As I write this first Road Warrior column, I'm about to fly over to LA, New York, Utah and Washington for a lightning two week trip, once more exposing myself to the often fragile and eminently capricious world of mobile business computing.
The sumptuous features of my trusty new Toshiba T4900CT notebook (16MB of RAM, active matrix color screen, 810MB hard disk and Pentium 75Mhz chip) work well to keep fellow warriors drooling in flight lounges but make me a plum target for New York muggers. So one of my first priorities is to back up all my data before departure. (If it came to a choice between handing over my unbacked up hard disk and a 5th Avenue knifing, the latter would almost be more painless...)
The news said it was the coldest Melbourne day in almost a century but two road warriors stood shivering on the nature strip outside my house, a notebook computer clutched tightly in their blueish fingers where, truly, a hot thermos should have been.
Yes, your intrepid correspondent has the one (?) house in this suburb which stubbornly refuses to entertain mobile wireless communication. The man from Motorola was certain that former resident and builder of the house, Governor Hotham, must have put a hex on it as we trooped from one room to another seeking a connection with the svelte Personal Messenger 100D wireless PCMCIA modem card.
Road warriors deprived of access to their electronic mail will be familiar with the onset of e-mail withdrawal syndrome. It begins with longing looks towards telephone outlet sockets or swerves of the entire body (with embarrassing alacrity) to any computer that looks like it might be connected to the Internet.
It hit hard many years ago now on my first computerised trip to America. I hadn't realised that my Netcomm modem (unlike my Toshiba notebook with its pleasingly slender but `universal' power supply) only APPEARED to work with American 110V power supply outlets.
The road warrior must often fill the role of crisis manager, called on to perform amazingly difficult feats with little notice and less preparation. The warrior's mettle is best shown on that chilly 6am flight when a colleague billed as 10am keynote speaker at a distant conference has fallen sick or a key overseas negotiator for the warrior's side has been snowed in at some remote airport.
The bottom line is that a lot of information must be examined, sorted and put into useful form (complete with trump cards and appropriate jokes) by the end of the flight. You foolishly agreed to accept the brief - and now you are staring at your computer screen, wedged between your nose and the (much reclined) airline seat in front.
No matter how awful the jet lag (or hangover), a road warrior can have an enviable secret weapon at this moment of truth. It's called InfoSelect and costs just $199 (tel: 03 9427 0168).
The hand huggingly curvaceous desktop mouse is the dimmest of fond memories for the road warrior emerging from a long work session on an international flight. On how many trips in the early '90s did my cramped mouse paw come to resemble Nosferatu's twitching claw groping from its coffin? And how often did I shoot envious glances at the elegant trackpad of Apple Powerbook users?
Flight attendants may like to remove your book when you fall asleep but they HATE tripping over a dangling mouse cord (it is also a painful experience for the drowsy warrior to watch his beloved notebook suddenly wrench off his fold down tray and crack into the aisle following a spirited trip...)
Most Road Warriors are hard pressed to receive the merest jot of sympathy for a life-style generally perceived to be insufferably glamorous. Still, flitting from one distant appointment to the next can be lonely as well as grueling which may account for the appeal of a quaint Microsoft Home program called Scenes.
It's a simple screen saver which lets you set your favorite picture as a constant Windows background image or a series of images can be made into a slide show. This requires your images to be digitised.
Tomorrow your correspondent jets to Paris for the International Bar Association's 12th Biennial Business Law Congress, a talkfest which brings together hundreds of lawyers from across the world. This year's hot topic is the law of the Internet - a fast growing area for lawyers interested in multimedia and on-line services.
The idea of so many lawyers in one place probably reminds you of acerbic jokes involving the bottom of the ocean and sundry other ways of dealing with the legal profession. The low esteem with which the public regards attorneys may account in part for how hard lawyers strive to endear themselves to people - even to the extent of handing out dozens of business cards to their own kind at conferences.
Road warriors feel a particular pang of terror when their computer jack knifes off a car bonnet, gets pincered by a closing lift door or throws up a scrambled FAT warning message during boot up. They know every shred of information necessary for their life to continue smoothly is in that fragile box - crush, submerge or jolt it and the owner can be technologically lobotomised.
But the warrior's perilous treks via planes, trains and splashy hydrofoils are far from the only jeopardy. Your correspondent recently accepted a client's floppy disk containing text files for inclusion on a Web site. The Junkie virus leapt hungrily from the floppy to your correspondent's Toshiba notebook hard disk with malevolent ease after an uncharacteristically irresponsible failure to prescan the floppy with the Mcafee anti-virus program.
This Warrior has never felt the adrenalin of being a war correspondent but he has brushed closely with death in the line of duty. Back in the '80s, for example, his police roundsman desk was strafed by the Russell Street police station bombing, his chair blown back from the window impregnated with a spray of four inch-long glass shards. Fortunately, your correspondent was out to lunch.
In those days, journalists at The Age were issued a fearsomely large object for remote assignments called an acoustic coupler. This 300 baud modem fitted over the handset of even the most primitive telephone system and reliably transmitted data. While it would sometimes run out of battery punch on deadline, it was often a God send for far flung jobs ranging from mining disasters in country towns through to the Arts Festival in Adelaide.
The Road Warrior's notebook can be more valuable than a fistful of credit cards for a sophisticated thief who knows the worth of a login and password. Many notebooks now have power up and other password protection to prevent the information in databases or automated company server login procedures falling into enemy hands.
But how many impatient warriors opt for convenience over security and simply disable these protections?
There are probably not that many warriors who would still send their credit card details across the Internet while teleshopping on a lonely night in a hotel room. However, it is sometimes hard to resist the temptation to telnet back to a home town Internet gateway for mail, news groups and browsing.
I could see it in the embarrassed eyes of the British Airways flight desk operator as she looked up from her computer. `Prepare for the worst, and then some', they said.
The Friday night flight back to Melbourne from Heathrow Airport, London, was canceled. This exhausted warrior, desperate to get back in time to write a conference paper to be delivered Wednesday morning, was faced with a compensation choice of either 250 pounds cash or 400 pounds towards his next BA flight. That wasn't too bad, as misfortunes go.
But then comes the punchline: a forced night at the Heathrow Hilton, thrown in before a Saturday departure.
It was with scarcely contained joy that this correspondent glimpsed through the dim light of his most recent jet cabin, two empty power outlets just yearning to be filled with an American adapter he happened to have in his hand luggage.
Perhaps it was only some cruel mirage, sent to taunt him by sadistic Boeing engineers. But as this provocative vista opened out in perfect unison with the arrival of yet another power-slurping-Pentium battery powerdown, it was only seconds before the Warrior had his power cable poised at the mouth of the first outlet.
'Stop right there!' boomed the cabin bursar just as the life-giving current was about to slosh into the Toshiba. There was only one way to settle the ensuing conflict - a direct trip to the cockpit for no less than the Captain's arbitration.
Until he met some of the serious Road Warrior executives at the American HQs of Novell and Microsoft who sport mobile phones and pagers on their belts at all times, your correspondent was almost brainwashed by his Australian friends into thinking that his own trusty, belt-mounted Ericsson phone and Link Advisor pager were some kind of quaint affectation.
In America, such high-tech apparel is pretty standard for true Warriors. Perhaps it is a little excessive to sport both phone AND pager, but the message capacity and navigational powers of the pager are still significantly better than in most mobile phones. The difference is, I think, sufficient to warrant hip mounting both devices.
Road Warriors take a lot of looking after, as any Personal Assistant will attest. For one thing, new travel schedules are continually required, bristling with last minute revisions, and messaging traffic is always heavy.
While Warrior management may be a challenging field (not least because the Warrior is often intolerant towards apparently bungled arrangements, even where, in truth, it is the Warrior's own fault), there is relief afoot. In fact, perhaps to the growing horror of some Warriors, there is a whole trend towards putting responsibility for making arrangements back on the Warrior's own shoulders.
Warriors who have long battled to make their notebook a stable and productive machine have undoubtedly peered at the computers of those brave enough to install Microsoft's Windows 95 and wondered if the time is right to upgrade. In many (but not all cases, depending on the type of notebook you use), I think the answer is yes.
Since returning from a recent trip to Europe I have been grappling with the minutiae of a Windows 95 installation on a Toshiba T4900CT notebook and, after some weeks of tense and eventful experimentation (including an essential BIOS upgrade), can now report that the benefits are substantial.
Every Road Warrior's pulse quickens at the thought of data loss. It is no surprise, then, that they get tense about backup and upgrading a notebook to Windows 95 involves a generous swag of special backup issues.
Last week's column hailed the advantages of Windows 95 for notebook computers. But does your notebook qualify for an easy installation? It is certainly not a foregone conclusion. Either call your vendor directly or check resources such as your notebook manufacturer's Web home page or other on-line resources.
The Road Warrior has a tragic flaw and it is an unshakable conviction which Windows 95 understands perfectly and continually exploits. It is the belief, particularly conspicuous when the Warrior is cooped up in a faraway hotel room late at night, that just one more tinkering improvement to the computer will make the definitive difference.
This sad silicon opera is played out over and over but our tragic hero remains strangely incapable of ever learning the fundamental lesson: when the system works, leave it alone!
All Road Warriors ultimately learn that just as in ancient Greek tragedy, the ultimate computing disaster always follows closely on a glaring act of hubris. And the gods of old were clearly paying particular attention one evening last week as your correspondent showed off his Windows 95 equipped notebook to an admiring friend.
They noted his unseemly pride at the Xircom PCMCIA card's easy networking. They frowned darkly as he demonstrated his beloved Visioneer PaperPort personal scanner. And they became particularly frisky when he proclaimed that his system was not only more robust with Windows 95, but also better backed up due to diligent use of his Pereos tape backup unit.
The question then, is easily put: why was your correspondent hunched over his notebook at 8 o'clock the next morning, eyes puffy, hands trembling, having stayed up all night trying to get his computer to boot?
Road Warriors are highly accomplished at ignoring the reality that whenever they rush out to buy a wondrous new product, it will be almost instantaneously and embarrassingly obsolete.
And we make the best of our technological circumstances, no matter what we have been dealt by fate in a previous spurt of consumer enthusiasm.