I love being able to write anywhere at any time and with a free wifi Internet connection throughout the San Diego convention center I was hoping for lots of opportunities to observe and then write. Interestingly, in the one place where one might see the most new cool stuff to write about, the expo hall/vendors’ floor was the one place in the whole lot with no public wifi. That sucked.NECC was my first convention carrying around my heavier/bigger macbookpro (compared to my former 12″ iBook). Besides carrying around my mbp, conventions are infamous for all the vendor brochures and session hand-outs that one can gather over the course of a day. And one thing that non-conference people tend to forget is that paper weighs a lot, and a lot of paper weighs even more. Anyway, pretty much every conference hands out bags to carry this stuff, but they’re not made to carry around one’s $2500 laptop computer. So before I headed to San Diego I thought about whether I wanted to use my big ol’ Samsonite laptop/back-pack, but thought that just seemed like massive over-kill to me. I opted to use my new bright red Tom Bihn messenger bag (with removable sleeve specifically designed for the laptop). So instead of a rather large, somewhat bulky pack-back, which would have spread the weight distribution across both shoulders and snugly resting on my back, I went for the somewhat smaller messenger bag which dumped the weight across one shoulder and had a tendency to bounce on my hip if I didn’t arrange things just so when I walked. Obviously messengers, who use heavily ladened messenger bags must have huge strong shoulders, or something like that. I, on the other hand, appear to built a bit differently.

I even found a vendor, shaun jackson design/higher ground, who had a small bag, that included an optional back-pack style shoulder straps, but for reasons that continues to boggle me, no one was allowed to sell actual product on this exposition hall/vendor floor. Huh? I guess things were set up to arrange for the purchasing of large orders from school districts or universities and the like, but selling to one guy looking for a little sore shoulder relief was not going to happen. I guess I should have just left the damn laptop in my car, but even carrying around the vendors’ handouts, etc., would have brought home the point that two shoulder straps are better than one. Ack. JBB.

p.s., I love my Tom Bihn and still lust for other laptop bags…. the latest is a small sling bag called “The Buzz” l had a friend who had/has 150 pairs of shoes… I figure that I can get away with having more than one laptop bag… JBB