So as I said in my last post I’ve just come back from a pretty long vacation. On top of this, and if you are a regular reader of this blog, you may have also realised that I spend quite a lot of time travelling on business. Travel, especially on business, can either be full of mind numbing periods of download time, or a chance to catch up on some of the things that you have been meaning to do, but never have the time when at home to do. I have found over the past 3 years I’ve been able to make much more use of my downtime when travelling, although I still find there are a number of things I’d love to see to make my stay away from home much more enjoyable. This will actually be an article spread across two seperate posts. In this post my tips for the frequent traveller, and in my next post, what I think is missing.

Firslty let’s look at how I make the most of time my time away. At the airport, well of course with International flights you need to spend at least a few hours waiting on your flight to depart. If you are lucky your flight will be ontime, but quite often this 2 hour delay, can soon become a 4 hour delay or more. This is where a laptop is you best friends. Most, perhpas all, airports these days offer wireless connectivity, so I quite often forward plan to spend some of the time at the airport updating blogs, working on the post processing of photos and generally just trying to keep active. I also find it to be a good time to catch up with people you havn’t talked to in a while, and if they are in anyways tech savy they will most likely have skype or an alternative installed on their PC. Free phone calls to friends and family are a sure way to relieve some of the boredom of airport downtime. On the plane I find two items help me the most, my PSP and my Archos. Gaming and media on the go. I spend quite a few hours on the recent trip catching up with Heroes and managed to get quite a way through series one while flying. At the Hotel, well there really is just one thing I reach for, and that’s the connect button on my Slingplayer software. This allows me to connect to my SkyHD box back at home base, to catch up on live TV. I also use this download to catch up on both audio and video podcasts, via my Zune, especially when travelling from hotel to the office, or simply when walking around. Sorted !

I now find myself looking forward to a spot of business travel as I know I’m going to have a chance to finish off some blog posts, publish some photos and of course catch up with some SkyHD that I’ve had sitting on my planner for months.

In my next post I’ll report back on what I think is still missing for the frequent traveller.

Posted on March 19th, 2008 by nigel