Are you a parent traveling on business? Here are 13 tips for taking the kids
.27.10 | 1 Comment »
October 27th, 2006 by Alex
I’ve recently become an adventurer in the world of business travel with baby — in this case, our son, now almost 4 months old. He’s now attended three different conferences, and from these experiences I’ve gleaned a few bits of wisdom that I wanted to capture and share:
- Think twice. Business travel is WAY easier without a kid, so don’t undertake it unless you really need to. That said, don’t let the challenges of business travel dissuade you from doing what’s best for your own work and family — particularly if traveling with your child will allow you to continue providing the benefits of breastfeeding.
- Start small. My first conference-with-kid experience was an informal, local, one-day event (let’s hear it for BarCamp Vancouver!) that let me alpha test our baby’s ability to quietly endure a meeting before I braved taking him on the road.
- Know your kid. Think about whether he or she can be quiet in meetings, and also whether you can meet her needs (for food, entertainment, and attention) while in a business setting. I happen to have a very easy and quiet baby, but I sure wouldn’t bring my three-year-old to one of these things. And since kids are constantly changing, you need to re-think your kid’s road-worthiness before each and every trip.
- Defer to your colleagues. If you’re attending a conference or client meeting with your kid, make sure to put your colleagues’ comfort first. Identify a location where you can nurse or entertain your kid if he starts to cry or disturb the proceedings.
- Buddy up. At the last conference I attended I was lucky to have a buddy — the lovely Katrin Verclas — who jumped in to lend a hand. Katrin volunteered to hold the baby at a few key moments, including dinnertime (my first two-handed dinner in months!!) Having the support of a buddy made all the difference to my experience.
- Forewarned is forearmed. Let meeting organizers or clients know if you’ll be bringing your kid, and give them a chance to tell you if their setting is not child friendly. When I attended the fabulous Online Community Summit, I checked with conference organizers before registering; their welcoming attitude helped me feel comfortable about participating. After the success of that venture, I didn’t worry about forewarning the folks at the Blog Business Summit; they’ve been fantastically accommodating, but I’m sure they’d have appreciated a chance to consider the challenges in advance.
- Scale your expectations. If you attend a conference with your kid, be prepared to miss big chunks of presentations and social events so that you can step out and attend to your kid’s needs.
- Scale your budget. Be prepared to spend more money than you usually would to make your trip as easy as possible — stay at the nearest hotel, get valet parking, order room service. And if you’re evaluating whether a conference or client visit is worth undertaking with child, consider not whether the event is worth the cost in and of itself - consider if it will still be worth the cost of a no-expense-spared approach, even if you miss half the conference sessions.
- Your kid is part of your presentation. Whenever you attend a conference or client meeting, you think about your self-presentation. When you’re attending with a kid, your kid becomes part of that presentation. So make sure your kid has a clean face, clean clothes, and behaves well.
- Connect with your kid. Don’t forget to interact with him. or there’s no point in having him along.
- Connect with your colleagues. If you travel with a well-behaved kid, you’ll find that many of your colleagues will be warm and welcoming — particularly the other parents in the room. Make the most of this chance to connect with colleagues on a personal level: one of the things I’ve enjoyed about traveling with my baby is the chance to hear from other parents about their own experiences juggling work and family. How else would I have left a business blogging summit with the URL of a great attachment parenting blog? I’ve really appreciated hearing from other moms who remember the challenges of life with a new baby, and whose support — whether it’s holding the baby so I can use the bathroom, or cheering me on for trying this juggling act — remind me that I’m not the only woman out there trying to combine work and motherhood.
- Accept non-acceptance. While the vast majority of your colleagues are likely to be encouraging and supportive, some people may not be happy to see a baby at a business event. Accept that some people aren’t going to like seeing your baby, the same way they might not like what you’ve got to say or what you’re wearing. Anticipate those reactions, and know in advance which accommodations you’re willing to make for others. But don’t let concern about other people’s reactions push you into sharing more information about your circumstances than you feel comfortable disclosing, or into a decision that jeopardizes your child’s well-being or your professional or personal integrity.
- Cheer yourself on. When I first started using my laptop at conferences, about ten years ago, people used to ask me to put it away — they found the key tapping disturbing. Ten years later, everyone has their laptops out to take meeting notes (or check their e-mail!) That culture shift happened gradually — and a similar culture shift has to happen around children. The more that thoughtful parents include their well-behaved children in their professional lives, the more we’ll break down the cultural wall that separates the public and private spheres — a wall that has historically served to keep women and men in separate worlds. So give yourself a cheer for bringing baby along: you’re not just helping your family or business, you’re helping make our culture stronger, healthier and more human.
Woohoo! Tivo! Over here!
.20.10 | No Comments »
October 20th, 2006 by Alex
I wanted to send people a direct link to Tivo in my post about our home media server, but Tivo’s refer-a-friend tools don’t include a web badge! If I had a little snippet of code that let me put a trackable link to Tivo into a blog post, I’d be motivated to blog more about Tivo as a way of getting reward points. OK, maybe I blog too much about Tivo anyhow, but when I invite everybody over to our place to watch an ad-free episode of Grey’s Anatomy in HD, timeshifted so we can watch it two hours before it airs in our time zone, they’ll be glad I earned points for my referrals. My point is, making it easy and valuable for bloggers to talk about you is an easy, low-cost way of encourage positive referrals from trusted peers.
Tales of a Mac media server
.20.10 | No Comments »
October 20th, 2006 by Alex
Earlier this year we purchased a 32″, HD-ready Philips LCD TV. So when our DVD player died a few months ago, we found ourselves staring at the PC input on the back of the TV and wondering whether our next DVD player should in fact be a computer.
About eight weeks ago we bit the bullet and bought a Mac Mini as a home media server. We’ve been delighted with the results, so I thought it was time to share the details of our set up, the ways in which it’s changed our entire relationship to the information age, and our remaining wishlist.
The hardware:
Mac mini 1.66 GHZ Intel Core Due with 2 GB of SDRAM
Ministack 465 GB hard drive
Apple Bluetooth keyboard
Logitech cordless optical mouse (replacing a Macally Blueooth Mouse Jr that wouldn’t track)
Series 2 Tivo with 300 GB hard drive upgrade from Weaknees [UPDATE: Our hard drive — and thus our Tivo — is toast, just under a year from purchase. Weaknees only warranties for 6 months so we’re looking for alternate vendors before replacing the Tivo drive.]
Motorola HD digital tuner
Yamaha stereo receiver
The software:
Mac OS X 10.4.8
Parallels (for PC virtualization)
Windows XP Home edition
Tivo2Go
Mac the Ripper (for ripping DVDs)
Bits on Wheels (for downloading BitTorrents)
Earth-shaking ways we use our new server, starting with the most fundamentally life transforming:
- DVD archiving: We have quite a collection of kids DVDs. Make that scratched DVDs. As any parent of toddlers can attest, the value of that Dora the Explorer collection is seriously challenged by a toddler’s interest in laying dirty hands on each and every disc. Now we use Mac the Ripper to copy our daughter’s favorite DVDs to our massive external hard drive, and keep the originals safe on a high shelf. Our daughter can watch whatever DVD she wants whenever she wants, and all we have to do is play it back on the computer (by using the Mac’s built-in DVD player and selecting “Open DVD media”…then navigating to the DVD we want on the hard drive, selecting its Video_TS file, clicking “choose”, and then choosing “Play” from the DVD Player menu.)
- TV downloads: For a long time it seemed we’d been excluded from the joys of BitTorrent by our ISP’s throttling BitTorrent packets. Maybe we’ve become more patient, or maybe our ISP has relaxed: BitTorent has finally become viable. And with the computer hooked up directly to the TV, we can easily watch any shows that we’ve forgotten to Tivo. Most crucial use case: downloading HD BitTorrents of Battlestar Galactica, which is not yet shown in HD in Canada.
- DVD timeshifting: Notwithstanding Blockbuster’s “no late fees” policy, we’re able to incur a decent number of restocking fees before we get around to returning the movies that we’d hoped to watch weeks ago (another hazard of life with toddlers: no movie time!) Now we rip a DVD as soon as we rent it, and watch it when we have a chance (before we delete it — just for the benefit of our MPAA buddies).
- Audio landscaping: I’ve always wanted to be one of those people with mood music playing whenever my friends are over. Now we’ve consolidated all our MP3s and iTunes playlists on one server, and can easily choose to listen to any of our playlists, which play back through the stereo.
- Video landscaping: Instead of having our photos scattered across multiple hard drives, we keep our camera’s USB cable hooked up to the Mini. All new photos get loaded onto the Mini, but we keep sharing turned on (within iPhoto preferences) and iPhoto running so that we can still access the main iPhoto library from each of our laptops. We use System Preferences/Desktop & Screen Saver to set an iPhoto album as our screen saver, and set a “hot corner” so that we can activate the screen saver by moving our mouse to a corner of the screen. Once we’ve chosen a playlist for our audio landscape, we activate the hot corner and enjoy an on-screen slideshow of our favorite photos.
- Long-term Tivo programming storage: As Mac users, we were locked out of the joys of Tivo2Go, Tivo’s option for dumping Tivo-recorded programs to a PC. Thanks to the combo of Parallels and Windows XP Home we are now part of the Tivo2Go universe! We haven’t actually watched any of the programs we’ve dumped — this will require us to figure out how to move stuff off the virtual PC and onto the main folder for our Mac so that we can play back the programs. Or we could download the premium version of Tivo2Go to get decryption capacity on the PC side.
What’s next:
A series 3, HD-compatible Tivo with another massive Weaknees hard drive. Sure, we could download all those HD shows with Bittorrent — but we like the ease and control of having a Tivo.
Does Big Brother use a Treo?
.16.10 | 3 Comments »
October 16th, 2006 by Alex
I just had an inquiry from a new Treo owner who is looking his gift horse in the mouth:
My employer recently gave each of the salespeople a new Treo 650. None of us requested it, in fact, a year ago we told management we didn’t want them. Now we have them and can’t figure out why. Our business is not dealing with life or death and we don’t send a lot of emails. We carried cell phones before, and laptops too.
One thought (suspicion) is perhaps they got them for us so they could track us. Without asking them, is there a way we can determine if our Treos are being used for such a purpose?
I couldn’t think of any way the Treo could be used for tracking — certainly no more than any other cell phone — but maybe I’m being naive. For example, if the company is running the Treos’ e-mail through their servers, they could be monitoring that…but is there anything more Treo-specific that might be going on here? Does anyone else have insights?