.Dust

When I hit the road I found myself bring­ing with me a lot of stuff that I think I will need dur­ing my travels.

Here is a list of things that you can usu­ally find in my bag:

• Per­sonal com­puter with power supply.
• Usu­ally a cou­ple of mobile phones (some­times three or more depend­ing on the pur­pose of the trip) with travel charger and data cable con­nec­tions for those who do not sup­port bluetooth.
• iPod nano with USB cable.
• Dig­i­tal audio recorder with USB data con­nec­tion cable.
• Dig­i­tal cam­era with power sup­ply and USB data con­nec­tion cable.
• Portable hard disk drive with USB data con­nec­tion cable.
• GPS nav­i­ga­tion sys­tem that is made of a recy­cled iPaq 5450 and GPS sen­sor both with travel chargers.

If a am trav­el­ling for hol­i­days I usu­ally drop the dig­i­tal recorder and add up a video cam­era with its power sup­ply and firewire cable.

Let’s do the math: more than 4 power sup­plies, more than 5 or 6 dif­fer­ent data cables and more and 6 or 7 dif­fer­ent devices.

That’s absolutely crazy.

First thing. The first issue that you will face is that if you are being lodged in a hotel room there are not enough power plug to fit all of your power sup­plies. That’s a mat­ter of fact. This sit­u­a­tion will get worse if you are trav­el­ling abroad and need to add a num­ber of power plug adapters in your back­pack.
In this case you will have to look at your agenda and define a charg­ing sequence for your devices. Some­thing that may cause some issue to the best project man­agers in the world.

Sec­ond thing. No mat­ter what atten­tion you pay while buy­ing some new elec­tronic device you will find your­self with a dif­fer­ent power sup­ply with pro­pri­etary power plug con­nec­tor and data cable.

Lucky us that in Italy we do not have any kind of pagers or that would add another device to the list.

I won­der why nobody is doing any­thing try­ing to nor­mal­ize this situation.

I per­fectly under­stand that indus­trial design con­straints some­times forces man­u­fac­tur­ers to adopt pro­pri­etary fancy con­nec­tors but they should start to think to a nor­mal­iza­tion process.

In the ideal world I would not like to carry any data cable. I would like every­thing to be done over the air. (blue­tooth, WiFi, UWB, what­ever the tech­nol­ogy but wireless).

I would like to have only one power sup­ply for all of my devices or, at least, have the pos­si­bil­ity to charge some of the devices using the USB port to which data cable are usu­ally con­nected to.

Why do I blog this? We are really liv­ing in a wire­less world. All of your data is trav­el­ling over the air in a very fast pace. Unfor­tu­nately you are still tied to the wall in order to make things work. How long will cus­tomers accept this?

Related posts:

1. Microac­tions
2. OOO world
3. Don’t loose the Power
4. Con­trol your home from your mobile phone
5. Some sim­ple thoughts about RFID tags