Blog

Dateline: Tbilisi, Georgia—04 Mar. 2017

I've managed to settle into the new room. I'm glad I booked for three nights. This give me some stability and a chance to spend a few days without a pack on my back.

Over the past few reports, I've touched on some of the things I've seen. But I've also glossed over any deeper impressions in favor of recording my travels.

Dateline: Tbilisi, Georgia—03 Mar. 2017

Today was all about getting settled into a place for the weekend. And more sleep. Lots more. I’ve also learned that some streets just don’t have names and that’s okay.

Nana, my host, had today off work as it was Mother’s Day. Here it’s an actual holiday, not just a greeting card sales promotion event. Most retail businesses I saw were still open. I guess those who don’t work in customer facing jobs get the benefit. A retail job is a retail job, no matter it may be.

Dateline: Tbilisi, Georgia—02 Mar. 2017

Sometimes health takes priority over the best laid plans. The money I put off spending on the Istanbul airport lounge came out in Tbilisi. Getting in so early with my sleep deficit led me to spending a morning crashed out in the Freedom Square Marriot Hotel. How I got there is a story in itself.

After posting the last article, I waited until my flight was assigned a gate number. When I first landed, my flight to Tbilisi wasn't even listed. There were too many flights inbetween and the board could only display about 50. It came onto the board around three hours before departure. Then about an hour before departure, the gate number showed up.

Dateline: Istanbul, Turkey—01 Mar. 2017

If yesterday was about trains, today is all about the planes. Specifically the Turkish Airlines 777-300 that flew me into Istanbul.

It's the biggest plane I've ever been on. The inflight entertainment system had screens in the back of every seat. I wasn't sleepy at the beginning of the flight, so I watched two movies I had been putting off seeing, Jack Reacher Never Go Back and The Accountant.

Dateline: Toronto, Canada—28 Feb. 2017

One of our great philosophers once said, “A journey of a thousand miles starts will a single body scan."1

Today was an air-travel day. I started out on a train and will end it during my second flight of the day. I’m also playing fast-and-loose with a definition of what “today” is. Since I’ll do most of the “night’s” sleeping on the long-haul flight to Istanbul, that will end my “day.” Plus since I’m posting this from the airport wifi in Toronto, I want it done before leaving.

Dateline: Phoenix, AZ USA—27 Feb. 2017

I’ve decided to cash in my chips and hit the road for a while. This trip is one of those where I’ve been thinking about it for a while, but only bought the tickets a few weeks ago. It will also give me a chance to test out some of my MVW strategies, as I’ll be traveling light.

As I’m putting together this series of articles about becoming a Minimum Viable Writer, one thought keeps coming back to me: why bother?

I briefly touched on this in the last article, but feel it deserves more explanation. On some level, MVW might seem like just another backup strategy or a guide about how to work more efficiently on the road. The MVW concept covers that and more, but it has also grown into a mindset for me. This became clear as I was working out what would become the MVW definition:

The MVW is a writer who can work in any situation while maintaining almost full productivity. The question becomes how to get there and what’s needed along the way?

I envision the MVW as someone who is hardware agnostic as possible. There’s no harm in having a favorite platform or writing app, but when the chips are down, the MVW can get by without.

This is one of those odd posts that came about because I starting playing with one idea and something else came about all-together. It started with me considering blogging options besides WordPress. There’s lots of platforms out there, and some of them are quite good. I’m also looking for something that I can run for free. Right now my WordPress.com premium account is paid for until almost the end of the year. So I have plenty of time to consider other options.

I like to work on a variety of computers. Only one of them is a non-Apple product. It’s a cheapo Lenovo laptop I got three years ago at Black Friday sale for $300. The original Windows 8 didn’t last much longer than the first battery charge. Now it runs Xubuntu Linux off of a small solid-state drive I installed. Overall, its 11″ screen and poor battery life make it a mostly pathetic specimen soon to relegated to the scrapheap.