ON THE ROAD

Dick Pountain/Tue 13 May 2003/1:21 pm/Idealog 106

As I write this column I'm gazing out of my window at the dark green cypresses gently nodding in the glorious sunshine of an Umbrian spring. [I need to interject a quick aside at this point: my editorial philosophy for the Real World section of this magazine permits three modes of relation to the reader, namely whingeing, gloating and explaining, which ideally ought to be kept in perfect balance. I feel I've personally been concentrating too much on whinge and explain recently, so it's time to have a bit of a gloat...]

As I was saying (cypresses, sunshine, nodding), I reflect dreamily that by now I've accumulated some considerable hard experience in mobile computing - that is, in computing from various locations. OK, it's not the same sort of experience as the travelling rep who must access the firm's database to get his prices, nor the jet-set executive who has to check her email every 5 minutes from all over the world. I compute regularly from only three different locations nowadays - London, Italy and our chairman's lovely gaff in Mustique - and the tasks involved consist of editing and proofreading the copy for the Real World section, writing this column and keeping in touch with general PC Pro office business. This requires a modest number of substantial document transfers on top of ordinary email. I also, as explained in a recent column, keep a PDA with me at all times to take notes for an ongoing book project. While it would be presumptious of me to claim the title of 'road warrior' on this basis, I have developed a certain cunning for getting and staying connected, and more important, for maintaining data integrity between locations.

That first requirement is met by using two ISPs that support global roaming pretty well in my experience, namely GRIC and AOL. I know, I know, AOL, but really it does have presence absolutely everywhere and is pretty reliable. Some will object that AOL still doesn't properly support POP3 mail but that matters not a jot to me. That's because I solve the second requirement, maintaining data integrity, by using the same mail setup from all locations and it doesn't involve either POP3 or IMAP. For around five years now I've been using a laptop as my main computer, and I take it with me wherever I'm currently working. A laptop isn't a solution if you like to play 3D games, or edit video and audio all the time (though even that's getting to be possible, as Brian Heywood recently explained) but I do none of those things. On my laptop I employ Cix as my mail system and Ameol as my mail client, telnetting in via one or the other of those two ISPs just mentioned, so my Ameol database remains perfectly in sync and up to date regardless of location.

That leaves the problem of backup to insure against the laptop being lost, stolen or, heaven forbid, struck by lightning. When I'm in London I keep a second laptop attached on a LAN, with a scheduled script that mirrors all my data in the early hours of every morning. In the other two locations I use my HP M820 portable CD Writer to incrementally back up all my data every day. These two mechanisms between them make disaster recovery possible, if not quite so convenient as when I used to take Ghost images (such images will no longer fit onto one CD). As for the PDA, a Sony Clie SL10, I've discovered the joys of Sony's neat and simple MS Backup application which mirrors the whole RAM contents to Memory Stick - with a 128Mbyte stick I can store five images on a rotating basis without feeling the pinch.

An incident that happened yesterday justified my current PDA strategy rather spectacularly. I'd just purchased an old chestnut dresser for our kitchen which was due to be delivered this morning. I'd paid a deposit but the driver would need to collect the balance, so yesterday evening I drove into Trestina to the Bancomat machine to draw out the necessary euros. After inserting my card and having it rejected I realized that, in one of those brainstorms that periodically affects old duffers like me, I was no longer sure of the PIN number. No worries mate, it's stored in my Clie, which I duly took out, switched on and stared in horror at the reset logo. I've been slacking off for the last week and had inadvertantly let its batteries go flat, to the point that the accursed device had just hard-reset itself. There was just enough juice left to show me a nice new blank address book... The bank is shut, I'm half-an-hour's drive from home and my laptop, and the driver's coming first thing. Gulp.

But only a little gulp this time thanks to the wonders of MS Backup. I pop into the hardware store and purchase four AAA batteries (€4, ouch), insert a couple and restore my last backup from the Memory Stick. There's the PIN, there's the dosh, all done and dusted. 

Are there any flies at all in this soothing informatic ointment? All I can think of right now is that whenever I arrive in a new place I invariably forget to change the location in Control Panel | Telephony so my first logon always fails due to wrong country code. Wouldn't it be nice if Microsoft put a chooser icon right on the desktop to say where you currently are, which automatically changes the time-zone and telephony codes for you?