My back is killing me. It’s the result of spending the last couple of weeks solidly plugging away at my laptop whilst slouched across my bed or balanced on a coffee table in the Internet cafe. Being able to do all my work on a notebook does indeed mean I can do it anywhere, but unfortunately the required desk and chair don’t fit into the computer bag as well. It’s made me realise that whilst I’ve just made do with wherever I’ve been staying up to now, it’s time that I actually settle down in one place again and make an office of sorts for myself. Portable computing is all very well, but it always assumes that you have a base to return to eventually. Which, er, I haven’t.
For the last two years, I’ve been writing and coding webpages on a succession of (as it turned out) doomed laptops, and plugging into whatever exorbitantly priced internet cafe I could find or using a kindly friend’s home connection. It’s been fun, and most of the time I’ve been so busy doing other stuff that writing and web work were never the priority, but now I want to concentrate on cranking out words and code. I miss having my own desk and internet connection, where I can come and go and not worry about cost. Here in Thailand, a broadband connection costs around 700 baht a month after setup – about a tenner. To use broadband in a cafe costs 120 baht an hour – that’s about 2 pounds an hour. You can see the problem. It’s exacerbated because outside the main urban areas – Bangkok, Chaing Mai, Phuket and Pattaya – infrastructure and connectivity is a lot less prevalent in Thailand. Broadband and mobile services are developing rapidly and leapfrogging over traditional telecoms structure but its rollout doesn’t extend that far beyond the urban centres.
So yes. I want a room of my own. With a fat pipe. My current plan is to start the process of getting a Thai work permit, which involves a fair amount of money and paperwork but will then let me work here and also, more practically, give me a visa so I don’t have to leave the country every 30 days. Which is what I have to do at the moment. Whilst that’s all going through, I can work on my own web projects, getting all the code and publicity materials together, and hopefully it will be all quite advanced by the time my work permit comes through and I can then launch the company. It’s quite exciting. And scary, because it involves spending quite a few hundred of my precious savings on bits of paper with no guarantee that my business ideas will actually generate enough money to recoup it, let alone make a profit.
Still, dildo sales are up on spike, so mustn’t grumble.
