Working from Mexico, continued

I think I can say now, after about a month of running my businesses 100% from Internet cafes in Tulum, Mexico, that it has been a successful experiment. My web design business is at a low setting; most work is waiting until my return. But I have been communicating with new clients, answering requests, and sending urgent work to colleagues to handle temporarily. My other business, WebDevBiz.com, I have been able to run very smoothly from here.

A few small glitches:

• Mexican computer keyboards. Not only are they often ancient and decrepit in the Internet cafes of Tulum, but the keys are arranged strangely. Characters like the at sign (@) are notoriously located in strange locations, requiring a the use of a special key labelled to access. And, I have encountered several keyboards which are completely missing an @ character. How people are supposed to use the Internet and never use that particular character is a mystery to me! The keyboard I am currently typing on seems to have no apostrophe - this is why I keep writing I am instead of the contraction for that phrase! Neither can I find double quotation marks. Despite all of this, I believe I have carried on respectable email correspondence during the past month!
• Browsers are set to display all of their menus in Spanish, and I have not (no apostrophe or I would use a contraction there) been able to figure out how to switch them to English. Similarly, many sites such as PayPal load with all menus in Spanish. (This can easily be changed, I have discovered since, but I was not aware of that initially.) With my rudimentary Spanish I have been able to get by, with the exception of one goof the other day: while attempting to transfer funds from PayPal to my bank account, I instead withdrew funds from my bank account and deposited them in my PayPal account. Doh!
• I did have to get very good at deleting all personal data before leaving each Internet cafe, but this is not difficult, especially since most of them have Firefox installed. (On a totally separate sidetrack: my site statistics for WebDevBiz.com today showed, for the first time, that more visitors are using Firefox than Internet Explorer, which seemed significant!)
  

When I return to Mexico with the intent of carrying on business, I intend to bring a laptop and either get my own Internet access one way or another. Obviously, this would solve the problems above, which are entirely due to using public Internet access.

Along with a good phone service, it looks as if I might have everything I need to live and work from Mexico for parts of the year. Que alegre! :-)