Stephendann.com

East Coast Roadshow (ft Perth)

Six weeks on the road has a few challenges.  Being a deep geek with a load of high technology toys means that I tend to travel heavy.  There was a time (not that long ago) that a three day weekend away consisted of more luggage for the toys than for me.

Then there was the time that the laptop had its own suit case for the accessories. Wait. That’s this time.

The Roadshow’s objectives include a series of face to face interviews with academics across the country, and since I believe in travelling heavy whenever possible, this is the load out. Somehow, this all comes in under 23 kilos and one piece of hand luggage.

Portable Computing

• Darktrooper (Dell) armed with an full size external keyboard and mouse, external 320gig USB drive, D-Link external powered USB2.0 hub and a set of USB charger cables for the iPod and Sandisk MP3 player
• Sandvich (Asus) with the amazing battery life (once I disable the wireless again), compact keyboard, and SD drive (16gig cards are so cheap these days)

Darktrooper is the primary machine for the tour – carrying a massive arrray of project data, Steam games and mp3/mp4s, this is my office on the road.  Sandvich comes into play as the device to use on the go – I’ve got a couple of long train journeys in the tour, and I want to be able to simply flip open a device, work away, and not worry about battery life when I walk into the meetings at the end of the train trips.

Recording systems.

• iPodTouch – the oversized wristwatch which now doubles as To-Do list, notepad, actual iPod (that’s the biggest shock – using it for music) and a host of other apps based accessories
• Sandisk Sansa MP3 player – the backup recording system which  records native MP3, has a tiny but strangely effective mic, and a massive battery life
• iPod 120 gig Classic mounted on a Belkin GoStudio recording system (primary recording device).  Since the iPod’s drive space is larger than the free space on my laptop, I had to pick up the 320 gig external drive as the backup for the iPod.

Double redundancy on the equipment – the GoStudio can dock both iPods, and the Sandisk operates independently of the GoStudio.  In the event of battery life failure of all three mp3 devices, I can press gang the laptop into audio recording, and if Darktrooper is down, Sandvich has a microphone as well.  If all the tech is down, we’re in a sort of energy deadzone that’s probably a more pressing priority to solve than the interviews.

Vital secondary equipment

• Powerboard. Admittedly, I flew out of Canberra without a powerboard. That’s entirely because I was going shopping on the way home from the airport.
• Extension cable with double adapter plug. An upgrade from the usual conference travel supplies – the double adapter plug lets you piggyback into the hotel room / apartment power set up without sacrificing the TV/radio/desklamp
• Phone charger – not having a USB charger for the Nokia 6210 is slightly annoying, but acceptable since I have the actual charger taped to the powerboard.
• Housekeys.  This is something I realised accidentally after flying to England with my housekeys in my luggage – I’m extremely used to the sensation and weight of the keys that I miss them when I don’t have them. So I’ve taken to travelling with them so I can attach the hotel keys, rental car keys etc to the keychain. I’m rarely in the habit of carring keys the way hotels set them up (with the giant plastic room numbers), so I tend to forget them more easily.  Stick my primary keys on them, and I remember, and check/doublecheck the keys as habit.
• Cooking equipment.  This is a new one for the tour – I’m living in serviced apartments with full kitches for six weeks. So I’m taking the Matt Hayden approach to travel – pack cooking gear in the equipment list, and self cater en route.
• Portable speakers. Strangely enough, I don’t usually have speakers plugged into the laptop at home.  For the tour, I’m taking a pair of Creative SBS Vivid 60 speakers.  They do have a decent bit of bass for such tiny devices.

Backup Plans

• The last piece of the puzzle is a backup drive sitting in my mate’s office at ANU with the instructions that if I call in and say “I need the backup”, he puts the drive into an overnight courier bag and mails it to me whereever I am in the country.
• Drop Box. Mission critical word docs, including the itinerary, tour dates, flight details and the like are stored in the cloud as well as the local machine.  No Google Docs this round – didn’t quite work out as well in the UK tour as I’d have liked.