Month: April 2014

Following sports as a nomad

One early struggle with not having a television came when trying to watch a baseball or hockey game. For starters, Airbnb rarely feature TVs that receive useful channels, nor do hotels.

I solved most of the problem with an Apple TV and subscriptions to MLB.tv and NHL Center Ice, save nationally-broadcast and playoff games. This was particularly vexing during last year’s MLB playoffs while I was in San Francisco.

Thankfully, there exist services such as Adfreetime and Unblock.us, like VPNs, that circumvent geolocation restrictions. Their advantage is that rather than routing both the location check and video stream through their servers as a VPN does, only the geolocation request is intercepted. The result is a smoother streaming experience.

Remembering Where I’ve Been

As I wrote about yesterday, colleagues struggled to track my whereabouts, so I created https://whereis.ethitter.com/ for real-time updates.

I’ve since discovered that my coworkers aren’t the only ones who can’t track my movements–I found myself struggling to remember where I’d been at a certain points as well. Borrowing the idea from Philip Arthur Moore, I created a WordPress plugin that uses a custom post type to record my travel history. The end result is at http://ethitter.com/timeline/.

I haven’t released the plugin yet, but if there’s interest, I’ll clean it up and post it to GitHub.

Tracking A Nomad’s Whereabouts

One of the unique challenges I encounter as a nomad who also leads a team is accessibility, both to my team and my coworkers in general. While I can predict when my team will be working based on their locations, they cannot do the same for me.

Following a rather entertaining conversation in which I asked a coworker about the weather where he lives and he couldn’t respond in kind, I created https://whereis.ethitter.com/. Currently it’s just a series of scheduled posts, but I would eventually like to tie it either to TripIt or Foursquare. As it happens, I’m running Beau Leben’s excellent Keyring Social Importers, so I already have data from those services accessible within the multisite installation that runs all of my sites.

Are there other, non-homegrown, solutions to accomplish the same? I’ve found a few, but all try to do too much for my needs. One of these days, I suppose I’ll get around to leveraging the data I already have so I can automate this process.

If you travel frequently, have you encountered the same problem? How did you address it?

My Love Affair With Scenic Drives

Perhaps it’s because I grew up in New Hampshire and had to drive everywhere, often on bucolic country roads. It could’ve been the boredom-induced exploration of a state just-moved-to, one with relatively few urban areas. Or perhaps it’s the experience of rounding a corner on a winding road and being confronted with overwhelming natural beauty. I’m not sure what is the genesis of my insatiable desire to drive long distances to experience natural beauty, but I also don’t mind that California is replete with options to satisfy my needs.

Continue reading My Love Affair With Scenic Drives

Decades

Three decades gone, here’s to three more.

I’m not much for celebrating to begin with, milestones are infrequent these days, and age often bears influence on little, so as my boyfriend and I drive the California coast today, I can’t think of another place I’d rather be or anything I’d rather be doing at this moment.