I went ahead and bought a new laptop anyway. In any scenario I can come up with, I'm going to be a road warrior at least part of the time. And a laptop down under is going to cost twice as much as it does here. So I picked up one of those cute little Toshiba Satellites. Had my eye on it for a long time. The reason I didn't do this before was the length of time it would take to get a development environment setup and working.

But when you get right down to it, it's no different from trying to get a working version of SunOS 20 years ago. I 've got a basic operating system (Vista, yuck!!!!!!!!). But I really don't care about the operating system. Honestly, they all suck. Some just suck more than others. But I just need something/anything that will load and run a handful of tools.

So what tools do I need?

• Firefox

• Thunderbird

• Filezilla

• ssh

• emacs (and my 20 year old .emacs startup file that I can't live without)

• UnxUtils (especially gunzip so I can unpack emacs) 

• Xampp (Apache, MySQL, PHP, phpmyadmin, etc.)

• the GIMP 

• ... my web development tree

• ... my databases

It isn't a huge list. I managed to get copies of all of them onto the laptop in under 2 hours. The hard part is configuration and customization. But that isn't as important as I thought. I've got time to configure it. Once I've got everything on the above list, I can unplug at any time and configure at my leisure. At the airport, on the beach, in a tree. You get the idea.

And this is a good thing because the time to unplug is fast approaching. Uhm, that would be tomorrow...