DaedTech

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.