On Southwest, the internet’s no longer free

by Tom Johansmeyer on

Starting tomorrow, Southwest Airlines is going to start charging for internet access on four of its planes. The fees will range from $2 to $12, based on how long you’re in the sky and how you connect. For the past few months, access has been free, but the lure of additional revenue must have been hard to resist.

Yep, another extra fee to add to the list …

Both Delta Airlines and American Airlines are planning to add internet access to more than 300 planes each, but they’re still in the early stages. The fee to connect can reach $12.95, though less on shorter flights or when you use a handheld device instead of a laptop. I tested out Delta’s offer on a flight from New York to Atlanta and had great results. If you’re looking to recapture a few hours of your professional life, the price is well worth it.

For once, there’s a fee well worth paying.

Business travelers: five pre-flight rituals

by Tom Johansmeyer on

When you take that early Monday morning flight, you know you’re kicking off a marathon. If you’re a business traveler, you’ll have five days of meetings, late nights and team dinners that deprive you of sleep, push your personal relationships to the periphery and generally dominate every ounce of your life. This is the path the business traveler has chosen. So, any measures that reduce anxiety and otherwise make life easier are priceless.

For me, this meant developing a pre-flight ritual that brought me a little more sleep-time, helped me remember to pack everything and ensured that I’d have nothing to worry about once I stepped out the door.

1. Pack to run: Don’t put off packing your bags. Get everything ready the night before, and leave your luggage by the door. Put your wallet, keys and cash in a place where you’ll remember them. I used to put them on my laptop keyboard. Since I checked my e-mail before leaving, I knew I’d see these important items.

2. Check in the day before: You’ll probably get a better seat, and you’ll save time at the airport. Print your boarding pass at home, and put it with your keys and wallet.

3. Get your cables together: Laptop power supply, iPod cable, Blackberry or cell phone charger … bundle them all up in advance. Forgetting this stuff isn’t a disaster, but it is a colossal annoyance.

4. Develop a path: Retrace your steps every Monday morning. For example: bed to coffee maker (turn it on) to shower. Grab coffee after shower, and take it to living room. Get dressed, drink coffee, check e-mail. Pack laptop, and pick up bags by the door. Leave.

5. Stick to your usual transportation: Find one town car company and learn to love it. Use it every week. The company will get to know you, leading to the predictability you crave. And, as it develops a track record with you, you’ll trust it more. That’s one less thing to worry about!

Building your own travel proof laptop — a step by step guide

by Grant Martin on

The x60s is my fourth generation travel laptop and at this point, I have my laptop system down. Far have I traveled around the world with my Thinkpads, starting with my 240 in Vietnam and evolving up to an x20, x30, x40 and finally an x60.

Fact of the matter is, everyone can use a cheap, lightweight throwaway laptop these days. As long as it runs an internet browser, plays MP3’s and you can upload photos to it, it’s a great alternative to taking your $1600 Macbook into the Amazon and dropping it into piranah infested waters.

Is the solution really in a new fangled netbook though? It’s true that you can get a fancy Acer, Dell or IBM netbook straight off the shelf for $250. New shiny objects can be a blessing and a curse though — many of those units are difficult to modify, some of them are complex and all of them are going to be eye catching to potential thieves.

Instead let Gadling take you through the steps of putting together a good, reliable computer for very little cost, using recycled parts and software from the web and saving you a bundle. With a few tweaks you can make it modular and interchangeble, so that if you drop it in the water or run it over with your rental car (this has happened to me) you can still probably save your data. And If you play your cards right, you can put the entire package together for $150 or so.
Hardware

The CPU: $25 – $125

First, you’re going to need to invest on a laptop on which your foundation will be built. They call these “barebones” systems in the computer world, with only the bare essentials to get your system operating.

You’ll want something small, lightweight, not too complicated and cheap. This can be any brand, but you want it to have at least Pentium III processor over 400MHz or so. Under that point it gets difficult to run an operating system, web browser and Java or Flash (ie, Youtube.) My personal choice is among the IBM X series of notebooks, with the X20 as the lowest vintage machine you want to invest in. With enough RAM you might be able to get away with a 240X as well, but it’ll be close — and there are other problems with that unit as well, so let’s skip it.

Asus and Acer both are fairly easy-to-work-with brands as well, you just need to keep your minimal requirements, sizes and weights in mind. Older Dells, on the other hand, are frequently difficult to disassemble, so you may want avoid them. Apples suffer from the same problem.

You can invest in a laptop in any state of repair that you choose. Starting on ebay, you can pick out systems with no hard drive, memory or battery and a la carte your accessories as you see fit. In a way, this is an advantage because now you have more control over your project.

Expect to spend anywhere from $25 – $150 on the CPU. As an example, two barebones X20 laptops just finished up on ebay for $25 plus $10 shipping.

Memory: $10

You’ll want at least 128MB of memory in your machine to run Firefox, and since it’s so inexpensive, get at least 256MB. Just make sure you get the right type of memory (pc100, pc133, pc2700 etc) or else it won’t fit in your laptop. Go to the product page for your laptop’s manufacturer when you start building to see what variety you want.

Hard Drive: $40 – $100

The hard drive is where you’ll store all of your data from the trip, so you want to make this as robust as possible. Using an off the shelf 20GB IDE is inexpensive and fast, but it’s also got the highest probability of failure because it’s got moving parts. Instead, consider two options:

Solid State Drives (SSDs) consume lower energy and are sturdier against shock and damage. The technology is still fairly new though, so to get an IDE SSD it can cost over $100. But they’re a great alternative to a moving drive, and my last two notebooks have run swimmingly with them.

Alternatively, consider using the combination of an IDE converter and a Compact Flash (CF) or Secure Digital (SD) card. You can get an IDE conveter with an 8GB SD drive combo on ebay for less than $40 shipped. Think 8GB is too small for you? Is it really? If you’re just using the computer to surf the web, write up a few documents and store some photos, you should be able to get away with 8GB or even 2GB without much strain. Heck, if necessary, you can bring another 8GB USB thumb drive with you.

The best part about using a flash card as you hard drive is that the data is portable. If you drop your laptop at the airport, kick it across the street or run over it with your scooter, chances are that the SD or CF card is in tact. Pick that card out, stick it in your change pocket and bring it to a cyber cafe and you’ve got all of your data back. Or, buy another identical laptop off of ebay for $50, put the hard drive in and forget anything happened.

Afraid you’ll drop your notebook in the water? Try getting a waterproof SD card.

WiFi capability: $20

First, check to make sure if your laptop has internal WiFi built in. If it doesn’t, see if it has the capability. Many units come with a WiFi slot and no card installed. You can get a new one on ebay for $10. If you don’t have internal wireless capabilities, you can get a PCMCIA wireless card for about $20 (search “PCMCIA wireless” on ebay.)

Battery: $20 – $40

Depending on your model, a new battery on ebay will run you around $30. Don’t get a new battery from your local Best Buy or direct from the manufacturer. They’ll just rip you off.

Software

Installing a proper operating system and software can be tricky. Effectively there are three routes you can take:

Buy it: $80 upward
At the very least, you need an operating system like Windows 2000 or Windows XP to run on your notebook. You can buy clean versions of these on ebay for around $80 or you could just

Dowload it
Which is basically stealing. So I’ll let you follow up on that if you want to.

Use Open Source Software
Operating systems like Ubuntu and Fedora have made expensive operating systems a thing of the past. You just have to come to terms with your fear and give them a try. Fact of the matter is, system slike Ubuntu are so well engineered and logical that they work just like Windows — you just click on the appropriate icons and run your programs — so the learning curve is fairly shallow. The installation process, furthermore, is just as easy. Which brings us to:

Installing your operating system
All of the above operating systems and example notebooks support a full install by just dropping a CD into the drive and booting. The problem is, none of the above notebooks have CD-ROM drives. You’ll need to find a friend with an external USB CD-ROM drive, buy one yourself or get crafty to get figure out how to install without the hardware. The latter is doable, but chances are that if you can figure out how to do that you don’t need to be reading this article.

Aside from the operating system, you’ll want to install the basics to keep your computer running, Firefox, Macromedia Flash and Open Office (a free alternative to MS Office) as well as some basic drivers depending on your CPU.

Summary

So what have we got?

$50 — CPU
$10 — Memory
$50 — Hard Drive
$20 — Wireless
$30 — Battery
$0 — Software

$160 — Total. That’s still $90 less than most netbooks on the market. Along the way? You’ve put together your own computer, ensured that you’ve got the best value for your dollar and finished an amazing project. Pat yourself on the back, you just created your own modular travel notebook.

Guilt-free vacation, part II: free your inner workaholic

by Tom Johansmeyer on

If you haven’t read the earlier installments in this series, check them out:

Once you’re up to speed, check out the latest round of tips below. Here are even more ways to work yourself to the bone while you are (supposedly) on vacation while minimizing the impact on your family.

1. Bribery
Hopefully, you earn per hour more than your spouse can spend. Hand over the credit cards, and unleash your family on the mall, local shops or spa. Bite the bullet.

2. Encourage relaxation
Suggest that your spouse take a long bath or shower. Emphasize the great smell of the soaps and shampoo. Then, use that time to scratch your workaholic itch. If all goes well, you could buy yourself an hour with your laptop.

3. Bigger is not better
Devices are easier to hide than laptops. If you have an iPhone or Blackberry that’s hooked into your corporate e-mail account, take advantage of it.

3a. Leave the laptop at home
This is easy if you move all your necessary work files to your handheld device. Then, you can make a point that you made the profound sacrifice of not taking your laptop with you.

4. Phone ringers = busted
When the phone rings, you know you’re going to get caught. Vibrate is better, but you still run the risk of being heard. Instead, set your phone to silent and look for missed calls. Then, check your voicemail while you’re in the bathroom.

5. Read your voicemail
Voicemail transcription applications like PhoneFusion, Youmail and Simulscribe solve the problem of having to buy time to disappear and make a call. Reading rather than dialing and listening is much less intrusive.

Good luck out there, and don’t get caught! Do you have any other tips? Leave a comment, and help your fellow workaholics.

Guilt-free vacation, part I: free your inner workaholic

by Tom Johansmeyer on

If you haven’t read about how to screw-off and look good while you’re on vacation, check out yesterday’s article. This is what you’re up against. The workaholic invests even vacation time in career success, and to look like that white-collar stud, you need to deliver beyond the appearances of your lazy, poseur coworkers.

But, you will.

When you get to the office, you see opportunities rather than work. You feel high when you pull the proverbial bunny from a hat. You love this shit. You live by it. You need it.

Your family, on the other hand, has no interest in your latest corporate conquest while you’re supposed to be playing water volleyball with them. They get angry because you can’t get away from your Blackberry. They love you, and they want to spend time with you.

So, you need a plan.

The next two days are for you. The Gadling team has come up with some amazing ways to work your ass off while you’re supposed to be relaxing without incurring wrath from spouse or child. As always, leave a comment and share your ideas. There’s got to be some great stuff out there.

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1. Use the plane wisely
This one’s obvious but important. While you are en route to your destination, you have a rare chance to get away with working when there are no competing priorities. Use it.

2. Build layovers into your travel plans
This is free work time! Pick up a wireless connection, and plug into a power outlet while the kids find an ancient Pac-Man machine. Bring plenty of quarters with you.

3. Get up early; go to bed late
When nobody else is awake, you aren’t depriving them of your time. Block of an hour or so at the beginning and end of every day. You’ll be able to crank out some great stuff for the office, and nobody in the room with you will care.

4. Piss frequently
When you dash into the bathroom, you have a few minutes to pluck away at your Blackberry. Drink a lot of water to add credibility. The easiest lies to maintain are actually truths.

5. Smoker, non-smoking room
Not only do they smell better, non-smoking rooms give you a chance to step outside for a bit. Bring your laptop. To get the most from this approach, also bring a cigar … a big one.

6. Waiting in line
Need to kill 45 minutes at Disney World? Take a call; work your Blackberry; review a document. There’s nothing else to do anyway. Bonus points: time your arrival at a long line to coincide with a conference call.

7. Set expectations up front
If there are some pressing issues at the office that you just can’t avoid, prepare the family. Let your spouse know that you may have to duck out for a bit. Be as specific as possible (e.g., provide conference call times). Don’t get greedy, though. Keep the calls to a minimum.

8. Look like you’re relaxing
Print documents you’ll need and bring them to the pool or beach. Tuck them in a magazine. Vanity Fair is thick enough that you can “lose” almost anything in it.

9. Forward your e-mail
If you can’t access your corporate e-mail account from the road, have it forwarded to your personal account. Let your colleagues know that they can reach you this way and to expect to hear from you using a different address.

10. Make all day “think time”
Take notes on your projects before you leave. Review them in the morning, and take the entire day to mull them over. You can be productive without looking like you’re working.

If you need more than this, fear not. Tomorrow, we’ll bring a few more tips to you. Before you know it, your family will think you can cut your ties to the office, and none of your coworkers will realize you aren’t at your desk.

Have you seen yesterday’s post yet?