#travel

Working Out While Traveling

I travel a fair bit for work, and have historically let it affect (read: completely stop) any sort of fitness routine I might have going at home. Normally I try to get to the gym 2-3 times a week, and do whatever is the WOD at my CrossFit (Sprint) gym. When traveling, I just let it slide normally, and then try to get back into a routine when I get home.

This last week, I was in Florida for the week and decided to try to get in a bit of a workout. I made up my own minimal CrossFit-ish routine that I could do in a park on my own, with no equipment. Here’s what I ended up doing (2 days in a row):

10 up-and-back; air squats, pushups, and “box jumps”, with a 2 minute break at 10. Light run for ~5 minutes.

So I started with 1 squat, 1 pushup, one box jump (onto the side of a brick flower bed), then 2… up to 10. Rest for 2 minutes. 9 squats… back down to 1 (for a total of 100 of each). After that, I rested for another 2 minutes, then finished off with a light jog around the park I was working out in. The whole thing only took about half an hour, and fit perfectly into my schedule. It was a really nice break from otherwise sitting in a conference room all day, every day, and hopefully will make it easier to get back into my normal routine next week.

4 years on Automattic

On this day, 4 years ago, I started full time with Automattic. This is my 4th Automattiversary.

I had already been on trial for 5 months by that point (since January), and had a good feel for the company and the other Automatticians. I knew it was where I wanted to be. So I accepted the offer, and became a fully-fledged member of a relatively small team (I was employee number 35) that was bringing blogging to the people (amongst other things).

In the four years since then, a lot has happened and changed.

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On Internet Addiction and Connectivity Bubbles

If there’s one thing that travel has done for me lately, it’s made me recognize and accept how addicted and reliant I am upon my smart phone (in my case, an iPhone).

When you travel (internationally), you have to make a hard choice — do I shell out big $$$ to AT&T to get an international data plan, do I shell out even bigger $$$ to use roaming data, or do I sever the umbilical and disable roaming data. Roll the dice on being able to get wifi. Or worse yet — don’t use the internet at all. Gasp.

Traveling with others, I get this feeling that some people who don’t get an international plan are hopping from connectivity bubble to connectivity bubble, holding their breath in between and hoping they make it to the next one alive. There’s a sense of relief when they can get back online. Check Twitter. Check email. Check in. Check a map. OK, now hold your breath and hope we can find somewhere else with wifi before it’s too late!

I’ve found myself more and more often opting to not get any data access at all, and to actually relish the experience of not having connectivity for the most part. When I was in Chile, it was rough at first, not having access to maps, Google, etc. But I got used to it. It was like taking a step back in time. I talked to people. I used a paper map. It wasn’t so bad. It turns out that not having connectivity to the world wide web forces you to live in… the world right in front of you.

That’s not a bad thing. Try it.

Buenos Aires For The Weekend

When we originally planned our trip down here, there were 2 places at the top of our list. Santiago and Buenos Aires. Santiago won out by a hair, but BsAs was right up there. After copious amounts of harassment from Robin, I finally gave in, and we picked up some cheap tickets to duck over there for the weekend. For Christmas. I’ll comment on the sanity of that in a minute, but here are some general notes from our Christmas weekend in Buenos Aires!

The Andes, From Above

The Andes, flying from Santiago to Buenos Aires

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Santiago, Week One

We’ve been here for over a week now, and it already feels relatively familiar and normal (in a good way), and we’re getting our feet under us. We’ve been lucky enough to spend some time with a string of different folks who we somehow managed to get connected up with (all connections from before we got here), and we’ve done some more tourist things, plus started getting some real work done.

These updates are as much for my memory as for any interest they may (or may not) be to other folks, so I don’t doubt that they will bore a lot of you to tears. This is a big one…

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On Cafe Working

Since arriving in Santiago, I’ve been posed with the challenge of finding good locations to work from. I like to work from cafes, which I refer to as “cafeworking”. Whether you’re traveling or just wanting to get out of the house for the day though (assuming you work from home, like I normally do), your selection criteria are probably similar either way. I decided that I’d document some of the things I look for when I’m trying to find a good place to work for the day. Feel free to add your own criteria in the comments.

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