The SquizLog

Commuting

Commuting. It's a part of my existence.

I live on the Central Coast but work in the Sydney CBD. For those who may be reading this, and given that this is just my second blog entry, I don't expect it to be a vast readership, but just in case you are reading this and are unfamiliar with the geography, the Central Coast is about 75 km north of Sydney.

Or about an hour and twenty minutes by train.

For me, like many others, it's one of life's trade-offs. A better lifestyle for my family (and me when I'm at home) is the up side. And, obviously the downside is the commuting time. But then again, it depends what one does to make use of the time.

Fortunately for me, I have a good range of alternatives. I've been commuting from the Coast for eight years now, and there are, of course, the standard choices of sleeping or reading (those that know me well would assume that I would sleep as a matter of course!). But for the last four months I've also had the opportunity to use my refurbished IBM ThinkPad, which has been a liberating experience in several ways.

I've had the use of laptops before. But this is the first time I've enjoyed using a laptop whilst commuting in conjunction with the liberation of using an operating system other than Windows. For me, unlike a colleague of mine, the delight is not that of using Mac OS X. But he is young and single and can afford such extravagant elegance. Only yesterday he volunteered that his new mobile phone, which will allow him to publish his blog entries, has taken him one step closer to Nerdvana.

But I digress. In my own case, I had decided I could justify to myself spending less than A$1,000 on a laptop onto which I would install Linux. And in late March I spotted an opportunity to embark on such a path for A$800. And I've been happily using it on the train since. I still have much to learn about Linux. But I think it's wonderful that a worldwide community of enthusiasts has made it possible to derive the benefits of a computer relatively inexpensively.

So, here I am, writing this in OpenOffice.org en route from Sydney to Gosford, anticipating an enjoyable weekend with my family. I guess I happen to be writing this because I feel my new blog needs some fleshing out after I got Movable Type up and running earlier today. But I could be continuing one of my pet projects, for example using Hibernate (an excellent open-source Aussie Java ORM tool) to persist a cricket statistics model. Or I could be exploring Linux networking. Or learning Python.

On the other hand, I could be doing some cricket administration such as typing up the minutes of last night's committee meeting of the Mountains Kariong Cricket Club.

Anyway, the point is that the combination of a refurbished second-hand laptop together with open-source software has given me a whole spectrum of new choices for utilising my commuting time.

We've now left Woy Woy and will shortly arrive in Gosford. Home to the beautiful Central Coast.

Posted to Personal by Keith Pitty