Maria’s Adventures

Since going freelance full-time 3 months ago, I’ve been experiencing the fruits of the flexibility that this lifestyle offers. These fruits include:

• Working from anywhere in the world (the most amazing fruit!)
• Getting up and slowing starting the day with a nice walk in the park
• Not having to face a commute
• Taking leisurely 2 hour lunches
• Taking the obligatory nap after lunch (after eating I just collapse into food-digestion sleep)
• Going on mid-week adventures, because the weekend just isn’t long enough!
• etc, etc, etc

Old habits die hard

When you move to the work from home model, you are still left with some office-working-employee habits. For example, office workers typically have to be at their desk from 9-5 and have to appear to be working for all of that time. They can’t just say “Wow, I’m sleepy after that lunch, I think I’ll go have a nap” or “I don’t really feel focused right now, I’ll go shopping for an hour and catch up later”. That would be just too good to be true! Most office workers are not 100% focused and productive while at their desk, but still have to put on the act so they don’t get called into the supervisors office.

Switch your mindset

Being a freelancer, you really have full flexibility with your time. To really get the most out of the freelancing lifestyle, its necessary to switch your mindset from an office-working-employee to a freelancers mindset. This means that you can stop pretending to work when you can barely keep your eyes open. Go for a nap if you need to. If you get distracted while working on a project, or come across a stumbling block that you’re having trouble with, take a break. But leverage that time. You no longer have to sit at the computer and browse the web covertly, ready to minimize the browser if the supervisor walks by. Hang out the laundry or walk down to the shops to get food for dinner.

Use your time wisely, you’re no longer forced to sit at the computer from 9-5, so when you’re not working to your fullest, do something else that needs doing. Mix up your day, and I bet you’ll be closer to 100% productive in whatever you are doing at a given time, instead of being 100% working and 50% productive.

I have a few different domains for this blog, my portfolio site, and other personal projects I work on. For each domain, I have at least one email address which I use. Instead of logging into each of these Gmail accounts, I manage all of them from my personal email account, and boy does it make life easier!

Here’s how I do it:

1. Forward each email address to one master email address, in my case this is my personal email address that I have for years. To do this, go to each Gmail account, go to Settings->Forwarding and POP/IMAP->Forwarding, as select the “Forward a copy…” radio button, giving it your master email address. Now you will receive a copy of all emails into your personal email accounts inbox. You can then add filters to add labels to them to keep everything organised.
   
2. Now you need to tell Gmail about your other accounts. To do this, go to Settings->Accounts->Send mail as, and select the “Reply from the same address…” radio button. Now click the “Add another email address you own” link.
   
3. A window will popup and you can fill in one of your other email addresses that you have forwarded to your master email account.
4. Click the “Send Verification” button and you should revceive an email from Gmail into your email inbox. You don’t have to login to your other email account since you have just forwarded the emails to your personal email account, the email will just show up in your pesonal email inbox. Click the verificaiton link in the email, and Voila! You’re done!
5. Now you will receive emails from all your accounts into one inbox, and when you reply, it will come from the same email address that the email was orignally sent to.

This will make your life so much easier, you can manage all your email accounts and not have to worry that your reply comes from the right email account.

I spent a month in Nepal (Kathmandu, Pokhara & Chitwan) and absolutely loved it, especially Pokhara. I heart Pokhara! Nepal offered so much for backpackers, outdoor enthusiasts and adventure-lovers in general. However, Nepal is definitely a holiday destination as opposed to a working destination.

Here’s a brief Pro/Con comparison which sums up Nepal:

Pros

1. Cheap at the moment:  The tourism industry in Nepal has taken a knock over the past few years, due to political unrest, but it is now very safe to go to Nepal and we didn’t encounter any weirdness or unsafe feelings. However, tourism is still struggling a bit, and so there are some real bargains to be gotten, accommodation and food wise.
2. Adventure Wonderland: Nepal is the perfect destination for outdoor enthusiasts, or anyone who wants to try some new things. For me, this meant that my trip to Nepal incorporated my first trek, my first white-water rafting trip, my trip safari and my second (but the best) paragliding session. So when you’re not working, you won’t have a chance to get bored.
3. English speaking and friendly: Most people in the tourism industry in Nepal speak English, so you won’t have to learn Nepali to be able to survive. Also, the Nepali people are incredibly nice and very friendly, so this means you are lively to make some new Nepali friends.

Cons

1. Power cuts: In Nepal, there are 16 hours of power outages every day. Enough said.
2. Poor Internet access: The Internet network in Nepal is very bad and extremely frustrating to work with.
3. WiFi is expensive: WiFi is available in a handful of restaurants/cafes (in Kathmandu anyway), but I remember those particular restaurants being quite expensive.

So as a conclusion, I will definitely go back to Nepal, but I won’t count on getting any work done there. Has anyone else taken a working trip to Nepal and have anything else to add?

After a month and a half in India, one thing is for sure - it is NOT a potential working destination! In India, things don’t really run as efficiently or smoothly as in other countries and of course, the internet feels the brunt of this. For us, as a web developer and a web designer, the internet is crucial and so, ruled India out as a future potential working destination.

Here’s a brief Pro/Con comparison which sums up India:

Pros

1. Cheap: India is super-dooper cheap. If you eat in local places, and avoid accomodation that you found in the Lonely Planet, you can stay in India for next to nothing.
2. Alot to do: India is a huge country, so you’re not going to get bored for a long time. Each state is almost like a different country, so there is plenty of variety to keep you interested.
3. English speaking: Most people in India speak English, well most people we met anyway. In fact, during our whole time there we really didn’t encounter a language barrier much. If you were planning to rent a place, or buy a motorbike, etc, this becomes a very useful pro for India. It also means that you can chat with Indian people quite easily, and can be quite independent there.

Cons

1. Poor Internet access: The Internet network in India is really poor, and connections are so slow, they’ll remind you of the dial-up days. I can’t recall the number of times I just abandoned what I was trying to do in an internet cafe because it was just too slow.
2. No WiFi: In all our time in India, we didn’t once come across WiFi. For most Westerners like us, WiFi is a convenience that is really taken for granted. We’re so used to having it there, and it is such a part of how we work. Well, forget about it! No WiFi means that whenever you need to send email or sync files from your laptop, you’ll have to find an internet cafe that will let you plug into their ethernet network.

Those 2 cons are enough (for me anyway), to make India a no-go for remote working. In saying this, I’m sure it would be different if you were renting a place and got your our broadband. However, from my experiences of India, I doubt it’s straightforward to get broadband setup.

I have written my first Wordpress plugin, Tweep Roll! You can read about it and download it here. The plugin homepage at Wordpress is http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tweep-roll/.

If you come across issues with it, please email me: maria (at) mariasadventures (dot) com

Hope you enjoy it

Round-The-World travel is a dream that most people hope to accomplish at some stage in their life. With the rising cost of travel, prospective adventurers will feel the pinch. Its a good idea to have an accurate estimation of what your whole trip will cost. As you know, the cost of the flights is not the only expense.

Here are some of the main expenses involved in a RTW trip:

• New passport - €75 (for an Irish passport) + passport photos - €6
• Visas - €25 - €50 per country (this varies, but just a general idea)
• Vaccinations - €300 (for vaccines to India)
• Travel products (rucksack, clothes, travel accessories)
  • Rucksack - €130 (Deuter Quantum, an amazing backpack!)
  • Clothes - €50
  • Travel Accessories - €50 (Headlamp, insect repellent, travel clothes washing detergent, adapters, etc)
• Travel Guide - €30 (Good old Lonely Planet)
• Travel Insurance - €315 for 6 months worldwide cover with World Nomads. This is pretty much Lonely Planet travel insurance and for me, it offered the best and most modern policy. They contribute part of your policy cost to a third world development, one of their many Footprints projects. Also, they provide the best cover for extreme sports and I’m a surfer so that was perfect. There is no excess so any claims you make are fully covered. Also, from what I read in forums, they are really good when it comes to making claims, which is the most important thing. Lots of other insurance companies I researched offered dirt cheap insurance, but the customers had a really hard time when trying to claim.
• Flights
  • Dublin -> London - €45 (BMI)
  • London -> New Delhi - €400 (Kuwait Airways)

These are approximate costs and are based on Irish prices, but they should give you a general idea.

Can you think of any I’ve missed? Has anyone got a more accurate estimate for other countries?

When I was little, we had a set of children’s encyclopedias and one of them told folk tales from all over the world. It was my favourite book and one story in particular made an impression on me, Jonah & the Whale. Maybe not the story so much, but the illustration which was done in the old Japanese style. I can’t find the name of it anywhere, but it is the way they paint the sea and waves in particular. I have loved that style of art ever since, and will definitely be having a print or 2 in my future home. I suppose it may have something to do with my water-baby-ness and love of surfing too

I’ve just recently bought a new aluminum MacBook, and given the sandy nature of places that we stay, I’m anxious to keep it new and protected from hardware-eroding sand. While in Kuala Lumpur, I saw lots of shops selling these paper-thin skins that stick to the lid of your laptop. They sport nice designs and can be easily removed, without leaving a mark. We left Kuala Lumpur so I looked online and found a really great website called Gelaskins, who sell skins for laptops and iPods. The designs are really cool and quite different. You can also download a wallpaper for your desktop, of most of the skin designs.

Imagine my joy, when I stumbled upon this one:

It’s a painting called “The Great Wave off  Kanagawa” and was painted by a Japanese artist called Katsushika Hokusai. So I’ve ordered it ($29.99 not too shabby) and can’t wait to look at that lovely wave everyday Just thought I’d share my immense happiness about this, I’m very easily pleased you see! Does anyone know what this style of painting is called?

Anyone doing web design and development on a Mac knows the heartache that is cross browser testing. Alas, until they do away with IE6 for good, we’ll still have to do it.

The best and simplest method I’ve found is using VMware Fusion. If you are a student (wink wink nudge nudge), you can get it for $35 on Amazon. All you need to get going is a copy of this and a Windows installation CD.

Here are the steps to setup a virtual Windows environment to use for cross browser testing:

1. Install VMware
2. Open VMware and click the “New..” button to create a new virtual machine.
3. During the setup, choose the appropriate Operating System and Version, give the virtual machine a name and choose the disk size to give to your virtual machine. I just chose 5GB, and everything has worked fine for me so far.
4. On the next screen, check the box for Easy Install and enter the Windows serial key.
5. Check the box that says “Make your home folder accessible to the Virtual Machine” and choose “Read & Write” in the drop-down box.
6. The install should beign and go into the standard Windows installation screens. You can leave this run in the background until it’s finished, when you should see the same old Windows desktop.
7. If you installed Windows XP, IE6 should already be installed on the virtual machine. If you want to have multiple versions of IE available on that one virtual machine, download Multiple IEs and install it. This will give you all the versions of IE that you choose in the setup process.

Now you are ready to test websites in Internet Explorer! Well woopee for that!

The next step is to make your Windows virtual machine look at your Mac localhost, so you can test your websites locally. If you try http://localhost/ in IE, you’ll get a “Page cannot be displayed” error. this is because “localhost” is looking at “127.0.0.0″ which is the local machine, ie: the Windows virtual machine. To make it look at the Mac, we need to find the Mac’s IP address.

To do this, open Terminal and type “ifconfig”. This will give you a big ugly list of nonsense. To find your IP address, look for the section labeled “en1″ and your IP address should be the next number. Here’s what mine looked like:

Now, to view your local websites in IE, go to ‘http://YOUR_IP_ADDRESS’ instead of ‘http://localhost’. Voila!

If you are using virtual hosts on your apache setup, you can also test them in IE. Just open your hosts file, which is usually at: “C:/WINDOWS/system32/drivers/etc/hosts”. Open this file in Notepad, and add your IP address followed by your virtual hosts. My hosts file looks like this:

Save the file and close it. Now your virtual hosts should work in IE and you can cross browser test to your heart’s content!

Well I’ve been incommunicado for a while now, so apologies After 3 months traveling, it’s definitely time for an update.

India

We started out by flying into New Delhi on October 7th, and we then spent 3 weeks traveling around North India. We went from New Delhi - Rishikesh (The Home of Yoga) - Amritsar (The Home of the Golden Temple) - Dharamsala/McLeod Ganj (The Home of the Dalai Lama) - New Delhi - Varanasi. We covered quite lot in those 3 weeks and didn’t really stay put anywhere too long. The culture shock of India was definitely setting in, and was starting to wear on both myself & my boyfriend Rob. So for that reason, we decided to head to the border and continue up into Nepal.

Nepal

Nepal was just amazing! We really loved it from start to finish, and couldn’t get over how nice the people were. We ended up staying a month there and doing so really exciting things. We went from the India-Nepal border at Sunauli to Kathmandu on an overnight bus, where we spent a week just chillin’ mainly. We then took a beautiful 7-hour bus ride to Pokhara, a lovely lakeside town set in the foothills of the Himalayas, with spectacular views of the Annapurna range. The Lakeside area is quite tourist, but we enjoyed it there nonetheless, taking nice boat rides on the lake and eating some great food at the Pokhara Steak House and Koto japanese restaurant.

Annapurna Base Camp

After much heel-dragging from me, we finally set off on a 7-day trek to the Annapurna Base Camp. I was my first trek and generally, that type of activity isn’t my thing so I have to admit, I was a little aprehensive! We rented our gear and off we set, taking a taxi to Naya Pul, where the trek begins. The first day was very tough for me, and at one stage I really wanted to ditch the whole thing. After that, things improved alot. I started taking “lots of little steps” and found that helped alot, lifting your leg too high really tires you out after a while. We took it easy on the way up, taking  days to the base camp. The view was really something special and we were lucky enough to have clear blue skies. Once at the top we realised that we were running out of money and had to make it back to Pokhara in 2 days. So, we ran and ran, and ran some more. With heavy leaden legs, we made it back to Pokhara and back to comfort.

Paragliding

When we had recovered, we went paragliding with Sunrise Paragliding. Apparently, Pokhara is one of the best places in the world to paraglide, so we wanted to give it a go. They drive you up to the top of Sarangkot, and you paraglide off it, flying above the Fewa Thal lake, which Pokhara sits by. Let me just say, it was the best feeling ever! Honestly, I felt like a bird, flyoing carefree through the sky. You are strapped in front of the pilot so you can’t really see the parachute, just the open sky in front of you. My pilot was really cool and talked the whole time, which helped distract me enough, so that I didn’t feel nauseous. He let me take the reigns (?) and pull some acrobatic spirals, which really made the whole thing. I managed to catch the whole thing on my awesome miniture Flip Video Camcorder
, but then I deleted it by accident Yes, I nearly cried! That night I was already online looking for paragliding courses, it’s so addictive and I can’t wait to do it again.

White Water Rafting to Chitwan National Park

We then had to make our way to Chitwan National Park (in the South, near the border), so instead of taking another long bus ride, we signed up for a rafting trip and rafted there! The trip was great, very scenic and a little exciting. There were 3 rafters with us to show us the ropes and keep us safe. At every stop, they cooked us up a very impressive meal over one little fire and we were entertained by a local village community who sang songs and danced for us. I’d like to try rafting again, but will definitely go for something with a higher grade. Bring it on baby!

Chitwan National Park was really nice, especially the elephant bathing, where you hop on an elephants back in the river, and for 100 rupees, you can help wash it and more fun… let it wash you! It was a really great experience, although I wanted to steal an elephant afterwards! We then took an elephant safari into the park and saw rhinos, crocodiles and many different types of deer. It’s well worth a trip there if you make it to Nepal.

Sadly, it was time to leave Nepal then and make our way back into India.

Back to India

Back to India and long train rides. We swung by Agra to see the Taj Mahal, but we over-organised and due to late trains, and a train we needed to be on that evening, we were left with only an hour to rush into Agra centre and try to see the Taj Mahal. Bad luck  struck us again, as we found out that the Turkish prime minister was visiting and the Taj was closed. So, improvising, we rushed to the rooftop bar of a nearby hotel, and saw what we could of the Taj before rushing off to catch our train to Mumbai.

Mumbai

Mumbai, what a place!! I was so surprised by what a nice city Mumbai is, compared to other cities in India. There the Chowpatty Beach and a really nice promonade to walk, not to mention the harbour and the Gateway to India. We booked into the Seashore Hotel in Colaba, and went exploring. That night I was woken at 4am by a call from my mother to the hotel phone, saying that there were bombings in Mumbai. One look out the window and we could see and hear the fire and gunshots from theTaj Hotel, about 400m away. We spent the next day holed up in a tiny room, with 4 other backpackers, waiting til it was safe to leave. We got the last tickets on a bus to Goa and were relieved to pull out of a very deserted Mumbai.

Goa

Goa was just what we needed after Mumbai: beach, relaxation and surfing! The surfing alone made me so happy becuase it had been months since I’d surfed. It didn’t matter that the only surfboard available to rent had only one fin! we chilled in Arambol Beach for a week, before heading down to Trichy to catch a flight to Kuala Lumpur.

Malaysia

Kuala Lumpur made me feel like I was in a sci-fi movie! Which was great and was what we needed after India. Clean, efficient and seeped in commercialism, Kuala Lumpur offered all the creature comforts we could ask for. We binged on Starbucks and Wifi (from our newly bought MacBooks)  and after a week we headednorth to Penang, an island off the west coast. We went to Penang looking for beaches, but that wasn’t what we found. So a snap decision was made and we booked tickets on a bus the next morning to Thailand!

Thailand

Koh Lanta island has been home for the past 10 days. It’s really lovely here, but quite developed and there are alot of package holidays here. We went diving near Ko Phi Phi (the island where “The Beach” was filmed), which was spectacular and whetted my apetite for diving in tropical waters. It is nothing like diving in Ireland, that’s for sure! We’re staying in a beautiful bungalow at Red Snapper, which has free wifi and the most delicious food.

We can only stay in Thailand for 15 days without a visa, so we leave again in a few days and will head to Langkawi, Malaysia.

“I ain’t gettin’ on no plane”

In general, all is going very well and the thought of going home any time soon gives me a pain in the tummy. Especially because everytime I call home, all I hear about is “recession, recession, recession……..country’s falling in on itself………everyone is being laid off….etc”. Seriously, it feels like we got at the right time, and I really don’t envy everyone at home being subjected to crazy-negative-recession-hype. Things are bad enough without the radio, TV and newspapers trying to scare you more!

So, even though we planned to go away for 3 months, we’re staying on and trying to get enough freelance work to keep us going. Be sure to see my Hire Me page, and if you have any work you need doing, drop me a line at maria (at) mariasadventures (dot) com.

Enticed by the many blog posts about Portable Apps, I decided to give it a go for my upcoming trip to India. What I got was a very pleasent surprise - it worked so well! When I quit my job, I had to give back my lovely shiny MacBook Pro. I still have ongoing freelance web development work to do, and only my mothers Vista laptop to do it on. Bummer Cue PortableApps!

Using PortableApps is a cinch, all you need is some sort of portable drive, be it an iPod or a thumb drive. I’m sure it also works on PSP and Nintendo DS, but I haven’t tried them. Just download the PortableApps platform and install it. It will ask you where to install it and you can choose the root folder of your portable drive. Whenever you need to use it, you just go to your portable drive in explorer and double-click the StartPortableApps.exe icon. This loads a tray icon which you can click on to display a menu of your portable apps.

You can also install other apps not found on the PortableApps site, by installing them as normal on the computer, then copying the folder from Program Files to the PortableApps folder on your portable drive.

Here are the apps I have setup on my iPod and am now using to do web development from different computers in internet cafes:
IDE/Code Editor

When I had my Mac, I used TextMate to develop and it’s just outstanding. A good replacement for this is Notepad++. This doesn’t have all the really helpful bundles that TextMate does, but beggars can’t be choosers. If anyone finds a good alternative, I’d love to hear of it.

Web Server

I used xampp when I had a Mac, and it also works great in a portable environment. Grab it here, install it as normal on your computer, then copy the xampplite folder into your PortableApps folder on your iPod/thumb drive.

Web Browser

Being a Firefox advocate, it’s the obvious choice when going portable. Thankfully, Firefox Portable is available and works very well. Make sure you get at least version 3.0.3, as extensions didn’t work with earlier versions. Now you can just install extensions as you normally would and they will be available in Firefox no matter which computer you plug into.

Subversion (SVN)

Getting command line SVN to work was a cinch. Just follow these steps:

1. Download svn-win32-1.5.2.zip (or whatever the current “Subversion Win32 binaries for Apache” download is) from the SVN download page.
2. Extract the svn-win32-1.5.2.zip file into the PortableApps folder on your portable device. For me, this is D:\PortableApps.
3. To use SVN, open a Command Prompt, cd into the working directory. From there, you can type svn commands as always, such as “svn st”, “svn commit” and “svn update”, but replacing “svn” with the path to your svn.exe. For example, if I want to commit something, I would use “D:\PortableApps\svn-win32-1.52\bin\svn.exe commit”.

I couldn’t find an SVN client that worked however. The only solution I found was RapidSVN, but that gave me an error saying that my SVN client was too old. That could have been because I was using an existing working copy. It might work if you checkout a new working copy via RapidSVN, but I just needed something to work immediately so I could commit client work. If you get this to work, or find another solution, feel free to post in the comments.

Email to SMS

Keeping up contact with clients via email is standard for me. However, I’m not 100% sure that there will be reliable internet access in every place I visit in India. For me, one of the most important factors in good freelancing is maintaining good communication with your client. It counteracts any insecurities a client may have with dealing with freelancers in general. Have the freelancer moving around the world and that becomes much more important.

Thankfully, many mobile phone operators offer an email-to-SMS service where you can send emails to a certain address and it will be forwarded to your mobile as an SMS. I am using Meteor in Ireland so my mobile’s email address is 08XXXXXXXX@mms.mymeteor.ie. To find your mobile’s email address, try this link or Google something like “SMS via email NAME_OF_OPERATOR”.

To address this, I have setup forwarding rules in Gmail for emails coming from my clients. The rule would forward the email as an SMS message to my mobile phone. To do this, go to Gmail->Settings->Filter and create a new filter. Setup a filter for emails coming from your client and set the filter to forward them to your mobile’s email address (as detailed above).

Obviously if you’re abroad, this will only work if you have roaming setup.

So far, my system has worked great, and if I come up with any improvements, I’ll write a post about it. Who else is using PortableApps and how have you found it?