I just moved into an RV, where I will live and work for the next year

I've read them all (I've been following your posts off-and-on since the Ghetto Indoor Pool). Your posts were a contributing factor in my decision to do this. I owe you a beer or three; hopefully we'll cross paths at some point in the not too distant future.

Sorry, I didn't get something... what's the objective of parking on top of the piece of wood?

This is both simpler, and more complicated than you'd think.

It is simpler, because there are a number of really good services that will accept mail on your behalf. I chose St. Brendan's Isle, and I pay less than $20 per month for all of my names (I get mail to both Joe and Ronald) and my business name. They scan the covers of all non-junk mail, and I can then request scans of the contents of the mail or physical forwarding (for a small per-piece fee). The fact that they'll simply recycle any junk mail I get, automatically, makes me wish I'd always used a service like this. I hate junk mail and I hate paper, so having everything shredded or digitized and never having paper except for what I explicitly ask for, is miraculous.

And it's more complicated than you'd think because the postal service requires a notarized form, along with multiple forms of ID (and those forms of ID beyond drivers license are strange, and I only had one of them, so it was a close call) in order to permit someone to open your mail. So you have to file a form for every name and business name that receives mail at the forwarding service.

My primary line of defense is to simply not get mail. I've switched to paperless statements from my bank and credit cards, I already had all of my other services setup with automatic withdrawal and such (and have canceled a lot of them). Even so, California still sends me crap all the time about payroll taxes and such.

There will be other issues. I need to read up on operating in California now that our address is in Florida. Jamie is still in California, and will remain a CA resident (while I'll be claiming Florida as my home this year, for no state income tax and lower vehicle registration fees). I don't know what we'll do about our various taxes for the business. We're a Delaware corporation, so that stays the same...but how we interact with California might change. I'll figure it out soon.

Another complication is that my new address is in a town I've never visited and in a state I haven't been to since I was a kid. I'll have to visit Florida at some point to register my RV and get my FL drivers license and voter registration. I should go visit the Wufoos, anyway, so this isn't a major hardship. But, it feels a little weird telling people my address and using it for billing address and such.

Check out http://www.earthclassmail.com

Yes, there are a handful of big box stores that permit this. Also, many state and federal parks allow dry camping (with no water or electric provided) for very low rates. I haven't really begun to explore these options, yet, but will. My solar panels were delayed, and so power when boondocking has to come from my generator for another month or so, which isn't really something I want to run for several hours each day (I could probably do it with two or three hours a day of runtime to charge my batteries and my laptop, but I haven't experimented with that).

And, since it's currently the off-season, RV parks are pretty cheap. I'm paying $41.50 per night in a really nice place on the beach, vs. $71.50/night plus utilities at my house in Mountain View.

hey, re: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1064673 (which is dead and thus I cannot directly reply)

I asked and received a nice answer:

"Someone accidentally banned a site that you then submitted something from. We have some new people with admin privileges, and they don't realize how easy it is to ban stuff accidentally."

My dad has been doing this when he travels in his minivan to sell/buy motorcycles. He parks next to the rigs if possible.

I live on a boat, and have been doing so for the past four years. If you have any questions throw me an e-mail, Ill be glad to answer.

What do you need bandwidth for?

My father lived on a canal barge for the past 4 years and is now living in a custom RV. He loves the mobile life and dislikes being anchored to one spot too long.

He rents a virtual server with Linode for things that require constant monitoring, but it also provides him with a SSH tunnel for when he's using public internet.

He's parking in pub car-parks a lot of the time and as he's in the pub most evenings the landlords are happy with this. He uses their wi-fi (with permission) and gets great bandwidth and has his SSH tunnel to offer security.

When he's not parked with such favourable conditions he uses a 3G card which gives him decent reception everywhere. With a blackberry all of his email is taken care of so he only needs to get online to do specific things.

Now, granted he's not a programmer... but how much bandwidth does that SSH connection take? And if you're using a virtual server to do your downloads and then can drive by a wi-fi spot to collect them from the server then you would've successfully avoided the very expensive cost of a satellite connection.

This is also my primary concern for the future of this project. I don't really know yet how it will work out.

Today I'm parked at Morro Dunes RV Park in Morro Bay. They have free WiFi that is excellent. I'm currently watching Torchwood on Netflix, while also uploading several large photos to flickr. It's not the 20-something Mbits I had in Mountain View via Comcast, but it's perfectly usable, and fast enough for everything I need to do, including repository syncs of our software. It has also been reliable all day, and Netflix streams have been completely smooth and without interruption for the couple of hours total I've been watching and working.

The KOA I stayed at in Monterey had very expensive ($14.95/day) and very slow/spotty Internet, though, so I don't expect Internet to be an easy problem everywhere. But, finding great Internet here in Morro Bay is encouraging, as this is a small town, not renowned for technology.

When I parked on the street when first arriving last night, I used my G1 tethered via PdaNet. But, there's no 3G here, so it was really slow. Pretty much just good enough for checking for urgent email. So, boondocking (just parking wherever and living wholly off-the-grid) will probably be limited to weekends, and possibly 3G-enabled areas. PdaNet also only runs under Windows, so I can't run Linux natively while using it; which means I have to virtualize for development (our software is a Linux/UNIX-only product).

Sleeping in the vehicle is another matter; but since it's not obvious someone is sleeping in the vehicle, I suspect one can get away with parking legally and sleeping illegally enough of the time to make it worthwhile (if a ticket for sleeping in the vehicle costs, say, $75, then as long as you don't get ticketed more than once every three nights, you'd come out ahead over an RV park). There are other benefits to RV parks, including the convenience of not having to run the generator for power, not having to dump and refill water, and probably having better Internet, so I'll probably end up staying in parks about 75% of the time. I'm paying $41.50, including utilities and Internet, per night here in Morro Bay, and this is a pretty pricey area; my house in Mountain View cost $71.50 per night, and didn't include utilities or Internet. So, I'm still coming out way ahead.

My brother used to do long-haul trucking. With the right person to set up your loads, you can make $300k a year.

This sounds like an awesome/crazy way to pair program.

I came here from Austin, Texas three years ago. Winter in Silicon Valley is not an acceptable season for me. Even summer is a pale imitation of the real thing (though I do love the smell of Jasmine which permeates everything during spring and summer here).

For people from cold climates, the bay area is very mild, and lovely, year-round, but I'm a total wimp in the cold. I hate the cold, and I've been miserable the past couple of months in Mountain View. So, I'm heading south.

"Winter sucks everywhere."

Not in Scottsdale, AZ. :)

Summer, tho ...

You kinda have to "exist" here in the US, as well, for federal income tax and other such things, but you can have a post box or registered mail agent to act as your "home address".

And, I'm not sure if tech startups, in general, require the ability to move from city to city. I do think it'll become a lot more common, though, amongst startup founders, now that Internet has become so close to pervasive. Most of the YC founders I know are already extremely mobile, and generally travel a lot more than the folks I know in other fields (except touring musicians, perhaps).

It also remains to be seen whether I can be productive as a tech startup guy while traveling. I suspect it'll work out fine, but there are plenty of variables in the year ahead.

I'll be posting an analysis of my expense projections (and the real numbers for the few days I've been living in the RV) sometime today. I haven't run the numbers for a hotel, as it wasn't a feasible option for me. If you don't mind staying in less interesting places most of the time, you can probably do it for roughly the same. But, high rent cities will probably kill your budget (though, there are usually cheap hotels in every city, if you don't mind living in a ghetto and in a crappy hotel). Since I can theoretically just park somewhere (Wal-Mart, neighborhood street, etc.) in even the toniest of locales, I can probably visit the highest rent places in the country without paying a fortune to do it. We'll see how realistic that turns out to be over the next year, as I visit Los Angeles, San Diego, Austin, Atlanta, New York, Toronto, San Francisco (I've lived down in the bay for 3 years, but never really properly experienced San Francisco), etc.

Weekly stay hotels would also probably bring your expenses down a bit.

I suspect there is also a large component of "my own place" that you cant get from a cheap motel. Such a comfort is a big deal.

An 80's Schecter strat, a 1987 G&L L2000 bass, and a 2001 Gibson J-45. I also still have a 1969 Fender Malibu acoustic, but once I get it restrung and setup again, I'm going to sell it. I currently also still have my 1984 Marshall JCM 800 100 watt twin combo, which failed to sell, even at a ridiculous discount off of current eBay prices, before moving day (this surprised me, but Mountain View isn't exactly a music town), so I have to get it sold, as well. I'll probably craigslist it when I get down to Los Angeles. I'm gonna replace it with a little 5W Blackstar or something similar.