Well, we're about 5 days from our departure date to Europe and making last minute preparations. As you already know (I think), we've decided to go sans laptop for this trip. What? No computer at your every beck and call? Preposterous you must be shouting by now. I think so too, but we decided against it since a laptop would comprise about 20-25% of our total gear weight limit of 40lbs. I still think we're a tiny bit over without the beastly machine, but at least we're not lugging a whole computer and what not around.

This presents a few problems in and of itself. First is that we will need internet access. Sure there will be Internet cafes just about everywhere, but we know those are about as safe as carrying your money around in a clear plastic bag floated by helium balloons behind you. I'm sure most are perfectly fine, but I'm not really in the mood to take a chance with my private info.

So what to do? Well, in this day and age, plenty. We're bringing a USB thumb-drive-ama-key-fob-ama-flash-amajig that contains a bevy of widgets:

1. Portable Apps - a nice suite of apps ready to go for your USB thing
2. KL-Detector - a free keylogger detector.
3. KeyPass - a password keeper app (yes, you should put your passwords into this app BEFORE you leave home)
4. LockNote - a notepad that uses AES256 encryption to lock up text...we're going to keep backup copies of our info on here...just in case.
5. TrueCrypt - a drive encryption mechanism that will keep data safe in case it gets lost.
6. Mouse Only Keyboard - a tool that will allow you to construct passwords by choosing letters and symbols on screen instead of using a keyboard. Sure it's slow, but it is much safer.
7. Neo's SafeKeys - a variation on the on-screen keyboard theme.

I'm also thinking of bringing my PPC-6700. Eventhough I won't have EVDO access, it still has built-in wifi that should work with public wifi connections. The cool part comes when I login to my home PC via logmein from the phone. Since there are no keyloggers on my personal phone and the logmein traffic with my home computer is encrypted, we should be pretty safe. A little paranoid you say? Yeah, but at least my data will be safer for the most part. A little geeky elbow grease goes a long way.

Big Ups to The Great Geek Manual for point the way for us paranoid geekswho want to roam the earth.

Well, I did it. I installed Vista RTM onto all but one of my machines (that one needs to stay a Windows 2003 server for testing purposes). To tell you the truth, I wasn't too thrilled about installing the big V on any of the machines, but boy am I glad I have. The reason was that I've been on the Vista boat even before Beta 2 and man...it's been some rough sailing. RC1 was even a little rough for my tastes and I was scared to see what would happen with RTM. I have been pleasantly surprised as it seems a lot of performance issues have been resolved and my nc6000 feels as fast as a fresh install of XP, but it's running Vista loaded down with a lot of junk from it's former XP life.

On my laptop (an HP nc6000), Vista took nearly a millenium to upgrade from Windows XP Pro SP2. But it completed almost flawlessly (MacDrive barfs and refuses to uninstall since it doesn't think it'll run on Windows Vista). Not only does my laptop start up faster, but even during the post-password entry throws of launching all 900 of my startup apps, my computer is still pretty responsive. This is quite the departure from my XP experience in which I needed to treat rebooting like a 20 minute break (hence I HATED to reboot and would loathe the POS software that forced my hand in the matter). Now my reboots are less painful.

Also I notice that my slow ass notebook hard drive no longer gets the better of the OS and brings it to a grinding halt. I don't know what they did under the hood to fix that pain in the ass, but I salute the hardy soldiers developers that braved that battle field.

IE7 is much improved...so much so that I am considering uninstalling Firefox. What? Blasphemy you say? Well...who needs it when you have IE7's awesome tabs (finally) funtionality, phishing filters, and even the uber cool quick tabs view (take that Mozilla). Also I've noticed that FF 1.5.whatever has been very unstable in that it seems to stop loading pages after 20 or so minutes of use. "Whadap wit dat?" Anyway, FF is safe for now, but gets less and less use these days. Yes I know I know..extensions. I like them too, but hey they leak memory like the hole in the side of the titanic.

What's this? Windows Photo Gallery? Oooooh. It's like iPhoto, but on Windows. Very nice (and hauls major ass). It's now the heart of the Suriwong family photo empire. Try it, you'll really really like it.

Did I mention Windows Live Mail Desktop (someone, please call the naming police...4 words to name a product IS BAD)? Aside from the horridly long name, it's actually a decent piece of software that improves on Outlook express and kicks Thunderbird's ass in the spam filtering department. I've been getting ebay, jcpenny, and walmart spam among others nonstop for weeks. I mean these things got through Gmail's spam filters even though I marked them as such every single f'in time I got them. They eventually arrived in my thunderbird mail box and I have diligently declared these as spam to no avail. Why won't these pieces of crap recognize these as spam? As soon as I fired up Windows Live Mail Desktop...boom it got them. It told me that these were spam and put them in the junk folder. End of story. Good by Thunderbird. Gmail stays for now, but it's all going to WLMD now.

So what sucks with Vista? Not much yet. I haven't tried burning stuff (although there is a built in burning software now). I guess the only thing that rubs me the wrong way is the user account control that bugs you every time you want install, uninstall, change a system setting, make some coffee, etc. It's not as annoying as it used to be way back in Beta 2, but it's still there (I quickly shut it off).

There's a lot of neat goodies that are included that I've yet to try, but will surely get a chance to sooner or later (movie maker, calendar, meeting space, etc.). Like all things shiny and new, I hope the honeymoon never ends, but I'm jaded just enough to know that Vista will break my heart somewhere down the line....let's just hope it's not too soon.

So now that a9 has scaled back their offerings, I have been forced to find a better way to synchronize my favorites across all of my PCs (I use 4 regularly) and across Firefox and IE.

I tried the google toolbar since they did bookmarking as well, but I just didn't like the "feel" of having my bookmarks in yet another toolbar. I know, I know...this is what I had with A9, but google's toolbar just has too much crap on it. Windows Live Favorites was definitely out since there is no compatible firefox toolbar. I tried installing del.icio.us browser buttons, but I didn't like how delicious organized my favorites. I also didn't like that I had to load their page to access my bookmarks.

So I found a combo of Firefox plugins that get the job done...Google browser sync & FavoriteSync. Now...this isn't seemless mind you, but I'm opting for this route for several reasons:

1. I have local copies of my bookmarks for both firefox and IE
2. No toolbars (or annoyingly crowded ones at least)

There are some caveats: first, FavoriteSync seems to have a very low rating and there are reports of Firefox favs disappearing and having only IE favs migrated at first install. I did not notice any sort of lost favorites, but you have been warned (export your favs on both IE and Firefox before doing this). Secondly, you'll need to click on the little favorite sync star in firefox to get it to sync with IE. You can install a client side app from favoritesync to get this to happen automatically, but really, who needs more crap running on their machine? Just push the button for chirst's sake...

Anyway, I hope this helps the band of multiPC, multibrowser brothers (and sisters) out there get their favs on.

My very recent decision to give up on Firefox did not come lightly. I always figured that the open source folks were doing much better at figuring out what people really want (stability first) than Microsoft. I guess I was wrong.

Up until this point, I have been an avid Firefox user, but I think my firefox days are numbered. The reason is that my Firefox simply uses too much memory. I caught it at a whopping 325MBs today! No wonder my laptop with 1GB of ram as been crawling. The thing I will miss the most as a Firefox user are the extensions that I used the most:

Adsense status bar
Greasmonkey to download google and youtube videos
Sessionsaver plugin (which functions like Avant's ability to save all of the active tabs so if your browser konks, you don't loose all of your tabs)
Colored tabs
Close button on tabs

It's going to take a while to migrate back to IE (maybe I should look into some browser shells that have some of the neat features found in firefox plugins). At least my favorites are on A9 so all I have to do is install the A9 bar to get them back.

If I ever have time (probably never), I may try to put back the missed functionality via MSDN's Browser Extensions guide.

Yes, yes, IE7 is on the way and I'm excited to see it finally coming to fruition. It's been a long long time since I've actually used IE. Most of the time, I use Avant since it has tabbed browsing and things like tab groups that are savable. It also uses the IE engine so that makes things easy. However, I think I'm going to be using FireFox a little more. Why? Well a few reasons. The Google Adsense plugin that adds up to the minute (I set mine for 99 minute updates) info from your Google Adsense account. Also, I found this sweet tutorial on some of FireFox's obscure and not so obscure yet very useful tricks: You Don't Know Jack About Firefox! [Software Tutorials].

Anyway, I highly recommend it (and yes, I know that this site looks a little weird on Firefox, but I plan on fixing it). Also don't forget to checkout the tips to get you started.