Rob, a friend from my college days (circa the stone age), writes in...
Just out of curiousity Steve, what's your gadget bag? Maybe you want to throw a post on your blog about what tools you use to keep up with everything, and how your "digital lifestyle" affects and enables you. What do you use on the train...etc..? Gizmodo of course does ths kind of thing all the time - and people love to see what other people are using.
OK, I am game for that. Michael Dell does this, so why not me? First, my overall philosphy here is simplicity. Less is more. Let's start with hardware. First, my man purse backpack. I am a big fan of Tumi bags. They used to be very expensive but these days they have introduced several lines that are more cost effective. My bag of choice is the Tumi Cliff Three-Way Computer Carrier. It's light and very flexible. Inside, I always have four traveling companions...
- A CooperKatz-issued Dell Latitude D400 laptop (at work I dock it and use a 19" ultrasharp LCD monitor). It is equipped with Wifi and I use T-Mobile Hotspot since I frequent/blog/work at Starbucks and Borders often.
- A silver iPod Mini. On my iPod at any given time I have music of course plus a number of podcasts and several audio books from Audible, which has tons of great choices. I am trying to transition all of my business book "reading" to audio. It's easier on the shoulder since I can carry many books at once and I like that I can listen to them wherever I am - including on trains, planes and in automobiles. I also constantly refer to my calendar and contacts on my iPod. I ditched my Palm PDA last year since I rarely use it.
- My LG VX7000 cameraphone. Believe it or not I use more of my minutes towards data that I do voice. I access my feeds via Bloglines mobile as well as my Gmail and synced Outlook info using Remo. I occasionally use it to blog and post photos in Flickr as wll.
- Last but not least, like many bloggers I am a fan of Moleskine notebooks. I usually have one of these with me.
Now onto the software. Here I also try to keep things simple and light...
- First, it's no secret I am a Firefox junkie. I am also a Web junkie and I am trying to move my entire life off the desktop and onto "the cloud" so I can access my information from anywhere. My essential Firefox extensions include Scrapbook, Spellbound and the Bloglines Toolkit. Online apps I use regularly include Bloglines, Gmail, a Socialtext personal wiki (thanks Ross!), del.icio.us, Flickr, Microsoft Outlook Web Access for corporate mail, Citrix and finally TypePad for my blog. I am also a huge fan of Google Desktop Search. I use Firefox's Live Bookmarks feature extensively as well. In fact, I use Live Bookmarks primarilly to access RSS news search feeds to find new things to blog about.
- Microsoft Office 2003 - I am a particularly heavy user of Outlook, Word, PowerPoint and occassionally OneNote
- WeatherBug Plus - They are a client, in part, because I found their service indespensible and I felt compelled to contact them on a whim back in 2001
- iTunes/iPodder for podcasts
There you have it. What's in your bag, readers?
