Mobile office - back online
My soon to be sister-in-law (Gwen) kindly sent us her old nokia phone, as she's replaced it with something more spiffy. Our current Motorola phone sports a colour screen, polyphonic ringtones, compact design, and WAP. Oh, and the keypad glows electric blue in the dark. Gwen's old phone has a monochrome screen, monotonic ringtones, and no WAP. It's also larger and heavier? So why am I so excited about getting it?

Because the old Nokia has an infra-red port, which the oh-so-fashionable Motorola is notably missing. And given the choice between a phone which can talk to my Palm, and a phone that sounds like a slot machine paying out when it rings, I'll take the first any day.

Sure enough, within an hour of the new "old" phone arriving, I could dial in to my main server, establish a PPP connection, and fire up an ssh client to the host of my choice. Likewise, I can transfer vcards back and forth between palm and phone, rather than having to tediously enter them by hand.

Shame it doesn't play mp3s, or have a java virtual machine. I really miss that old phone.

Investment/Retirement
The whole process of min-maxing my finances is proving to be a very difficult task. I can continue working steadily for the next 8-9 years, with an incredibly stable and dull savings plan, and then live a life of luxury thereafter. That's not bad, but 9 years is a long way away.

I can work one year on, two years off. That gives me lots more free time now, but the "one year on" will be difficult. Work flows most easily when you're already too busy to take more. Switching from holiday mode to business mode is difficult when it comes to catching clients.

I can work steadily, but do something more creative with investments. This is tricky, because it's not something I'm experienced in, and past performance is not indicative of future growth. We could sink funds into buying numerous houses, trying to ride tax-effective capital gains, but that's more risky, and risk sucks. This is an area which I'll need to investigate further.