iPad meets the Rural Lifestyler.

Like quite a number of IT professionals in the Bay of Plenty, NZ, I have bought into the dream of having an intense IT career and living in the country on a "mini-farm" - just 12 mins from the centre of one of the fastest growing cities in NZ - Tauranga (pronounced "Toe - wrong - ahh"). My IT job provides me with the ability to work remotely, supporting and monitoring networks, servers, workstations and server environments - approx 2,000 devices across 4 countries, 24 x 7 - all from my 12 acre lifestyle block, where we breed Suri alpaca.

My laptop serves me well for the SQL (and other) development and monitoring. Sometimes, however, I just don't need all of that "grunt" with me and the mobility is still a compromise - I can quickly pick it up and go somewhere, but you still really need to sit properly and support the device on a hard surface (they get really hot just sitting on your lap).

There are times you need to be truely mobile, just keeping an eye on things (monitoring) and "tweaking" things as necessary, most commonly via RDP. The mobile phone screens just aren't big enough, they have there place in my world - e.g. SMS/TXT messaging of a monitored alert. So, I need something that perform most of the simple functions of my laptop but with the mobility of my phone - hmmmm maybe an iPad!

When you want to sit outside in the BBQ area, in the sun, sipping on a "cold one", gazing across all you own, out across to the harbour, only being interrupted when an alert sounds requiring you to put down your drink and take a peek, jump-in, give it the attention it begs for, then, pick up your drink and resume "life".

And then there's the times when you are down at the yards doing your shearing, or regular health checks - just fire up that spreadsheet, or application, and capture your data on-the-spot. Boy, I think I can see a little project there to incorporate some RFID/EID technology for data capture - put that on my to-do list, once I get that iPad!