USB Sticks

Since getting the job offer a month ago, I’ve made a lot of changes in the way I work. Primarily for my own security (i.e. so the passwords and data for the other sites I work on aren’t readily available) I removed all my private work and data from the work PC, and instead stuck it on a USB stick. I also now have Portable Firefox and Portable OpenOffice.

What I don’t (currently) have on a portable stick is all the text editing stuff, photoshop, and that kind of thing. That doesn’t really matter, doesn’t really need to be portable. But the information itself is all now held on portable devices.

It’s been interesting working this way too – plus it means that effectively I can do my stuff on any old PC, wherever I am, and it won’t even affect the PCs settings.

I’m currently debating upgrading the USB sticks (At the moment I use two 512M Sticks, mainly because of a fuckup I made earlier in the year) to one or two 1Gb sticks, and at that point I can also put on portable XAMPP as a complete development environment (database, PHP, Apache web server, the lot) and portable NVU as a text editor, and then I’ve got everything I need for my work on one or two USB sticks. Of course, with a bit of rationalisation (and a bit of “dump the old crap on the portable 30Gb drive”) I could do it with the two current 512Mb sticks. One for the tools, one for the data. Hmmmm.

Anyway, I find this kind of thing interesting, because it does change the way I work. It makes me wonder about logical extrapolations, where you have a complete operating system on a USB stick/disk, and PCs go towards being dumb terminals that don’t have their own drives/storage at all. Instead, you carry your ‘computer’ around with you, and just slot it in (or connect up the USB cable) and bang, your own operating system wherever you are.