Travel flexibility has its virtues

In an earlier discussion about travel notebooks, I mentioned that I use an IBM Thinkpad X31, a light little laptop that’s good for bouncing around airports and cities across the world.

On a flight to San Francisco last week, I found another reason why I like these machines: takeapartability. On the first leg of my trip between Detroit and Houston I discovered that my machine wouldn’t boot — something about the hard drive media not being recognized by the BIOS. So using a broken pen cap and another pen I unscrewed the hard drive caddy, reseated the drive and reassembled the chassis. Problem fixed. I’d like to see you do that with your Mac Book.

I suppose one could project this metaphor to many travel-related things: Be flexible and crafty on the road and you can always keep yourself happy. Just make sure that your plans/hardware aren’t so complicated that you can’t fix them on your own.