This post is more of a question.  What would you keep on hand while traveling?  I’m a writer-editor-filmmaker (editor?) attempting to become a world traveling writer-editor-flimmaking… so the question gets a little tricky.  The usual suspects of travel documents and related travel supplies make sense, but I’m looking deeper for much a much longer journey.  Documents you may need for work, checks, other paperwork… tax documents?  Other related ‘life backpack’ artifacts like photos, videos, media of any type.  What about massive footage from filmmaking inlays?

When planning for years of constant mobility, what would you keep on hand? and is there any quick access ways to keep that list to a minimum?

Personally…

I’m beginning to think I don’t need more than a thumbdrive + internet backup (for documents) and an external hard drive.  I don’t plan to have any printed paperwork, unless business requires it.

I am fearful though.

Any non solid state hard drive dies after time, and with the nature of travel, it’s difficult to decide on the right mass storage solution.  Most of my work and life don’t require high amounts of storage.  I’m a writer and editor honestly.  The difficult comes with the third facet of my life, filmmaking.  I edit independent films in DV and HD (DVCPRO).  These projects require massive amounts of storage.  Its looking like I’ll have to carry around HDDs for years to come.

Any ideas for the film-editor on the go when it comes to mass storage solutions?

Today’s BTS post with regular musings over the past few days of simplification coming within the next few hours…

Behind the Scenes!

The last seven days have been sporadic, simplification wise, however fruitful:

Day 20: Water on a Simple Saturday

Drink Water… simple.  Almost too simple.  Yet noteworthy - like my inability to write a full sentence right now. I should add though, in creating this habit I’ve realized it’s best to just carry around water wherever you go, for me that means bringing a camelback to new york (adding that to my bag of course).  I also heavily recommend Sigg bottles, or flasks <~ if that floats your boat.

Day 23: The expedition grows weak and hungry

Paraphrasing the three days after Day 20, I discussed Delicious, ToDo lists, and focusing your life goals!

Day 24: Mail, Snail Mail, and E-mail

Simple, cutting down on all bad mailings, opting out of everything I don’t use (while still trying to go paperless).  Pontification and longer google searches yielded a wonderful post from Unclutterer that helped immensely.

Day 25: The almighty pushup

Exercising is so important, and pushups are wonderful benchmarks when assessing physical ability.

FreeTalk

You may be wishing to ask me, where are the posts?  Where’s the media?  Well the easy answer is just life getting in the way, however this should not suffice as actual explanation.  Really, my day job has forced a slowdown…  Now I’m not going to ask you for money; how annoying requests for money from baby blogs can be. I’m not letting you off though.  I ask, fervently, and relentlessly… with no shame, that you continue reading this blog.  I may be updating slowly, but… I just don’t want to lose you, you know!

If you look to the upper left… your left, you’ll see a poll.  I would love your feedback  I ask because I’ve come to the heavy realization that daily posts lack beautiful content (due to my day job.. of course if you’d like to donate, I’m totally down with posting full time).  I’m attempting to decide whether I will just post weekly, twice weekly, or continue posting daily and keep things short.  So, what do you think?

And for those of you who read via RSS, here’s the poll:

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I try to exercise daily, or every other day and can’t stress how much this has helped me emotionally (as well as physically, obviously). Lifehacker had a wonderful post about pushups a while back, and I believe it would be wonderful to include this in my daily routine, as well as create a daily, simple routine.  For this, I’ve employed youtube, to search for pushup, ‘ab’ and other workout videos.  I suggest the same!

Another quick tip attached to an hour or so of labour.  Yesterday I received three credit card offers through the mail.  Twas quite bothersome indeed as I realized the amount of wasted paper (snail mail) and wasted time (e-mail) have been spent on bulk mail and e-mail.

So I’m spending the day opting out of every mail service and e-mail service I do not fervently care about. Trying to keep a tidy inbox, you know!

Any suggestions are always greatly appreciated!

Its been three days since my last post.  The expedition has grown weak and hungry.  Yesterday we sacrificed William to make it another day.  The last three days have been the most treacherous with little possible escape from the elements.  My only hope now is to attempt to recount the last days of our journey so those following in our my footsteps know what lies ahead of them.  If you don’t see me ever again, know that our attempt and its annals stand as a testiment to infamy.

These past three days have been spent restarting Del.icio.us usage, regrouping todo lists, and arranging life goals.

Delicious delicious… Del.icio.us?

For anyone reading this, del.icio.us is old news.  However I feature it for its simpifying abilities.  Del.icio.us addresses the need for social bookmarking as it does for personal bookmarking.  I feature it as a simplifying utility partially for this blog, and partially for those of us who like (read:need) to reside on the bleeding edge of technology, or those with multiple computer stations (work, home?)  Why have local bookmarks when you could just use Del.icio.us to stream your bookmarks to you?

I now use the RSS function in firefox to ’stream’ my bookmarks to the bookmark toolbar.

To do this, just go to your del.icio.us homepage, the one that lists all your links, then from there find the RSS feeds.  There should be a tag, and raw feed.  I put both of these in my firefox bookmarks bar, and now have no worries of my computer crashing, or have to worry about finding long lost bookmarks on different computers.  What do you all think?  Oh, and if you want to be my delicious friend, here’s my page!

ToDo lists

I know I’ve already talked about Rememberthemilk.com when it came to bills.  I personally have just started using it for its primary purpose, todo lists!  Within my blocks of the day, I’ll have different todo lists (for those blocks) and simply go through checking them off during their time blocks.  It sounds pretty redundant, but having a system seems to break all of this down in a simple way.

Life Goals

Most important of these three days came the soul searching.  I’ve come to realize you can only really focus on one major goal at a time.  Multitasking makes everything take an impossibly long amount of time to do.  So I asked myself the easiest (ha!) of questions:

What do I want out of this year?  Where do I want to be in 10 years?  Where do I want to be in 20 years?

If you take any suggestions of mine, take this: meditate on those questions, give it a day, a week, any amount of time you can devote to only thinking about the above questions. Have a think week for your life… Now what is the most simple way of getting there?