Connectivity at last!

The Internet has not yet made it to England.

This is what I've discovered over the last month, trying in vain to find a place to plug in my laptop around Kendal, a pretty big town up in the Lakes. Unlike any remote corner of Vietnam, where you'll find three internet cafes in a little village with no tourism, mighty first world England has virtually no place to plug in. You can find a smoky pub with wi-fi, but try to connect to it and you'll hit the hopelessly broken signup mechanism that shells you out to an ISP to purchase time online, then blocks the page where you'd give your credit card details. Not that I'm all that excited to spend £60 for a month of access in the first place, but the process of doing so should not be this painful.

Chamonix Branch Office

But now, things are looking up. I'm in Chamonix now, kicking it at a giant ski chalet, gearing up for a couple months of client work. With luck, maybe I'll have a few hours here and there to play around on Blogabond. But for the most part, I'll be heads down alongside the rest of the Expat Software team, building The Next Big Thing for our client.

I'm liking the idea of offshore development with a strong team imported from back home. We've done collaborative things remotely in the past, with good results, but this is the first time we've tried to bring the entire team onsite. Even the client is coming out for the duration of the project, so we'll eliminate the communication gap that often slows down remote development. It's also cool that we're halfway around the world from the distractions that usually get in the way of productivity. With the whole team snowed into the chalet, there's nothing to do but crank out code. It should be good.

written by

Jason Kester on June 3, 2006 from Chamonix-Mont-Blanc, France

from the travel blog: Building Blogabond

tagged Blogabond and ExpatSoftware

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