Rosie's Ramblings

By Sandra Rosenzweig
     
      Rosie's Ramblings
     
      My cousin the textbook plugger (remember song pluggers?) calls himself a Traveller, and long ago I assumed that affectation for myself. (I believe he spelled it the British way-with two l's.) Much nicer than road warrior, with all its Mel Gibson connotations. My father, when he was teasing said cousin, called him a schlepper, spelled with two p's. When portable electronics came about, my fellow Travellers and I shelled out hundreds of dollars on carefully labeled electrical and phone adapters, converters, and plugs for every country we might conceivably visit in the next hundred years (check out the Electric Power Around The World page for a chart of voltages, plug types, and television formats at Voltage Converter Transformers, www.voltage-converter-transformers. com/world-electricity-conversion.html). We learned how to get our modems to recognize Germany's dial tones (see www. ihot.com/Global/help.html and www.kropla.com/phones. htm) and schlepped a newly updated printout of Internet cafe locations (see The Cybercafe Search Engine at http://cyber captive.com), as well as telephone and network cables. We also routinely checked into Steve Kropla's comprehensive and expert Help For World Travelers page, www.kropla.com, for local addresses of credit card ATMs as well as much of the above and a long list of useful travel links. I routinely checked the World Public Holidays Database to see whether I might bump into local holidays, at www.tyzo.com/tools/holidays. html. Cell phones for international travel were an iffy proposition because, at first, our phones couldn't talk to the rest of the world.
     
      Now, in the year 2006, nothing has changed. I still pack my rollaboard half full of black bricks and wires and can barely remember a time when we didn't have to run our laptops through airport security. I no longer use my electronic packing list: The neutral mix-and-match, one-pair-of-shoes, nonwrinkle traveler's wardrobe is ingrained in my cerebrum, although I still forget my toothbrush. However, I still worry I'll leave behind that one important charger. So, I've taped a small checklist of accessories to the inside of my traveling case. As I pack each gadget, I check it against this list to make sure I've included all the necessary power bricks, network cables, cradles, styli, media cards, and battery rechargers. Even now, we must buy our mobiles with an international attitude if we want to use them beyond the seas. (See www.kropla.com/mobilephones. htm.) We also have to pack the support staff for GPS receivers, Bluetooth headsets and keyboards, and media cards. And gods forbid we lose our French adapter plug-maybe we should carry a backup in a different bag?
     
      Before I get distracted, though, let me suggest a laptop mobile accessory that I've used, on and off, for years and never thought to mention. (I did, however, review it five or more years ago as a desktop mouse replacement.) Although I hate the trackpad on my laptop (and just about everyone else's), I routinely pack my Cirque Easy Cat Touchpad to use as an external mousing device. This flat, half-inch thick, 2.7-by-3.4-inch rectangle has two buttons (they work as regular left and right mouse buttons) and some tap zones you can use instead of the buttons-double tap here to select something, keep your finger on the pad and drag it there to move it. Because it's flat, it seems more compact than even a mini mouse, and yet it doesn't cramp my forearm the way a built-in trackpad might ($44.95 for the USB model, www.cirque.com/products/desktop_easy.htm).
     
      Another tip: Whenever you ride on a commercial airliner, wear your Bose QuietComfort 2 Acoustic Noise Cancelling headphones. What do you mean, you haven't bought any because they cost about $300? What is your sanity worth to you? Amortize the cost across all the trips you will take in the next several years. Or, maybe, use them in the office whenever street crews serenade you with jackhammers or someone is vacuuming while you're trying to think.
      Whatever. All those jet engines roaring and whining, all those babies crying and hard-of-hearing people yelling, they all fade to almost nothing the moment you turn the Boses on. You arrive at your destination far, far less frazzled. And, because these headphones are full earmuff-style cans rather than on- or in-ear pads or buds, I even wear them while I'm sleeping. The QC2s are a vast improvement over the original QCs: They have the batteries in the headphones themselves, so there are no wires connecting to an external power pack-unless you want to plug them in to your plane seat or MP3 player. They even fold flat, although they're still big enough to force Travellers to schlepp them in their carry-ons. Buy direct from Bose (www.bose.com, $299), or check eBay.
     

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