that I was self-employed. Oh, I made a living, sure. But it was inconsistent, insecure, feast or famine nonsense with little in the way of a cushion. I decided that what I really needed to do was set office hours. It worked so consistently and dramatically that I had not only to have specific hours to work, but strict guidelines about when to stop because of all the paying work. This is more important than you think. A couple of twelve hour days taught me that real quick, let me tell you what! No matter how you love your work, getting brain-fried and ignoring your friends and family is not a good idea. Yes, yes, work hard! But let work time be work time and make sure that there is specific time that is not work time! Corral it, set good boundaries around it, or I promise it will take over your life.
I really did think that office hours were kind of missing the point of being self-employed! Ahh, the freedom! Oh, how nifty to be able to go work out in the middle of the morning and take as long as I wanted for a swim instead of cramming it into my lunch hour. Ahh, what bliss to realize that I could spend a Sunday afternoon writing for money rather than dreading coming into the office on Monday morning. What fun to be able to take your laptop on travel with you and still work!
You know what? There’s some truth to it. There’s nothing in the world wrong with setting your schedule to suit yourself. My office hours are not a standard 8-5. I do sometimes work when the Spirit moves me outside of office hours, and I really do work while traveling. I’ll take the train rather than drive somewhere just because it’s easier for me to work while traveling rather than waste the time driving.
The problem comes in not because the freedom is bad. It’s because it’s really easy to fool yourself. “Oh, I’ll finish that up tonight!” you’ll say to yourself, or, “I’ve got all day to finish that!”
Anyone who has ever been a homemaker knows the dangers of, “I’ve got all day.” In fact, the Sidetracked Home Executives use the IGAD! acronym as a telling point about how dangerous this really is. “I’ve got all day to deal with that,” translates very quickly into “IGAD! A Deadline I might miss!”
I do know of people who don’t have office hours and make it work. Most of them are far more self-disciplined than I am about deadlines and less prone to procrastination. They also usually have other controls in place about work – a target income level they have to meet before they’ll permit themselves to slack, or a set of tasks they must complete before they allow themselves to call it a day. If it works for you, great, but be ruthless with yourself when assessing this. If you’re not putting in six hours a day of honest work, you’re really slacking.
I caution against slacking, but you know, if you find yourself slacking that much, either you’ve got someone supporting you or you’ll be looking for a Real Job pretty fast. I consider myself something of a slacker, and I willingly pull down some hours that have astonished me.
Rule of thumb for the self-employed: it’s illegal for anyone to ask you to work as long or as hard as you’ll be working for yourself. — Holly Lisle
When I read the referenced article[1], I’m gonna have to admit I figured her to have an overdeveloped sense of Calvinist martyrdom and inverted pride. Well, she was right, I was wrong. Chances are good that you’re going to have to guard against overwork rather than otherwise. I was cranking out 1,000 words a day on a terrible and unpublishable novel and holding down a Real Job. It was no strain. Boy, did I get fooled when I really did take the leap from the lion’s mouth!
If you think you’re putting in ten hours a day of work, I highly recommend you get some tracking software for yourself and assessing that honestly. I can recommend ClockingIT and RescueTime. ClockingIT is more for billable hours and RescueTime is for an honest assessment about what sites you visit and how much time you spend in what applications. I would have been indignant to have RescueTime on my machine with an employer, but my present employer is a real slave driver. <grin>
You can fool yourself that screwing around is work. That’s a very short road to both poverty and burnout. Just because you’re at a computer or in your office doesn’t mean you’re working. Be sure all that work you’re doing is genuinely productive work. I have guidelines stricter than most commercial places of business about websites I can visit or what I can be doing during office hours. I’ll talk about this later in the What’s Work section, but it’s an important concept.
When I face this in all honesty, I know that for me, being strict about office hours is what brings in the cash. I encourage you to try office hours first. The important thing is that you create some workday structure and control for self-management.
Oh my, if that isn’t a “that depends”. If you’re not putting in 35-60 hours on your business, you’re not going to make it. Yes, I’ve read the 4-Hour Work Week. Mr. Ferris is being incredibly misleading about how he lives. He’s only counting the time spent on stuff that is directly-paying. He works more than four hours a week just doing interviews and networking. That image of the rock star lifestyle is part of his product. He has to document what he does (and I promise that takes a few hours, even if he is hiring some schmuck like me to pound out the words), come up with stuff he thinks will be interesting to his readers, harass people to meet up with him and blog about how cool he is, and so on. If you think self-promotion isn’t work, you don’t understand how the gig works. By his rubber ruler, my very busiest week was about 20 hours and I’ve plenty of weeks where I spend less than that on directly-paying stuff. I promise you I work more than 20 hours a week even on weeks I spend at the beach!
I’ll deal more with this when we talk about setting prices. But you’re not going to have every hour of your work day be for directly-paying clients.
What About Breaks?
Yes, for heaven’s sake, take breaks. I know of one freelancer who tries to get up at least once an hour, so that she doesn’t feel chained to her work. I, personally, take a whole hour for lunch. That’s my time to eat, screw around with social networking sites, whatever I want to do that’s not work.
On the subject of lunch, one of my hobbies is making Bento — cute little Japanese lunches in small boxes that are healthy and aesthetically-pleasing. I generally make myself one, ensuring that I’ll eat at least one healthy meal a day, and take a break. They’re so cute and pretty, it’s hard not to make an event of it. Snacking all day at first is the bane of the new freelancer. This makes me not want to.
You do want some sort of break in your work day to have a little something to eat, reorient yourself and relax before you dive back in to your work. This is the time to have a meal with friends, take a walk, or otherwise refresh yourself for the rest of your work day.
Where should your office be?
Because my office is really my laptop, I don’t bother with a specific “work only” space. I have four places I usually work. On the left is my writin’ chair. This is far and away the most common place for me to work. It’s in the living room, and is considered a “classic” no-no. I would agree a living room would be bad if it’s a public place where you can’t get any privacy. I’m usually alone all day, so it works for me. Note the privacy bit. We’ll be getting back to that.
I work there frequently because it gets plenty of sun, it’s comfortable and my office hours are over when the kids get home from school, anyway. This isn’t to say I don’t work after school. I do. But I save administrative tasks and other things that do not require intense concentration for those times.
Experts also recommend against having an office in your bedroom. My writing desk is in my bedroom and that’s where I’m presently writing this. I work there sometimes, but I tend not to work there every day, as I’ll start to feel as if I am trapped in a single place after awhile. I mean, I already spend at least seven hours a day there sleeping!
I mentioned earlier that I sometimes work from bed if I’m trying to give myself a reward or motivate myself. I don’t do this often. Yeah, I know that looks comfy. But it would be terrible on my back to do it, and since I make a habit of watching Doctor Who and streaming Netflix movies just in that position, it’s just not got the “serious work” feel to it. Hence using it as a carrot when I really need to motivate myself. It’s kind of my version of “casual Friday.” It’s also where I work if I was stupid (as I was recently) and managed my time so badly that an all-nighter was necessary. I try very hard not to do that.
The fourth place I work is my “Jungle Room”. It’s a room in my house that’s sunny, filled with plants and has the wood stove. In the wintertime, this is great for chasing away that cold, dead feeling of winter and being warm. I live in Northern New England, so warmth, sun and living things can be a nice feeling. However, things are not set up in there to be an easy-to-manage workspace, so I usually only do it when I’ve shivvered too much for one week and want to be by a warm fire.
I discuss all these things not because I’m going to discourage you from having an office. Honestly? If I had a specific room in my house with a door that closed that I could use for one, I would in a heartbeat. But in terms of productivity, you need to decide for yourself what’s going to work. Being able to give myself a change of scene frequently is what works for me. If a certain workspace starts feeling a little stale, I move. I have a laptop. I can do that. Some people find that having an office puts them into “work” mode better than office hours and dressing for work put together! The principle here is to find what gets your mind into “serious work” mode and do that. Yes, it seems like there are a lot of externals that “shouldn’t” matter. All I can say is that some millenia of civilization has taught us that ritual drives mindset, and it’s not bad to make it work for you. For me, it seems to be the ritual of “setting up shop” somewhere.
Don’t underestimate the “carrot” of being able to work in a special place. For you, it might be a coffee shop with an Internet connection – always a popular choice and a great one if you’re sick of being alone!
Whatever you do for an office, be comfortable. I am unusually careful to create an ambiance that reminds me that I’m doing this to savor life, not spend my life in a working grind. If scented candles or incense turns your crank, there aren’t any office regulations forbidding it any more. Have your coffee or tea in the good china if you have it, play music that focuses your brain, and don’t lock yourself away in a forgotten, cluttered afterthought of a room. Don’t tell yourself that you’ll do these things “when you can afford it”. Putting away clutter costs nothing, and few of the things I’ve mentioned are an extra expense.
A lot of people want to work from home so that they can take care of small children while they’re working. Thing is, at the end of the day, it’s still a job and to get paid, you have to put out product.
I’m not saying it can’t work. There are things you can do while you’re looking after a small child that can make money. I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt that anything that requires concentration for a long period of time isn’t it! Programming, writing, graphic art… If you need to think uninterrupted, don’t fool yourself that you’ll get anywhere near enough done – either from responding to RFPs or actual paying work while attending to the children. I speak from the experience of a failed attempt to do so.
I can’t even begin to count the number of people who get into writing because they think they can do it when their kids are small and avoid the cost of daycare. The ones that make this happen are usually people who don’t need much sleep, are night owls and work when the children are asleep. Even with older children, you might have the habit of keeping an ear out. My first summer as a freelancer was a real eye opener about this, and I have a teenaged reclusive introvert as my main parenting responsibility!
The take-away here is that unless you’re doing work a child can help you with, such as many sorts of farming, you really do need time alone to be able to concentrate and work. I’ve created websites while the children played, and while it can be done, you’re not focused and efficient enough to make it a business.
[1] And by the way, I find her writing advice good, even if I’ve no talent at fiction.
May 1, 2009
Freelancing, bento, fitness, goals
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I swam my 1500 today. That’s a challenge still, and took me about 45 minutes1. But that’s okay. Come June, I don’t think that’ll be a challenge any more!
I’m even using a cute widdle fishie ticker. Ain’t that sweet? I note, however, that the progress bar is hardly to scale.
Apparently an aquafitness class counts as 2,000 yards. I think they’re figuring a certain fitness level2 takes about an hour to swim 2000, so that’s how it’s figured. Fair enough. Plenty of people find lap swimming mind-numbing. I don’t, but that’s because that’s my time to work out plots for stories, plan how to pitch projects or plan classes.
In fact, I spent most of today’s workout working up a proposal to try to teach a bento class that the gym where I work. It’s a community/rec center more than a classical gym, even if the exercise equipment is really good. They have all sorts of fun classes, so if I can figure out a structure for it and pitch it right, they might let me. I was figuring an end of summer-type deal where I have the class and give away to each student a cheap bento box (you can get ‘em for a buck through Ichibankan), a colorful bandana and some cute chopsticks as well as a few lessons on how to make and arrange some basic bento food. I’d have a handout with some basics, a list of local stores that sell good Asian food and some places where people can buy bento boxes.
For the local gym, the pitch would have to be the “healthy lunch for your kids” thing, I think. There’s also the frugality hook. But I’m going to have to figure out a way to pitch it as not particularly time-consuming. The way I do it, it really isn’t, but you can go overboard with the cute.
I’ve had the idea for this class in the back of my mind since I started bein’ a bum, but it’s fleshed out a lot more in my mind lately, and I have a considerably better idea of who to talk to for getting this class on the program as well as how the class really ought to be structured.
1Go ahead, competitive swimmers. Laugh it up.
2Hmm, close to my own, now that I do the math.
March 18, 2009
Freelancing, Work From Home Course
2 Comments
You see a lot of scams about how to make a fortune while working from home. The truth is that millions of people really do make a living as their own boss while working from home. The sad truth is also that you’ll never be able to do this by taking a $250.00 seminar meant to get you excited and fired up.
So, because I’m a generous soul, I’ll tell you how to do it, and I’m going to tell you for free. Why? Because scams get on my nerves. I’m not selling anything here. This is my personal blog. I’m writing it mostly because cheesy sales techniques and promises of riches get on my damn nerves. I believe in real, so real is what you’re going to get here.
I am confident that if you follow these rules faithfully for a year, you will make a living. You might or might not get rich. But you’ll make a moderate living. I’m not going to promise you the world with this. I’m not going to wave as a success story all the people who made millions working from home. Yes, they exist. They’re also rare.
What’s not so rare, and is quite possible, is to be able to be self-employed and make an adequate living from it. This course will not tell you how to do taxes, get you to decide on a business form or any of that stuff. It’s important, yes. Crucial, in fact. But most of the books on self-employment out there talk about it. I’ll be listing books I think are useful. But for this piece it would be like having a cookbook that tells you to make a grocery list. What you need to understand are the principles behind making self-employment work before you start trying to set things up.
I know whereof I speak with this. Almost 20 years ago, I wrote my first (and for about a decade and a half, my only) professional piece for a client. It was a book on how to open a mailing and packaging business. It was a fun project, not only because I was writing something, but because I was researching how to open a small business and learning a whole lot from a small business owner. It was great!
A few years later, I started a business with three other people. We were very focused on incorporating, setting up the tax stuff and all that. Now, that wasn’t wrong. But the problem was that we got so into the administrivia that we didn’t spend nearly enough time on the parts of the business that would make the tax stuff relevant. We were nerds and found structure cool. What can I say? It made enough money to pay for the toys of a household of geeks and wound up being a pretty good tax shelter, which was nice. But it was never a way to support the family as we had been hoping.
We were not thinking like entrepreneurs and we were not focused on why we’d started the business in the first place.
Some years later, after having spent about six or seven years as an administrative assistant, I realized I have about as much talent for being an admin as a rock does, but that I enjoyed it less. My living situation had changed and I was in a position to take a bit of a risk. So I spoke to my housemate and said, “You know I don’t want to be supported by you, but if I have to face another day of being an admin, I am going to go bonkers.”
“And this is a change how?” he asked.
I shrugged. “Okay, fair enough. But I’m not happy. I just figured out how much money I’m committed to bringing into the household and I don’t think there’s really a chance in hell I’d fail to do so. I wanna quit my job and make my living being a bum.”
“Okay,” he said. “If you’re willing to take the risk, I have faith in you.”
Two years later, I’m still making a living as a bum[1].
This information isn’t really new, though. You’re going to read a lot of it and go, “But that’s just common sense.”
If you say “Yes, but I can’t do it that way because I’ve got a Special Problem” to more than one of the major lessons of this piece and are not already making the living you want from home, you might wanna examine why this might be the case.
If you’re already making a living from home and making enough to suit yourself what the hell are you wasting your time on this for? Go back to your success and enjoy it, dewd. I’m not trying to preach to the choir here! Congratulations on making it work in your own way.
The next lesson is going to be, “Have the sK1lZ.”
As a prep exercise, think of 20 things you’re good at. Not just the big exciting stuff. Write down the little, dumb stuff, too.
The next lesson will be next Wednesday!
[1] My children scold me when I call myself a bum. “Ma
ma, you
work,” they protest. Kids…
March 13, 2009
Freelancing
No Comments
I was checking out the mini laptops when a friend of mine from online was reporting on her new one with squeeing positivity.
Now, I have a laptop. It’s my only computer. I don’t use a desktop at all, and don’t really need one. But the idea of a lighter, more portable laptop sounds good to me and I’ve been thinking about a mini laptop for my next computer.
There are those who would say, “What about computing power?”
What about it? There are mini laptops that have as much as my present laptop does. That’s not my complaint about the laptop I have. I use a low-end Inpiron. Lousy battery power and a propensity for overheating so bad I have to use a notebook cooler if I use the machine for any length of time. Also, I figured that 40GB would be PLENTY of disc space. (Not for my music collection, it’s not!) There are mini laptops with much larger hard drives than mine.
I don’t play interactive online games. The most complex tasks I do on a laptop mostly involve text. I could almost do my job on a smartphone, though would hate to have to. The smartphone versions of Office do have irritating limitations. I do sometimes watch movies on my laptop and have a pretty decent collection of Doctor Who on my external hard drive.
What I actually use a computer for is to write, bid on jobs and do research. I also travel as much as I can manage. Something I can slip into a purse, feel comfortable opening on an airplane that has lots of battery power and won’t overheat sounds like bliss to me! Firefox with a lot of tabs open is a far worse resource drain than any actual program I run to do Real Work. I was looking at the Asus EEE 1000HD recently. (And by the way, Mom, if you’re reading this, you might wanna check it out. The screen and keyboard are small, but this has about the same power as my machine, is a lot cheaper!)
I’m not buying one right away, mind. For all its limitations my present laptop is plenty useful for what I do and there’s no need to blow money away on a Nifty Gadget. But when I need to replace this one? Yep, I might consider going small.
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