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Taking Telecommuting To the Next Level - the RV
An anonymous reader writes "I have been telecommuting as a software architect for a major corporation since 2007. It has allowed me to live a quality rural lifestyle. Never content, am now considering living on the road for several years. Due to the proliferation of 4G and wireless hotspots, I see no reason I could not do this from a 5th-wheel trailer. Have any slashdotters truly cut the cord in this manner? Any advice or warnings?"
I have been telecommuting fulltime for 14 years now and used it to move around the country..not in an RV however. I find 4G coverage still spotty in rural areas and even if it wasnt, the data caps will kill you unless you're grandfathered into unlimited data..Sprint's just getting around to deploying LTE so they're unlimited data is mostly 3G, 3G data is unacceptable for most interactive IT work on the net.
I find working in Rural areas rought..no hardwared internet access unless I want to drop in a T1, The new satellite services(Excede) also have data caps.
I went to a cabin in northern Minnesota this summer..it was on a lake, nice, peaceful and a perfect place for me to work..no cell coverage and certainly no internet access.
I assume if you're RVing, you want to be in reasonably rural areas -- not in city RV parks.
I RV'd through British Columbia and Alaska 3 years ago. For much of the route, 3G wasn't available. State/County campsites don't have WiFi. Commercial campsites almost always have WiFi.
However, the quality of the WiFi can vary wildly. You could easily find yourself camped on the edge of the coverage area of a consumer-grade 802.11b access point, sharing a basic DSL connection with everyone else on the site. Sometimes even basic web browsing is frustrating. I wouldn't want to be reliant on it for VOIP, screen sharing, email attachments of reasonable size, or largeish file transfers.
So I think you'll find yourself hunting out sites with reliable WiFi, which means you won't be as free as you might have hoped.
Many of the places you may want to travel to may have limited cell coverage. I have stayed in many campgrounds where 2G is the most I can hope for. Think about where you want to go before you dive into this plan.
My father made money with dialup while RVing over a decade ago. "I can't survive without the latest modern tech" is a great way to talk yourself out of it.
Much as probably very few /.ers have Aeron chairs at home yet somehow compute none the less.
There will be "issues" like GUI/VNC is not a good idea compared to CLI/SSH. Learn how to make your computer multitask. If you're the type who can only do one thing at a time, such as watch a download process bar while doing absolutely nothing else, you'll be in agony. On the other hand if you're using something like GIT for distributed VCS you really don't care how long it takes to sync the repos as long as it takes less time that your average successful connection, then OK...
Also since roughly the dotcom boom almost all commercial/non-public campgrounds have wifi. So your 2G campground was almost certainly public, I'm guessing. I've never been to a commercial campground without wifi or a public campground with anything other than cell service. Luckily, being mobile, you don't have to stay at a park thats a telecommunications black hole. All campgrounds, commercial or public, seem surrounded by wifi equipped coffee shops. Even 10 years ago this was just not much of an issue. To some extent a coffee shop is more conducive to work than looking out the window at the ladies suntanning on the beach all day anyway.
You get pretty good at batching too, or you get pretty frustrated. I just did a git push, now I need to immediately instantly sync up with everyone else. Well, no, probably not, not if you're managing it well. Sure you would if you were not communications limited, but if you have to drive 5 minutes to the coffee shop, then it turns out you don't.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Many Walmarts and Sam's Clubs will let you park overnight. Some require you to ask. Highway est stops are usually safe places so take advantage of them. In either case, be discreet and safe.
My father's life as an RVer results in the advice that if you buy a pop-up or a slide-out camper there is no way to argue with the cops or rentacops or just jerks in general that you're camping/sleeping. The slideout / pop up is kind of a give away that you're doing something "not allowed". However if you buy a completely fixed RV with no moving parts, there is no way for "the man" to know you're sleeping in the back of the RV vs maybe inside the store shopping.
In an urban environment if you take a pop-up/slide out RV to the mall and obviously camp, you can expect to be very severely hassled. On the other hand, unless you offend them somehow, there's no way for a mall rentacop to figure out if you are shopping or sleeping in a fixed configuration RV. If they start chalking and towing then "regular customers" are going to scream bloody murder when their car is towed away while they're shopping, so thats a non-starter if the TV and newspapers could ever hear about it.
So no slideout / popup is a HUGE logistical advantage. Also what you don't have, can't break. So you'll never be "stuck" unable to leave a campground because your slideout is stuck open or the pop-up is jammed.
This leads to a vampiric lifestyle. Wake up around mall closing time, lets say 9pm, drive until the next big city mall opening time, lets say 9am (with stops for meals along the way, etc) then sleep or sightsee or shop or whatever until 9pm again. It sucks being exhausted at 8:30 am but can't park until the mall opens. Also being on the road shortly after bar closing time is often far too exciting... thats a good time to park somewhere for your "lunch".
The cheapest daily urban camping rate I've ever heard of is sports stadiums, assuming you can sleep thru the sporting event. Sometimes as low as $3 per sleep period, which is amazingly cheap in a heavily urban environment. I've heard some places demand to see your event tickets before you get to park, but almost all do not. In urban environments there are also airports and convention centers and strangely enough, hotels, all of which are often pretty good places to park for cheap/free. Hotels will often hassle you if you park there overnight, but rarely if ever during the day.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
When you park, place a small inflatable pool on the ground where the wheels will go. When the wheels are in the middle of the pool, inflate and fill with water.
That might take care of the fire ants, but now you've got a prime mosquito breeding ground surrounding your camper.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
" I'm guessing he wants a "real" RV--the $100,000 40 foot ones"
You dont know RV prices do you...
The morons that bought that $100,000 RV are now desperate to sell them. I picked up a 48 foot 5th wheel with TWO bedrooms and a freaking garage in it (it also has a gas station with a 30 gallon gas tank and gas pump) plus has a sealed and heated undercarriage for 4 season camping. Got it looking like new but 4 years old for $25,900.
Only a complete moron would buy a new one.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
it will always feel like a small step above camping.
Say what? I don't know where you've been staying, but none of what you said is true. RV parks, unless they're wilderness campgrounds, always have electric, water and sewer connections and many newer RVs have 10-12 gallon hot water tanks which a lot more hot water than my wife and I have ever used at one time.
Not something you will want to do for several years.
Says who? The longer you're on the road, the less inclination you'll be to ever go back to bricks and sticks and having your house nailed to the ground. We've been on the road for three years and found that many of our problems with traditional housing stem from a lack of convenient mobility.
Most generators will run an A/C unit on an RV just fine. If your RV has two A/C units most likely your generator is already sized for the load. The only time we've ever run ours is when we stopped at a rest area and wanted to take a nap or make lunch.
For the OP I have sections on wifi, satellite and wireless internet coverage. Right now we get high speed to our 5th wheel from the cable company, just like we did at the last two parks we've stayed in.
And as far as comfort goes, you have to learn to live in less space but the space you have is better organized. And there's someone else taking care of the yard work, cleaning the pool, grooming the golf course and stocking the bar.
Full time RV living is more comfortable and way more convenient than you might imagine. It's not a great choice if you have kids, but my friend up the street is a Unix admin for a hospital chain and he's lived in RVs for the last 10 years. You couldn't get either one of us back in a house. Traditional housing sucks in comparison.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I call bullshit on this entire thing. You ever met a homeless person? You can tell they are homeless. And you probably fit right in with them.
What I mean to say is that Borax is a natural substance. Has to be better than insecticide.
Similarly poison ivy is a natural substance so it has to be better for you than Advil.
In fact, I would prefer the hotel simply because there aren't any RVs nearby.
Nothing makes a camping trip less enjoyable than a bunch of fucking yahoos crowding up the area with RVs, noisy four wheelers, and teenagers firing a rifle into the side of a hill repeatedly.
I am sorry, but if you are under the age of 65 and you own an RV that you use for (what you refer to as) camping, you are a blight and you can bet your ass that if you park that thing anywhere near me I will sneak over at night after your 6 lb yapping dog has gone to sleep and let the air out of your tires.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.