I spent the last 4 days in Phuket in Thailand. I stayed at a major brand hotel and indeed they claimed to support wireless connectivity in their lobby if not in the rooms which were spread across a large area. Unfortunately when I got there I found out that the wireless connectivity didn't work, nor were we able (for some reason) to download my FTP program from the internet in the business centre.

My office emails are encrypted and only readable from the one machine, which meant automatically that I was out of touch with my work emails for 4 days. Given that this was supposed to be vacation time I figured I could live with this, but what about my website updates and daily emails?

Fortunately some advanced planning meant that I had all my files on a memory stick just incase. A short walk brought me to an internet cafe where I was readily able to download smart ftp and I had my set up details stored in my main email account which is webbased. I think it took me about 40 minutes from start to finish to update the website and send out the email. This was mainly because the pages had been pre-built prior to me leaving and just required a quick rename to become active.

I'd like to claim a major victory for planning around technology failures, but I still made some dumb mistakes and potentially upset a couple of subscribers who decided to unsubscribe whilst I was away. I have of course written and apologised and they seem to be ok.

I guess the morale is that we tend to take technology for granted but when it fails or simply isn't there some good planning can get around most issues. Even the problems I had could have been resolved with a little more thought before departure.