Sunday, February 25, 2007

Computerless ... Withdrawal and Fix ...

Day 2 ... suffering from severe tablet withdrawal .. the anxiety is extreme and driving me to find other ways to alleviate the fear of falling ... enough drama ..

Here is how I have used the net to function as my puter away from my tablet ... I am using netvibes to create a super info page that I have my gmail, ebay, news, weather, rss feeds, and remember the milk listing ... this is my daily start page and command center ... from here I can get a good picture of what's happening and what is needed todo ....

I have found that while I do not have my primary machine I download docs and sheets to my google account and keep them there for download when I get my baby back ... I can also work on the items along with create new ones and store them online for now ... this will work great on trips as I can then synch them down ... this is where the second portion of the functionality comes in ... I have a flash drive with all my current and needed docs, spreadsheets and mind maps ... if I need to get anything, I mount the flash and upload to google (zoho or thinkfree also) to work on them ... if I need to work disconnected, my drive has copies of open office on it and I can use the drive like a standalone machine for light duty work (keeping all on a portable drive using portable apps keeps everything secure) ...

The MindMeister app works great as the final link in my work chain ... it does a great job of manipulating maps (I can even upload current maps from my drive) .. when I want to use them on my main machine there is an export to rtf file which can then be imported for work in MindManager .... works like a charm as I had to think through a project yesterday and the setup worked beautifully ....

All in all, I am feeling less anxious now and glad I am going through this exercise ... having to make do and see it fall together like this creates a nice safety net (I use a real time mirror on my tablet, so all data is effectively archived on an external hard drive) ....

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