conventions and blogging...
So. I spend a lot of time on the road, and as such I often blog from a variety of places, as anyone who's followed my yearly SDCC blog will know. But this invariably means that I have to take a laptop and a ton of wires with me and over the years this has been a bit of a nightmare.
In 2006 I decided that the best plan of attack was to take my HP iPaq, a small PDA that had a wifi card stuck in the top. Back in the day I only posted on my Livejournal page, but it was easy enough to work with. The only downside was that the only place that gave me free wifi was the Horton Plaza shopping centre, and every day before the convention I would make my way down to the lower level, sit at a table and type. And of course, this became even more fun when in had to type using a small stylus, and the post was pretty much written in HTML - suffice to say by the end of the week I had missed several posts, was woefully confused as to what happened on what day and all I wanted to do was hurl the bloody thing against a wall.
The following year I bit the bullet and brought my laptop with me, a HP Pavillion. The downside with this however was that it was a) the weight of three small children and b) had a battery life of about thirty minutes. I might be lying a little here, but there were moments over be week where it damn well felt like it. And again, I had the same wifi problem. Only this time, I didn't have a stylus to worry about, just the dislocated shoulder from carrying the damn thing. I decided that I had to downscale.
And so for the last two years I have brought my Eee PC with me, a smaller computer that covers a whole load of things - it's small, light and does the job. But again it does take up a whole ton of space as the battery, although good isn't enough to, say, watch a whole plane flight's worth of video, and so I either bring a PSP or an Archos to fulfill that function, and of course all the wires and suchlike that come with it. The other problem of course with the Eee PC is, as ever, it takes a while to sit, open, restart, wait for the screen to load before checking something, although the posting has become easier now that the SDCC convention centre has started giving away free wifi in certain areas.
But this year I'm doing something different. I'm not taking a laptop, I'm taking my iPad instead. It's smaller, it's way more portable and I, as a two finger typer can work just as fast on it as I can on a full size keyboard. The quality of business apps means that I can write and connect to my DropBox account while on the move and only a Final Draft app is missing - although there are several pretenders to the throne that I can use while waiting, apps that I can use in a pinch. I can watch TV on it on the plane, it takes the same charger as my iPhone and the space it saves is incredible. But there has been one major issue of late. The Safari browser it uses, hates Rich Text boxes - which means that again, everything I type would be HTML based, which is a pain.
So, this is a test as well as a blog. I'm using an online Text Editor to take my QuickOffice document and HTMLise it, of which I then cut and paste into my blog window. Will it work? Well, if you can read this right now, it looks like it has. It means I can type up blogs over the week of San Diego.
And who knows, I might even be able to keep up the daily schedule...