DaedTech Digest: Our Decision to Leaf-Peep

Each Friday (Thursday night, really), I publish a digest post.  And these posts are about the slow travel life.  For instance, last week, I talked about how we pick where to go.

Today, I’m going to diverge from the normal practice answering questions people ask me about slow travel.  Instead, I’m going to announce our next expedition.  We’ve made the decision to leaf peep.

Specifically, we’re going to be heading to Vermont for the entire month of October.  The last weekend of September, we’re going to pack up all of the boats, water-things, and general lake toys.  We’re going to store everything, and then we’re going to blast out of the area, heading for the very northern part of Vermont, near the Canadian border.

As I understand it, we’ve got an AirBNB that’s both remote and scenic.  This is the perfect location from which to take in the changing leaf colors of the season.  And we’ll probably do a couple of weekend excursions to locations like Boston and Montreal.

This is the perfect instance of what I was talking about last week.  Amanda and I just started talking about fall in northern New England kind of out of nowhere.  And then we pulled the trigger.

This, “screw it, let’s go to a place,” is the essence of what I love about the remote, slow travel life.

Picks

• I’m in San Francisco (actually, San Mateo) this week, and had a style of dinner called Mongolian Hot Pot at the Little Sheep.  This is good stuff!
• If you’re in the market for sunglasses, check out SunCloud.  I’m a convert.  Historically, I used to buy really expensive polarized glasses in the vein of Oakley or Rayban.  Sun Clouds are less expensive and every bit as effective, if not more so.

The Digest

• For Hit Subscribe, we’re starting a blog as a lab of sorts.  It’s aimed at people thinking of getting into programming as a career.  I wrote a post about whether or not programmers should blog.  Spoiler alert, yes.
• For Gurock, I wrote about getting regression defects under control.
• And, finally, for NDepend, I wrote about how you should favor software products that include support in the price.

As always, everyone, enjoy your weekend.

DaedTech Digest: Picking Your Next Temporary Home

At one point of the week, I forgot what day it was.  Probably due to the US holiday last week.  But fear not.  I’ve recovered my equilibrium in time for yet another digest Friday.

Moving on from last week’s discussion of how we started slow traveling, let’s talk about perhaps the next logical subject.

How do you pick your destinations?

I wish I had a satisfying answer for this question.  I’d love to pro forma lifestyle blogger thing and lay out some complex evaluation matrix.  This would probably cross reference cost of living, seasonal trends, and a handful of other metrics that attempt to quantify happiness.  And then it would spit out, “yep, Charleston, South Carolina!”

But honestly, it doesn’t go like that at all for Amanda and me.

I’d compare our decision making process more to how we decide where to go for dinner.  There’s no conversation at all about it, and then, bam, out of nowhere “hey, do you feel like Thai food?”  When that impulse strikes, all the reasoned consideration in the world doesn’t deter you from gut feel.

So it goes with our slow travel ventures.  We’ll idly think of different places with a kind of “that might be interesting someday.”  Or, perhaps it’s destinations that would be really interesting right now, but won’t work logistically.  But there’s always one that sticks in the metaphorical craw, in a good way.

Like the Thai food, it’s out there, and you can’t send the idea back from whence it spontaneously emerged and embedded itself in your head.  It started out innocuously enough as “hey, I’ve never been to New Orleans” or “the leaves are really pretty in New England in the fall,” but it was destined for whim fulfillment.

And, that’s really it.  The only exception I can think of was a decision to spend time in Phoenix to see Cubs Spring training.  And that was because there was an obvious mission with an objective.

Picks

• We had our wedding anniversary on Wednesday, and my wife got me this awesome present: a super durable leather wallet that’s nice to the touch.
• Speaking of which, if you’re celebrating the leather anniversary with someone who doesn’t really like leather, you might be interested to know that leather roses are a thing.
• A few weeks ago, I used NordVPN to get around a series of mlb.com blackout restrictions (boo!) and it was pretty seamless to setup and use.  That type of tool has come a long way.

The Digest

As it turns out, Hit Subscribe’s growth has left me in a position where I’m writing ever-fewer blog posts myself (at least publicly, I do also handle some ghostwriting for the business).  So this week, I’ve got nothing but podcast appearances.

• An episode of the Freelancers show where we talk about making a good impression.
• Here’s another episode, where we discuss dealing with excessive communication (a subject about which I’ve also blogged).
• And, finally, an episode where we talk about working with recruiters as free agents.

As always, have a good weekend, everyone.

DaedTech Digest: How Did You Start with Slow Travel?

Happy Friday, everyone.  And time for yet another DaedTech digest.  Last week, I talked about what it’s like to settle into a home as a slow traveler.  This week, on the other hand, I’m going slightly more existential.  At least, from my personal perspective.

I’m going to talk about what gave me this idea and how it got started.  People ask me about this with some frequency.

What Put the Idea of Slow Travel into My Head?

If you exist anywhere near the union of slow travelers, entrepreneurs, freelancers, and lifestyle designers, this is going to sound incredibly trite.  Nevertheless, it’s what happened.  I got the idea from the Four Hour Work Week.  For those of you not among the set of people I’m talking about, this is trite because it’s so expected.

This book covers a lot of ground, but the salient part here is that it asks why you can’t secure some kind of remote work arrangement and then just travel for months or years at a time.  At the time I heard it (audio book), I was in the middle of some years of non-stop commuter travel as a consultant.  I was listening on flights, in rental cars, and sprawled out on hotel room beds.

And I started thinking, “hey, yeah, I could do that!”

I mean, I was already traveling all the time.  It had been over a year since I’d spent more than 4 consecutive days at home, so it wasn’t exactly a reach to be on the road.  And, it occurred to me that it didn’t really matter where my flights originated.

How Did You First Pull It Off?

The biggest barrier, at the outset, was my wife’s job.  I presented this idea to her in the summer of 2015, saying that, if she could figure out how to work remotely, we could both travel and work from anywhere we wanted (with me doing some commuter travel).

By mid-fall of that year, the idea had firmly taken root.  She quit her job, boomeranged her erstwhile employer as her initial freelance client, and became a freelance editor, working remotely.  And, just like that, it didn’t matter where we were.

A few months later, in January, a brutal chill hit the midwest, and we’d had enough.  We opened AirBNB, started meandering around the southern parts of the country, where it was warm, and then just kinda picked a place.  The location?  Covington, Louisiana, a sorta-suburb of New Orleans (it’s across Lake Pontchartrain).

We bundled up, packed up a U-haul, and headed south for 3 months.  And we’ve never looked back.

These days, I don’t do commuter travel anymore.  And these days, when we hit the road, we pack a lot lighter and are generally a lot more efficient at this whole game.  But heading out with that U-haul in tow on our first foray is an incredibly liberating and important memory for us.  And we wouldn’t trade it for the world.

Picks

• We’ve set up a 401K for Hit Subscribe through a company called Guideline.  I haven’t done anything with it just yet, but the onboarding was really simple and painless.  Definitely worth a look for small businesses.
• I’ll throw Marriott a pick.  It’s been a while since I’ve booked hotels, but I had occasion to do so yesterday.  Since my last visit, they’ve made some definite UX improvements to the logged-in experience.
• I’ve spent a lot of time at our fire pit this week, since the weather cooled off a bit.  And we have these awesome Adirondack chairs, which we’ve had for several years.  They’re the right combination of durable and comfortable for just this type of use.

The Digest

• I recently wrote a blog post for Raygun, a new Hit Subscribe client, in which I talked (with some valuable feedback from fellow authors) about server monitoring best practices.
• On the Freelancers show, I participated in an episode talking about how to write better project proposals.
• And, finally, I made a video for the Hit Subscribe youtube channel, talking about the how and why of blog topic planning.  There’s more to it than you might think.

And, as always, please have yourselves a great weekend.  It’s a holiday in the US, so enjoy 50% more weekend on the house.

DaedTech Digest: How Does Settling into a Home Go for Slow Travelers?

Well, I sure didn’t do any blog posts last week, digests or otherwise.  We were hosting some family and, frankly, my life has been pretty busy.  So I’m picking back up from two weeks ago, when I answered the question of whether we’re currently vagabonding, or what.

Today, I’ll answer a question that someone recently asked me in passing while we made small talk.  It’s a subject that I hadn’t really considered, but probably makes sense to talk about.

When You’re Slow Traveling, How Do Furniture and Settling into a New Place Work?

When most people move, it’s probably for a period of a at least a year, given standard leasing practices.  On average, it’s probably a lot longer than that.  So you pack up all of your stuff, emptying out the previous domicile.  And then you take all of that stuff and put it into your new place, which someone else emptied prior to your arrival.

So how does it work for slow travelers?  And how much stuff do we bring with?

Well, as I’ve mentioned previously on this blog, we really don’t bring much stuff with us.  For me, it’s my computers, some clothes, and some odds and ends, like Alexa devices.  Oh, and our cats.  So, to start with, we’re not taking much with us.

Every place we book (through AirBNB or VRBO) is fully furnished, which makes sense, since we aren’t bringing much.  But the place being fully furnished doesn’t mean that it’s perfectly suited for us.

Therefore, when we arrive, the first thing we do is take pictures of all furniture, rugs, decorations, etc.  We want to record how the place was when we came.  Then, since we’re going to be staying for weeks or months, we’ll move things around to our taste, to put them back only upon departure.

The only other thing worth mentioning here is that sometimes we’ll buy stuff on the spot.  A lot of places don’t have a desk adequate for my purposes, so I’ll go buy a foldable table at Walmart.  So to really make it home-away-from-home, we often have a budget of a few hundred bucks per place.

But that’s really all there is to it.

Photos like this aren’t the most fun, but they do show us where everything started:

Picks

• If you’re in the market for a CRM, Hubspot has a pretty good one.  It’s free and intuitive.
• Recently, on the Hit Subscribe blog, I talked about an experiment we were going to run in building traffic from scratch.  The site is going to be aimed at entry level programming people, but stay tuned because some veterans might find it interesting.
• This is admittedly a little childish, but apparently there’s a whole genre of videos on Youtube of old rap songs overlaid on clips of the muppets.  If you’re anything like me, you won’t regret clicking.

The Digest

• I did a post for Typemock’s blog where I addressed the business case for unit testing.
• For the Rollout blog, I wrote a post about the idea of “feature visibility.”
• On an episode of the Freelancers show, we talked about business cards and other non-digital marketing strategies.

And, as always, have yourselves a great weekend.

DaedTech Digest: So Are You, Like, Vagabonding Right Now

Hello all, and happy Friday.  As always on a Friday, it’s time for a DaedTech digest.

Last week, I answered a question lots of people ask me: how do you go for months with almost none of your stuff?   This week, though, I’ll answer a simpler question.

So, You’re in Michigan…. Do You Like, Live There, or, Is that Another Place You Travel, or, What?

In the open kimono spirit of these posts, let me talk a little bit about our living arrangements, pre-vagabonding.  In 2007, I bought a townhouse in the Chicago suburbs, which immediately proceeded to become almost worthless.  At the time of purchase, I intended to live there for maybe 3-4 years, but due to the vagaries of the real estate market, we still own that place.

While waiting for it to come back, we bought a lake house in Michigan in 2013.  We reasoned that 2013 was a great time to be a buyer and a bad time to be a seller so we, well, bought.  It was actually around this same time that I left the wage world and become a management consulting doing 100% travel.  So I stopped living in Illinois or, really, much of anywhere permanent.

My wife and I love the lake house and bought it with the intent to own it forever.  The Illinois townhouse is a thing we would prefer to sell (and have on the market, currently).  In that spirit, about a year ago, we actually changed residence and mostly vacated our possessions from Illinois.  So, in the end, we view ourselves as having a lake house and no primary residence.

And we like to spend summers at the lake house.

So, to answer the question, “are we vagabonding or do we live here or what,” it’s kind of complicated.  We’re choosing to reside somewhere because it’s fun, and it just so happens that we own the place.  But we don’t really look at it as a primary residence.

Clear as mud?  If you know us well, you now understand why it’s hard to explain our summer arrangement.  But you’d also know that this is why we love the place:

Picks

• I’ve got to do it again this week.  Come write for us at Hit Subscribe.  We’ve just signed a bunch of new clients, including some that I’ll make public soon that are .NET TDD fan favorites.  So, if you want to write for some awesome dev tools companies, fill out the form.  No blogging experience necessary — we’ll teach you.
• Speaking of Hit Subscribe, we’ve got a Facebook page, on which we’re kind of video-recording our vagabonding and Hit Subscribe-ing adventures.
• I’ve got a new tax prep/consulting firm, and they’re great.  They’re based in Michigan, but can help you anywhere in the US, as evidenced by them helping me with tax obligations in Illinois and Michigan in 2017.  Franskoviak Tax Solutions, they’re called, and they can help with tax prep for individuals and businesses as well as offering tax planning and consulting services.
• I’ve honestly been buried in work this week, doing 16 hour days.  So anything that I’ve enjoyed is a bit of a blur up until right this moment, when I’m relaxing with this tasty Lagunitas beer.

The Digest

• I wrote a post for the Test Environment Management blog that’s a little outside of my normal purview: one about test synthetics.
• Here’s a Freelancers Show episode where we talk about having “chaos clients.”
• And, finally, in one of my research posts for NDepend, I used NDepend to take a more detailed look at the code quality of Autofac.

And, as always, have a good weekend.