Arrived in Panama and started working in my new office

Last Sunday I've arrived well in Panama and today began working in my new office in downtown Panama City. Although I had some trouble with a box embargo American Airlines puts into effect between June and August I got my PowerMac and Cinema display with me on the airplane. At the moment I'm sitting at my temporary desk reading email and writing this blog post.

The furniture and other office equipment is still sailing somewhere on the Caribbean Sea and will hopefully arrive safely sometimes next week. Right now the office looks quite big as it is completely empty, but I expect it to be well filled with all that stuff from the 40' container. At least half of the load is destined for the office. We'll see how everything will fit in here. I want to have space for 5 or 6 persons.

To start with I got a 1 mbps Internet connection via cable modem. The service is with CableOnda which is the local cable TV provider as well. So far I have nothing to complain about and our Vonage VoIP phone service works the same way as before in the Tampa Bay area. It is not very cheap though. A similar service in the US would cost about half or even less.

Probably I will upgrade to some better type of connection soon. I got some proposals from several local telcos with interesting pricing for a dedicated fiber optics circuit starting with 2 mbps synchronous. My goal is to get some Internet access that allows to have a few servers here in the office and be able to connect via VPN from the outside as well. I don't want to convert the office into a datacenter, but it's very convenient to be able to set up a server for testing or demonstration purposes and expose it to the outside world using public IP addresses. You can't do that with consumer style Internet access.

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