- In Cuernavaca, the city of “The neverending spring”… #
All posts in New York
What happened on my twitter this week…
Going On A Carbon Diet
Eco2 Widget is a mobile and desktop app to get your carbon eating habits under control. Sure you don’t gain weight from carbon but you do harm the Earth and we all agree – the Earth is in dire need of a carbon diet. Like all diets, it requires a lifestyle change. The Eco2 widget not only monitors carbon affluents between all your devices but also educations and recommends little things you could do to help Earth get slimmer cleaner. There’s even a reward system built-in for digital money and to plant trees.
Designers: Jinok Kim & Sanghee Ryu
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What happened on my twitter this week…
- On his way to Mexico with Schatzi! 12 days of sunshine, micheladas y playa… #
- Updated Nokia Point & Find: Real-time mobile discovery now available globally on most S60 devices http://bit.ly/8ALuKw (via feedly) #
- Nokia gets Spotify mobile phone music app | News | TechRadar UK http://bit.ly/6Eow3D (via feedly) #
- Nokia N900 drops to $480 on Amazon http://bit.ly/aUYTZ #
- Finland unleashes Blobo, the squeezable, all-too-cheerful game controller, on an unsuspecting world http://bit.ly/5VS8hv #
- Experienced in Innsbruck: a tramway stopped to let me cross the street!! There’s nowhere else on earth where I’ll see that… Or not? #
What happened on my twitter this week…
- in Innsbruck! A beautiful city surrounded by mountains and a 360° breathtaking panorama… I love this place! #
Spending a (wonderful) night at the airport
New-York City, John F. Kennedy International Airport, February 10th 2017. 9.00pm - “Attention to all passengers of the KLM flight KL0644: Due to the current bad weather conditions over the Atlantic your flight to Amsterdam Schiphol has been delayed to further notice. We expect the next flight to take-off tomorrow morning at 8.00am. KLM thanks you for your understanding and wishes you a pleasant night in John F. Kennedy International Airport.”
Such an announcement in 2009 would trigger a wave of panic and distress among travellers waiting for their flight, and a comment like “KLM [...] wishes you a pleasant night in John F. Kennedy International Airport” would be more than inappropriate considering the context.
Thanks God we’re in 2017 and Airports waiting lounge don’t look like what they looked in 2009.
For the past 10 years, engineers have been working on projects of small individual resting rooms which could provide travellers, moments of quiet sleep and rest from the city without wasting their time searching for a hotel. Such projects, like SLEEPBOX to name the most significant, have started to emerge a few years ago in places like Airports, Railroad stations, Expocentres, Accommodation facilities and even in Public and shopping centers.
Thanks to those revolutionary infrastructures, any person now has an opportunity to spend the night safely and cheaply in case of emergency, or when they have to spend a few hours waiting for their flight or train with their luggage. Most of those resting rooms provide their users with a basic service: a soft 2×0.6 m bed equipped with automatic change of bed linen system, a ventilation system, a built-in LCD TV screen, WiFi access, electric plugs with built in adaptors and a system that darkens all the windows of this pod to give its user a minimum intimacy. And it is possible to use the service from 15 minutes to several hours.
Just like those public restrooms we could find in many developed countries at the end of the last decade, those resting pods are fully automated. After the clients exit his room, automatic change of bed linen starts and quartz lamps turns green to report that the pod is clean and free for use. Payment can be made on a shared terminal, which provides the client with a disposable electronic key or access key sent to his smartphone.
Sleeping the night over in one of those rooms has turned, for most passengers, to be more convenient and cheaper than a regular hotel room. Since the majority of pods are located near boarding gates, passenger can wait until the very last moment to comfortably board their flight. An unforgettable night before an unforgettable flight on board one of KLM’s brand new WB-1010 “Spruce Whale”.
I can tell now that I don’t fear any more to book this 8am morning flight since I can spend the night on site.
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SLEEPBOX
Area: 3.75 m2
architects: Goryainov A., Krymov M.
Design: 2009 – Arch Group
***
Too bad we’re only in 2009? Maybe, but at least you can tell one day your kids or grandchildren that once in your live you ended-up sleeping on a bench like a homeless.
Still need some info to spend a pleasant night in your favorite airport? Check The Guide to Sleeping in Airports, The worst, and best, airports to sleep in
50 Reasons for You to Choose a Digital Nomad Way of Life
On November 10, 2009
In Bora Bora, Featured, Headline, picture of the week, telework, travel
With 1 Comment
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And the teacher asked the children what they wanted to be when they’re grown-up. At age five or six, such an easy question merely insult their intelligence. Without careful consideration or hesitation all of them squeaked back something along the lines of, “I’m going to be a doctor”, “an astronaut!”, “I want to be the president!”, “I would like to be a teacher”, “I’m gonna be a queen with a purple crown and a castle made of glitter and my cat, Miss Kitty, can be a princess“. This last input caused less disturbance than my own answer.
- “I want to be a digital nomad”
The teacher stared at me disturbed and upset. She probably wondered what was wrong with this kid and if my parents where some kind of hippies, nerds or communists.
This morning I read one of the most interesting posts about being a mobile worker I’ve read in a long time. It was only 215 words long but the beautiful images it featured said it all about what you get when you manage to get free from this static place called “office”. And those images reminded me once again why I chose to live that life of Digital Nomad. And because we’re human, words are often not enough; we sometimes need impacting images to trigger a spark in those 4% of that little thing called “brain” to make us realize what we’re missing.
Of course, when you work anywhere but from an office there are a lot of advantages: you can organize your time as you want it, work when you’re the most efficient (early in the morning or late at night), take care of your kids when they need to be taken care of, avoid rushours (on the road, at the supermarket or at the sportcenter), save money on telecommutes (and give a break to the environment…) and preserve your mental health by working in a less stressful environment you can adapt to your personal and physiological needs. That’s not all, but that’s not bad either.
Obviously, nothing is perfect in this life, and there are drawbacks. But the fact that I can work wherever I want to work from is far superior to any cumulated advantages (call it better pay check, quicker promotion, hot technological tools, funny co-workers or yearly company offsite) I’ll get by working in an office.
There is a WORLD and a life outside. A big, beautiful, colorful and accessible world. This is what I (re) discovered when I watched those pictures in “50 Photos to Inspire Life as a Digital Nomad”.
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And when you spend 8 to 10 hours a day working in an office, what will you really see of that world and taste of that life? Okay, you might tell yourself that you’ll keep that for when you will be doing some tourism during your next summer holidays and that it’s well enough (do you actually believe that?). Maybe that will please “the commons”, but will you ever feel the real essence of those things around you and live them for real*? You also might end up pissed at me and think that after all you’re happier than I am. Maybe, I don’t know.
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When you’re free to choose what you want to see from your “office” window, travel the world while earning a living, standing for real in the middle of those postcard-like landscapes, knowing that as soon as you get bored from a place and “lose the inspiration” you can get a train, a plane, a car (or, please, any green transportation!) to another place, enjoy from that summer holiday house you’ve been renovating for some years, then and only then you’ll have the deep feeling at the end of the day that you fully live your life.
Remember that there are thousands of jobs opportunities available for mobile workers and freelancers and that there is at least one waiting for you. It is never too late to change your way of working.
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***
While writing this post I realized once again how lucky I was to live this life, and that there is an infinity of possibilities to live and work anywhere in this world when you’re “office-free”. “Anywhere”? I should say “everywhere” as the concept itself of mobile worker implies that
So I thank you again Corbett Barr for reminding me why I chose to live this marvellous life of a digital nomad. If you liked the pics Corbett put together, you might also like those Kerolic, another digital nomad (not totally emancipated from the traditional-office-cubicle system – but this is just a question of time…) took along his various journeys around the world.
Other websites of interest to turn dreams into reality:
Freelance job offers on Elance and Guru
64 Ways Location Independent People Earn a Living by Corbett Barr
List of companies hiring telecommuter
***
*I’m not too fond of that thing I’d call “fast-food-like-travelling”. Flying 13 hours to spend a week (or two) in a place I’ve never been before, and actually believe that I’ll have the guts to say “I know that place” because I’ve been there, tried a couple of local gastronomic specialities and took some pictures to prove my facebook friends (or to boast?) that I was actually there, is not for me. Sometimes you’ll learn more about a place by reading a good book than actually getting there; this week-end I made an impressive travel like never before: I discovered Calcutta after reading Dominique Lapierre’s s The City of Joy. Unforgettable.
What happened on my twitter this week…
- Welcome To The Company, Here’s Your 1980s Cubicle http://bit.ly/3paFx7 (via feedly) #
- thinks twhirl rocks http://www.twhirl.org/ #
Is Workshifting In Our DNA? [by workshifting.com]
On November 2, 2009
In Featured, Headline, How to, investigation/survey, telework, trend
With No Comments
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Two weeks ago Inga Rundquist of workshifting.com shared a very interesting and comprehensive review of the personality and competencies of workshifters (understand “mobile workers”), in which she details the characteristics of the modern mobile worker and the psychological challenges of mobile working itself vs office working.
A must read if something inside you tells you that you should leave your sad little cubicle or noisy and full of juicy gossips open-space…
***
Is Workshifting In Our DNA?
By Inga Rundquist on October 16, 2009
“I traveled back to Iowa a few weeks ago for some meetings, and ended up workshifting out of 
my parents’ house in a small town in Eastern Iowa for a couple days. I worked side by side with my dad, who has been running German Sense, an import business for German books, music and games, out of our home for the past 10 years. It got me wondering – is the ability to work remotely something that you can learn or is it inherently part of who we are?
Before I became a Workshifter, I worked for a company that was affected by the floods that ripped through Eastern Iowa in the summer of 2008. The office was literally under water, and as a result, staffers worked remotely from their homes while the space was rebuilt. During this phase it immediately became clear that some were simply not – by temperament, psychology or personality type – wired for this type of arrangement.
Unexpected? Not really. It’s clear that certain personality traits are needed to thrive in a remote workplace. Most people would agree that Workshifters are go-getters who tend to be motivated, organized, highly adaptable, disciplined and independent. But beyond that, are there certain competencies that can be learned?
In 2007, a company called Pearn Kandola was commissioned by Cisco to explore the characteristics of the modern mobile worker and the psychological challenges of mobile working. The study, Understanding and Managing the Mobile Workforce, revealed that unlike personality traits, which are relatively stable over time, an individual’s competencies can develop and improve with experience.
The findings outlined 9 core competencies required of the mobile worker:
- Communication – Workshifters need to “be adaptable in the way they initiate and respond to communications.” They also need to make their messages more explicit than traditional messages and select the appropriate channel to communicate with the intended receiver. This is opposed to an office-based worker, who is surrounded by people and as a result communicates in a more natural way.
- Achievements and result orientation – Workshifters need to be highly self-motivated. Office workers, on the other hand, have people around them who “monitor and ‘push’ them on.”
- Customer focus – While office-based workers don’t tend to spend as much time facing customers, remote workers spend a lot of time “going between clients, seeking clients out and working at client premises.”
- Teamwork – Workshifters take part in less collaborative work than office-based workers, who tend to work predominantly in teams.
- Planning and organizing – Key planning skills for Workshifters include priority setting, multi-tasking and time management. Office workers, on the other hand, need to plan, “but on a more basic level and not so far in advance” because there is less risk and fewer contingencies.
- Commercial and business awareness – Workshifters need to be independent enough to take action when commercial opportunities arise, since there is often no one around to check with. Because of an abundance of support, office workers have more opportunity to check with others before decisions are made.
- Flexibility and adaptability – Office-based workers are much more likely to work in a more routine role, while Workshifters need to be able to cope with changes on a much more frequent basis.
- Problem solving – Workshifters are much more likely to suffer from non-work related problems (such as IT or travel) that they have to solve independently, while office workers tend to have more options for support.
- Building relationships – Workshifters need to make it a priority to build relationships – and trust – with clients and colleagues. For office workers this occurs more naturally due to proximity.
I highly recommend reading the full findings of this report for anyone who is thinking about becoming a Workshifter or is managing a remote workforce.”
What happened on my twitter this week…
- 20 Amazing Pumpkin Carvings http://bit.ly/2wSdk5 (via feedly) #
- How To Share & Synchronize Research Data To Other Computers http://bit.ly/XyYJ0 (via feedly) #
- It’s time to reinvent the business card http://bit.ly/1n0Nd3 (via feedly) #
Internet Speeds and Costs Around the World
“Internet access everywhere” or at least in major cities in developed countries, is something we almost take for granted. Wherever we are today, we expect to be able to find this salutary buoy to the outer world, lost in the middle of this ocean of reality (as opposed to virtuality). And finding the right Wifi hot spot (aka free and fast) is the absolute condition to a fun and productive day of work outside of the office.
However it seems that we don’t all compare too well Worldwide. This awesome infographic below shows the internet costs and speeds around the world for the top 20 nations in the ITIF Broadband Rankings.
Number one is, predictably, Japan, where the average broadband speed is 60mbps and they pay $0.27 per 1mbps! It wouldn’t be that nasty to be a mobile worker in the country of the rising sun!
I’m just happy that I’m not living in Mexico or Turkey, where the price of the Internet is literally obscene! I’m though wondering what is the actual monthly fee for 1mbps in China… Probably high too, as expensiveness is even a more effective way than censorship to limit the access of the masses to the Internet.
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via Gizmodo