Thumb Drive Bliss
- February 26th 2008
- Uncategorized
After my Technology Fiasco last week I’ve been thinking about different approaches to telecommuting that do not involve a heavy laptop. My first solution, of course, would be to get one of the new MacBook Air laptops whose commercials have sparked that all-too-American feeling of DESIRE FOR CONSUMPTION in me. This is not reasonable. They are more than $1,000 dollars. So until my online presence takes off and I start making big bucks, I’ve got to figure out a more appropriate way to have a portable office.
Why a portable office? Aside from the fact that I haven’t been able to find an office job and I don’t know where we’ll be living 3 months from now, a portable office makes sense because of the travel opportunities it affords. If my office is portable, I no longer am chained to a desk. If I’m no longer chained to a desk, I no longer have to be located any specific place. If I don’t have to be located in a specific place, why should I be residing anywhere I don’t want to be or can’t afford to be? If I want to I can work in Tonga, Africa or California. Or rather, any place in between. This is the real draw of the portable office.
My goal- Thumb Drive Bliss. Dave at Go Backpacking.com has gotten his website and internet responsibilities down to only a thumb drive. His success is what inspired me that I might be able to live without a new laptop immediately. That and a friend pointed out to me that the MacBook Air is basically a HUGE thumb drive with a screen. That’s why it’s so cool and so light. RAM technology that exists in a solid-state drive instead of a traditional harddrive. This is where I’d been seeing my thumb drive in an incorrect light.
Ever since I started using one, I’ve used it solely as a floppy disk would have been used. For temporary storage between two computers. This is how I’ve been limiting myself. In actuality it is much more like an additional hard drive that is plugged into the makeup of the computer. Like an external hard drive such as an iBook that holds backup or extra data. Why is this different?
Theoretically, if the thumb drive is large enough, I can store application data on there and not just files. My Firefox application, my word processing application, my Excel application, my photo editing application. Then all that need be done is run those applications off of the thumb drive instead of the computer’s hard drive. If the thumb drive is big enough, this eliminates the need for a laptop when there are internet cafes to be found.
Does anyone out there use a thumb drive for their work? How do you like it? Anyone else use a portable office?
favorited this one, bro