You can never be totally secure, but basic precautions like this simple cable lock for laptops can help

This is part of an ongoing series of longer articles I am posting on Sundays.

In this digital age, it is easy to overlook the critical element of physical security. Put simply, it is often far more efficient to steal or gain access to a physical object like a laptop or flash drive than to break into a computer system. And despite the sanitary and controlled environments many mobile employees often travel in, risks to personal safety are real. Therefore, it is sensible to consider the physical security needs of the road warrior.

Protecting Your Data

Road warriors love gadgets, but so do thieves. According to a 2008 Ponemon Institute study for Dell, over 12,000 laptop computers are lost in US airports each week, and 70% of these are never reclaimed. Other studies have shown similar losses at public places like restaurants, hotels, and parking lots. Thumb drives, portable hard drives, and smart phones share the top of the most-stolen list with laptop computers.

Portable drives are particularly easy to snatch

Because these are often crimes of opportunity, the simplest protective measure is to keep these devices under ones personal control at all times. Never ask a stranger to watch your bag, and do not leave computers or peripherals unattended in conference rooms or hotels.

Special care is needed when passing through airport security: Never put your laptop or other valuable items through the scanner first, since you may be delayed while passing through the metal detector. Instead, place them in the middle or rear of your items so they will remain inside the x-ray machine until you emerge on the other side to retrieve them.

Most hotel rooms have safes available, and these should be used whenever you must leave your laptop or other valuables behind. Although they are not foolproof, they are much more secure than car trunks, cable locks, or bell desks. If a safe is not available or is too small, use a Kensington-type lock to secure your laptop computer to a bulky and sturdy object like a desk. These will not stop a determined thief, but should be enough to discourage a snatcher.

Protecting Yourself

Many of us wrongly assume we are safe in the familiar surroundings of offices, hotels, airports, and restaurants. The rolling suitcase, airline ticket, and laptop bag marks us as targets even in these environments, and serve as enticing evidence of loot to be had.

One of the best ways of protecting one’s safety when traveling is always to be aware and prepared. Get directions ahead of time instead of asking, staring at your PDA or GPS, or driving around. Consider whether your surroundings put you at risk: Select hotels in safer neighborhoods or where access is more controlled. Avoid public transportation when toting cumbersome bags, even if you would happily take the bus or subway alone. Spending a bit more money is preferable to losing your valuables or coming to harm.

When you are away from the office or hotel, dress like a local and watch out for too-friendly strangers. Most people are helpful to others, but avoid those who ask prying questions of offer extravagant services. Con-men often prey on travelers, waiting near hotels, airports, and offices. For example, never take an un-licensed limousine or taxi since these nearly always end up being more costly or risky than desired.

Business travel can be enjoyable, but one must always be careful to avoid becoming a victim!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | Physical Security for the Road Warrior
This post was categorized as Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

My secret to long (battery) life and happiness!

Shortly before landing in San Francisco the other day, the MacBook Pro-using guy in the seat next to me leaned over and asked, “how did you manage to use your Mac all the way across the country? Is that some special battery you have?”

For a minute, I was tempted to make something up, as in “yes, it’s an experimental fuel cell that runs on bovine methane!” Or maybe claim that the new $5 Tornado intake in my car gets me 50 mpg, 7 hours of battery life, and makes me more attractive.

But I’m a good guy. So I admitted the truth – that I bought a spare battery for the MacBook Pro, so I never run out of juice. I’ve done this with all of my laptops for years, and I wonder why more people don’t do it. Extra Apple batteries are just $130 (on sale at Amazon for $110 now) and this is a small price to pay for go-anywhere juice! Batteries used to be much more expensive, but prices have fallen.

This post is part of my series focused on the MacBook Pro.

• Don’t Be Jealous Of The New MacBook Pros!
• Upgraded! 320 GB in a MacBook Pro!
• SanDisk ExpressCard Flash Media Adapter: Nifty MacBook Pro Accessory!
• How I Get 7 Hours of MacBook Pro Battery Life
• Panic! Green Light and MacBook Pro Keyboard is Half Dead!
• Low-Power USB Ports Haunt My MacBook Pro

If you’re thinking of buying an extra battery, here is some advice:

1. Buy the original equipment battery, not some knock-off. I’ve had terrible luck with off-brand batteries and they’re never more than a few dollars cheaper!
2. Buy from an approved vendor so you get a full warranty (I got mine at the Apple store)
3. Don’t waste your time looking for super bargains – they rarely go on sale for more than 10% off. That Amazon sale is the cheapest I’ve ever seen.
4. Make sure you buy exactly the right battery for your machine – I match the part number on the battery that came with it. Manufacturers vary batteries over time, and although another machine’s battery may fit it might not be compatible with your computer.
5. Don’t buy lithium-ion laptop batteries that have sat on the shelf for a long time. They lose their life whether they are used or not!
6. Don’t pay much for used batteries. They probably don’t have much life left in them.
7. Dispose of old batteries carefully – they contain toxic chemicals! You can bring old rechargeable batteries to Staples, Best Buy, Home Depot, Lowe’s, and other stores for free recycling.

So that’s my secret to long (battery) life and happiness!

Note: Some of these links include affiliate codes that help pay for this blog. For example, buying an Amazon Kindle with this link sends a few bucks my way! But I don't write this blog to make money, and am happy to link to sites and stores that don't pay anything. I like Amazon and buy tons from them, but you're free to buy whatever and wherever you want.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | How I Get 7 Hours of MacBook Pro Battery Life
This post was categorized as Apple, Personal, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

This is part of an ongoing series of longer articles I will be posting every Sunday.

Balancing work and life has never been easy, and this is especially true for the knowledge worker. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that we keep our jobs in our heads at all times, and modern electronics like the BlackBerry and laptop tend to keep it at our fingers as well. When our jobs require us to travel, work can effectively separate us entirely from our lives for days or weeks at a time. Road warriors must consciously try to focus on life, even as work pulls their attention away.

Always On

First, let us focus on the element of time: How many hours do you spend on work? White collar “knowledge workers” enjoy great flexibility when it comes to scheduling – most of us can pencil in an early exit, long lunch, or late arrival with just a little shuffling of appointments. But we also tend to work at odd hours and locations, firing up our laptops for a late-night spreadsheet session or taking a call from the UK (or farther East) before dawn.

Flexible schedules mean less delineation between work and non-work, and those of us who are focused on excellence in our work can find ourselves saying “sure, I’ll be there” even when we ought to be focused elsewhere. It can seem almost selfish to ignore a call when driving, resting, or playing golf, but this is exactly what we must do to avoid always being on duty.

This is especially true when it comes to friends and family. We owe them our focus when we are with them, and must consciously turn our attention to them and away from work. Of course we must sometimes sacrifice personally if the urgency of work is too great, but we must not always decide that work takes precedence over life.

Out and Away

When work requires us to travel, attaining balance is doubly difficult. We are tempted to maximize our effectiveness while on the road, since we are away anyway, and can easily put in extremely long hours just to have something to do. But again, we must turn ourselves away and focus on our own lives and loved ones.

My first rule of business travel is to remember those at home. Time zone changes make calling to check in especially hard, but entering an appointment can help remind you of the time at home. Before you go, try to get a list of important events happening back home so you can continue to be involved just as you would be if you were not on the road. A little interest and concern can go a long way!

My second rule is to always find something interesting to do wherever you go. Hotels, office buildings, and airports are largely identical, and chain restaurants thrive on their predictability. I recommend looking up local museums and musical performances, since these vary greatly from city to city and also tend to take on some of the local character. Ask your hosts to suggest a local delicacy or independent restaurant to visit for a literal flavor of the city. Consider vegetarian or ethnic restaurants for some real variety, and use yelp.com to find top-rated eateries.

All considered, don’t let yourself be taken advantage of by work. It is acceptable to give exceptional effort to your job, but far less so to have this become the normal expectation. One should never settle for accommodations or treatment from work that we would not be willing to offer to ourselves.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | Out of the Office and Away From Home
This post was categorized as Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

"Marche sur le feu" by Josélito Tirados

Sitting in a jumbo jet five miles above the Sierra Nevada, I got to thinking. Now that I work at home and fly to work rather than drive to an office every day, has my carbon footprint increased or decreased?

Let’s lay down some facts for comparison:

1. I rarely got on a plane for work until the last few years. At those jobs, I normally drove 30 miles per day.
2. I now work from my home office but fly regularly. Over the past 12 months, I’ve taken 29 trips and flown 56,000 miles, and normally drive 100 miles (round trip) to the airport. Let’s leave it at 30 miles per day on the road, and 82 days on the road (thanks, TripIt).
3. I’ll assume that my office was comparable whether at home or at the office park. They are probably very different, but for now I will ignore the many other confounding factors.
4. I’ll also assume I never drove to lunch, spilled toxic chemicals, or chopped and burned rain forest trees.
5. I’ll use a rate of 1.35 lbs of carbon per air mile and .70 per driven mile (thanks, b-e-f.org)

Ok, so let’s do some math!

1. 250 work days times 30 miles driven to the office times .70 lbs of carbon equals 5,250 lbs of carbon – roughly twice the weight of my (tiny) car!
2. 56,000 miles flown times 1.35 lbs of carbon plus 82 days times 30 miles driven plus 29 trips times 100 miles driven times .70 lbs of carbon equals 79,352 lbs of carbon

Being a “road warrior” or “nomadic worker” or whatever has multiplied by carbon emissions by a factor of 15! I bet I have had a greater carbon impact in the last year than I accumulated in the first 30 years of my life. How can air travel ever be sustainable?

Some more things to consider:

• My travel schedule alone is four times the average American’s annual carbon footprint of 20,000 lbs.
• My travel footprint this year was equal to the lifetime footprint of the average Moroccan, Costa Rican, or Fijian.
• A single seat on a single round-trip flight between Chicago and San Francisco (4,616 miles) has the same carbon footprint as the entire lifetime of the average resident of sub-Saharan Africa.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | My Carbon Footprint
This post was categorized as Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

For IT-centric workers, being productive from the road requires more than just exceptional personal skills: A killer laptop is needed to replace an entire office full of equipment. Let’s consider what a modern digital nomad’s laptop should include.

Power and Space

The ideal road warrior machine needs capacity to handle any modern computing task. Nearly every digital nomad has to occasionally perform intensive activities like compiling code or encoding video, and these require serious capability in all three axes of computing: CPU, RAM, and storage.

The road warrior laptop should have a serious CPU, chipset, and graphics combination. Multi-core CPUs with plenty of cache will take the sting out of intensive computing, and modern architectures can provide good battery life, too. Don’t overlook the impact of a fast system bus and good graphics hardware, too. Integrated graphics chips are getting better, but a road warrior should have a discrete GPU and dedicated video memory, especially if video or photo work is to be performed.

Tip: It may not make financial sense to spend hundreds more for a few extra megahertz, but make sure the system is configured with the latest-generation high-end chip. (ie, not these...)

Max out the RAM, too. Extra RAM will provide a serious boost to overall performance, and should help battery life since more data will be cached. The modern road warrior laptop should have 4 GB, and the next-generation OSes and chipsets will bump this to 8 or more over the next year or so.

Tip: Its easy to upgrade your own RAM on most laptops, and you can save some bucks!

Storage capacity is a must, too. Equip a road-warrior laptop with as much disk space as is available, and consider upgrading the hard disk on older machines as new sizes appear. Larger disks are generally quicker than smaller ones, and serious performers might want to step up to 7200 RPM drives for an extra jolt. No matter the size, a portable external backup drive is a must, but make sure it’s secure and encrypted to protect your data on the road.

Tip: I like to lock my (encrypted) backup drive in the hotel safe while I tote my (encrypted) laptop around during the day.

Portability and Longevity

So-called desktop replacement machines are often too bulky for digital nomad use, so try to strike a balance. 15-inch widescreen notebooks are a nice compromise between usability on the road and ease on the shoulders, but some might be able to get by with a 13-inch or smaller ultraportable, depending on their needs. Focus as much on the physical size and shape as on the weight, since a 1-inch rectangle might fit your backback or briefcase better than a bulbous wedge. Besides, most modern machines weigh within a pound or so of each other.

The HP OmniBook 800 line set the standard for ultra-portability and toughness. Today's sub-notebooks are a serious draw for digital nomads.

Consider the weight and portability of the total package, too. Many manufacturers are introducing smaller and lighter power supplies, and this can make a huge difference to the digital nomad. Invest in retractable cables and Kensington locks and keep the clutter down to reduce the load on your shoulder.

Tip: Cutting out the cable clutter also helps keep airport security from flagging your rats-nest of a laptop bag for extra screening! This clear bankers' bag helps organize.

Although power outlets are becoming more common at airports, hotels, and even airplanes, an extra battery is a must. Always buy two of the largest batteries available for your machine and keep both fully charged.

Tip: If you have an airplane AC adapter, check seatguru.com before selecting your seats to make sure a power port will be available!

Virtualize for Flexibility

Advances in computer virtualization can help the digital nomad in unexpected ways. Install VMware or VirtualBox to enable outdated applications to run on modern 64-big operating systems. I keep a small virtual Windows XP image with older versions of Microsoft Office, Project, and Visio on my machine just in case I have trouble with the latest versions. Mac users love being able to use VMware Fusion or Parallels to run Windows applications alongside their favorite Mac OS X apps.

Consider support implications of your choice, too. Most larger IT organizations require a specific install for corporate use, and virtualization can be a lifesaver here. If your road warrior machine isn’t an approved standard, consider running the corporate image in a virtual machine. A friend of mine uses a MacBook Air ultraportable laptop with his entire supported corporate Windows XP image running under VMware Fusion. This allows him to have 100% compatibility and support in a lightweight package.

Connectivity

Finally, there is no substitute for the always-on connectivity of modern wireless phone-based laptop networking choices. Many road-warrior laptops have built-in 3G cards, but these might not be your best choice. A USB (or perhaps ExpressCard) device can be more easily swapped between machines as needed. A new type of wireless router is also appearing that connects directly to these external 3G cards, and allows their signal to be shared with a small group.

Tip: External devices are also much easier to exchange if they should fail while on the road.

All wireless providers offer similar service at similar prices, and most do not offer substantial discounts when bundling wireless broadband with voice service. Consider whether you want to buy the hardware outright in order to get a shorter contract or if you would rather sign a two-year contract and get free hardware. Pay special attention to their coverage maps when selecting a provider, as this is a major differentiator between 3G and EV-DO service providers in the United States. Although these services are expensive, they are cheap compared to a few days of hotel or airport Wi-Fi charges!

Wi-Fi coverage has become far more plentiful over the last few years, and providers like AT&T, T-Mobile, Boingo, and FON make convincing pitches about their service. But my experience shows that the limited range of Wi-Fi makes it frustratingly unavailable when you need it most. Expect to see Wi-Fi access bundled with 3G service soon. Next-generation services like Wi-Max aren’t ready for prime time at this point and should not be considered a road-warrior-suitable alternative.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | The Road Warrior’s Laptop
This post was categorized as Apple, Personal, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.