Rui CarmoTo kick off the year with some excitement, I flew to Dublin this week to visit partner facilities. Alas, the only thing I was able to fit into the tight schedule was nearly freezing my ears off, and there was not a leprechaun in sight.
Which was not really an issue in itself (my ears thawed readily enough), but rather the most memorable thing I can share here. And despite not being able to take advantage of all the helpful suggestions I got from my friends prior to the trip (not even for a cup of coffee, to much dismay from various quarters) it was an enjoyable enough stint. Very, hum… cloudy, in both regular and technical terms.
For travel gear I took my iPad mini, which still works splendidly as a thin client. The tight schedule meant that I was unable to do much else except take notes and catch up on e-mail, but I did use Working Copy to do some coding during the trip itself (including performing a couple of offline commits in mid-air), so my hope for the iPad as a productivity device was renewed to a fair degree.
But as a communication device, the thing is unbeatable right now. FaceTime worked flawlessly (much to the chagrin of the roaming guys, I suppose), Skype less so (but was tolerable). I was able to keep tabs on my e-mail, all forms of news and the hodgepodge of instant messaging solutions we all have to put up with these days was adequately represented and adequately useful, so all things considered it was the best device I could travel with.
Considering it was already technically obsolete by the time I bought it, that’s not bad. The only way it let me down was where it regards my reading addiction: right now I have Gibson’s The Peripheral and a couple of Erlang refreshers on top of my virtual pile (which reminds me, I decided to set up a profile on Goodreads a while back, in case you’re interested), and I still prefer reading the non-technical stuff on an e-ink display – there are simply too many potential distractions otherwise, and the type still seems crisper somehow.