Driving in the car en route to LaGuardia airport, I find myself blogging. I have finally removed myself from the barriers of the wired world and am now completely mobile. The only thing which remains unresolved is my mail but aside from junk mail most companies have made it possible to receive the electronic versions of my bills. I’m not sure if that is a good or bad thing but it is now part of my life.

While there will be new technologies that make mobile internet access more ubiquitous, there is sufficient technology available to make myself omnipresent. The only challenge while writing a mobile blog post is the continuous noise from the people surrounding me. “Shut up!” I yell, but they ignore me wondering why I continue to type on my keyboard.

I tried blogging during dinner but that didn’t work out so well. So now I’m blogging in a car and ultimately I’m finding that mobile blogging is nowhere near as efficient as sitting at my desk, focused on a single task. A while back I wrote that my goal was to become completely untethered (that word provided by my mobile companion). Soon enough I realized “detached” was not an adjective I wanted to use when describing myself.

Now I am completely mobile but I will still return to my home based. I guess it’s a fact of life. The totally nomadic life is a lonely one so I decided to opt-out and remain completely mobile yet not nomadic, if that makes sense. Have you figured out a way to become a completely nomadic? Do you think there is any reason for becoming a digital nomad or is being mobile sufficient?

Yesterday I posted about my Jungle Disk issue which was making it so that my Jungle Disk was no longer a central repository but was instead serving as an external hard drive. Within minutes, someone from Jungle Disk contacted me and told me that my issues was a resolvable one. Since it wasn’t completely straight forward for me, I’ll include here, how to configure your Jungle Disk so that it serves as a central repository.

Jungle Disk Drive Mapping

Create New Backup

The first step of the process is to configure a new backup for your data. For this example I’m going to show how to sync your documents folder between and a P.C. The P.C. is already configured and now you are trying to map your Mac documents to your P.C. documents. Below is the screenshot for configuring a new backup:

Select Backup Sources

The second step in creating your mapping is to select the folders that you would like to map to the P.C. version of your backup. This is pretty easy, simply click the button shown in the screenshot below. You will have needed to configure your bucket on Amazon S3 already but I’ll assume that you know how to do that since you already figured out how to do that on your P.C. It’s pretty straightforward when you first install the application.

Folder Selection & Advanced Options

The next step is also pretty quick. Simply select the folders you would like to sync. Theoretically you could do multiple sub-folders but I figured that it would be easier to select a single parent directory that will map to the same directory on my Jungle Disk. Once you select the folder(s) click on “View Advanced Settings”.

Map the Folders

This part is pretty easy. In this step, you are selecting where you would like the folders from the previous step to sync on your Jungle Disk. For my backup I used the folder /backups/NICKLAPTOP/C/Documents and Settings/Nick/My Documents which mapped to my Mac directory /Users/nick/Documents. That’s it! Now you have added your Mac to your repository.

Fixing the Mail Issue

Now that I’ve figured out how to have this serve as a central repository, I am now back to being portable. The one thing that I haven’t completely resolved yet is mail. After watching The Learning Channel series on the start-up “Earth Class Mail“, I decided to check it out and try for myself. I’m sure it works great but I quickly realized that there is still one flaw in this system: all my credit cards require my real billing address.

That means that my credit report has my real address no matter where I’d like to receive mail. All my junk mail (which is essentially a waste of trees) still comes to these addresses. So there is a solution still: mail forwarding. I could have all the mail being forwarded to my D.C. apartment directly to my Earth Class Mail address in New York.

The only problem is that if I need any of the mail that gets forwarded to New York, I am creating a relatively inefficient process which isn’t the most environmentally friendly. Unfortunately for this, there is not a one-step solution to creating a central mail repository similar to my digital data repository. While you can set up forwarding, the process is not the most efficient.

Have you configured any mail forwarding systems that work for you? What do you do about junk mail? This part of becoming a digital nomad will be the most challenging.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the concept of the digital nomad and how I was actively trying to make changes that enable my life to be completely portable. From the scanning of mail to moving my data to the cloud. Then last week my whole process hit a kink. I purchased a MacBook Pro and I became completely reliant on the cloud. Let me explain what happened.

Prior to purchasing my new computer I had been running a Dell Inspiron laptop to handle most of my computing activities. While I also had a G5 Mac, all of my business activities were done on my laptop. Early in July I decided to start moving all of my data to Amazon’s S3 servers with the help of Jungle Disk. The concept was that I could move all my data to the cloud and then no matter what computer I was using I could simply log-on, sync my computer with the cloud’s version and I’d be good to go.

Unfortunately it didn’t work that easily. The most significant problem was that my Mac and PC have different file and folder naming conventions. For instance on my PC my documents are stored under: /NICKLAPTOP/C/Documents and Settings/Nick/My Documents. If you are a PC user than this will look familiar. On my Mac however, my documents are stored under /Macintosh HD/Users/nick/Documents/.

While similar in many ways, this slightly different naming convention has made it impossible for me to sync my two computers. This means that Jungle Disk has simply become an external hard drive, just like all the others laying around my house. These external hard drives are more of a hastle than helpful because my data is not in sync. If I download a file off of Jungle Disk that was uploaded by my PC and modify it, there is no way to sync it other than manually overwriting the file.

Honestly, I can’t believe Jungle Disk doesn’t have a simple mapping feature. If there was a way to say that /NICKLAPTOP/C/Documents and Settings/Nick/My Documents on my PC equals /Macintosh HD/Users/nick/Documents/ on my Mac, I’d be good to go. As far as I can tell this isn’t yet available. My attempt at becoming a digital nomad has been rendered useless simply by switching computers, not by moving across the country.

If you know a solution to this problem please let me know! I don’t want Jungle Disk as a backup hard drive, I want it to be my central repository of information. Have you run into similar problems? Do you think becoming completely portable is a ridiculous notion?