I can also exchange contact data between the Nokia and the CLIE in the form of vCards, and between the Nokia and my ThinkPad. This isn't a totally slick exchange because the phone has no bulk download of data. But it does mean that I can enter a contact in my Notes personal address book, synchronize it to the CLIE, and then beam it across to the phone. Or I can make a contact entry on the phone and in the end get it to Notes. It would not be too hard to make an agent in the Notes Personal Address Book that extracts selected documents in the form of vCards and place them somewhere ready to beam across to the Phone directly.

Tool 6: the laptop bag
All of this has to be carried, along with a clean shirt or two, and some underwear, as well as tickets, passport, money and a few other things. I don't carry anything in my pockets apart from a handkerchief, not because it will ruin the cut of my suit, but more as a legacy of falling off a motorcycle in my youth and landing on a bunch of keys in my pocket. So, because of the pockets thing, I use a small travel bag for my wallet, phone, CLIE, and sunglasses, but even that has to go in the laptop bag when it can.

To get all this in and avoid leaning sideways any more, I use a Laptop Backpack. Mine came from IBM. Targus (at http://www.targususa.com) makes them too. This thing is specifically designed for laptops, having a protected pocket in the back just for the machine itself. It has no sticking out extra pockets or other bits, so it slides easily under a plane seat or into the overhead locker without snagging. It's big enough that everything I need for a three-night trip goes in easily, and I get both hands free.

But to get it all in requires, as I said before, some foresight and some discipline. We've already reviewed the technology bits that I need to carry about. The discipline bit is to clean it out regularly so that it doesn't slowly silt up with things that you collect and then don't use. You need to be able to justify everything in it on the basis that either you will use it, or that the likelihood of needing it is too high to ignore it.

So into mine goes the laptop, my diskette drive, the power adapter, the phone cable, and the cable for my Token Ring card. I also have a wireless Ethernet card, my modem saver, and an RJ45 to IBM cabling system adapter--I use this too often to risk leaving it behind. And with the phone and the CLIE in my travel bag, that's all the technology I carry.

The rest of the space in the backpack bag holds my small bag of clothes and toothbrush, a folder for expense receipts, some business cards, tickets, and a couple of city maps. There's also at least one bag of coins for the next country. By the time you read this, though, that will be much easier because most of Western Europe will be using the new common currency, the Euro. Sadly, the UK is not yet joining the Euro, but at least after January I will only have to carry two currencies, and not a minimum of four. I'm sorry to say I also carry an old-fashioned pen and paper notebook. All of that leaves space for a book, and on the way home, maybe some chocolate for my wife.

Mick Moignard has been working and traveling with Lotus Notes since Release 2.0 in 1991. Mick is a DominoPower Senior Technical Editor and a Principal CLP with Unipart Expert Practices, a Lotus Advanced Partner in the UK. If you want to discuss anything to do with this article, or indeed anything else to do with Notes and Domino, contact Mick at Mick_Moignard@unipart.co.uk. Unipart Expert Practices will also happily discuss any opportunities you may have with any Notes and Domino application development or infrastructure projects you need help with. Unipart Expert Practices can be found at http://www.unipartep.com.