Outfitting the Mobile Executive

I travel a lot for business and have gathered a lot of "tips" for what to have with me and how to prepare for a trip. If you have ideas to share on this topic, please send them to me and I will distribute them to our readers.

My laptop is indispensible to me. It is my primary computer and absolutely everything digital that I own or create is on it. I have found that synchronizing between computers is such a pain, that the only easy way to make sure I have everything I need with me is for it all to reside on my laptop. So, tip #1 is:

TIP NUMBER 1: Make your laptop your only/primary computer. Keep everything on it and you won't have to remember to synchronize it with other computer(s) that you own.

Because everything digital that I have is on this one computer, backups are essential. It would be a disaster to lose this machine without having everything backed up. I'll be writing a separate post on backups, but suffice it to say that my next tip is to make sure you regularly back up your laptop on to a USB hard drive, online backup service, or even better, both.

TIP NUMBER 2: Back everything up often to at least 1 other place, and better yet, 2.

Cooling my heals at airports is an unfortunate, but seemingly mandatory, part of business travel. As a result, I need to be entertained during delays. One of my favorite ways to use this idle time is via my Slingbox (http://us.slingmedia.com/page/home). This wonderful invention allows me to watch my home DVR from anywhere I can get a broadband connection. I can watch "live" TV and anything I have previously recorded on my DVR. It's not hi-def, but it's good enough for enjoyable viewing.

TIP NUMBER 3: Consider buying a slingbox and catching up on your TV viewing while waiting at airports or in hotels.

While on the road I always worry that my laptop or hard drive will fail and that I won't have necessary files to work with. For this reason, I carry a USB thumb drive which I use for small backups of active files. I use a program SYNCBACKSE from a company called 2BrightSparks that makes keeping the drive up to date very easy. Since I also use an online backup service, I also have web access to my complete backup data set, and can use this as well to get quick access to any file.

TIP NUMBER 4: Have available a second copy of your files that you can access even if your laptop crashes.

I also like to watch movies. Though the screen on a video ipod is small, it's pretty good for watching a movie. The iTouch looks like it's even better. I copy DVD's to my iPod with a relatively low cost piece of software, "PQ DVD to iPod Video Suite", that you can get at http://www.pqdvd.com/.

TIP NUMBER 5: Convert some movies from DVD to your iPod so that you'll always have something to watch.

If you have additional suggestions, please email them to me at the email address listed on the left.