What’s (not) in my bag..

I have a flight in the morning, so thought I would clean out my backpack a bit and lighten the load, and it dawned on me after unloading that I should take a picture to embarrass remind myself to keep it minimal.. Lifehacker has been running a “What’s in our bags” series, and the crap in my backpack is quite opposite from the sparse contents of most of the Lifehacker staff posts..

The contents of the Swiss Army Ishouldreallygetasmallerone backpack:
(only things on the table that weren’t in the bag were keys, wallet, and Roxane..)
ThinkPad T60
power supply (plugged in the wall)
lens wipes
Band Aids
baggie with 2 travel toothbrushes, 2 half-empty little tooth paste tubes, Advil, Advil PM, ear plugs, mobile phone ear piece, and emergency nicotine gum
a new toothbrush
Blackberry and USB cable
multi-size memory card reader and USB cable
2 external drives and USB cables – one for music and one for encrypted machine backups
iPod Classic, ear buds, and cable
2 USB flash drives
checkbook
travel document case
mini stereo cable for iPod2RentalCar
trusty Olympus XA
more emergency nic-fit-fix-gum
two black bracelets (SEP and HTFU)
library card
large and small nail clippers
old iPod Shuffle
Olympus FE-115 and case with extra batteries and media cards
ear buds
..and another pair of ear buds
wireless mouse
Sharpie and mechanical pencil
SD/MMC USB media card reader with media card in it
MicroSD adapter
a couple empty media card holders
Barnes and Noble gift card from Xmas
sticky note pad
Debian Lenny Netinst mini CD, a blank CDR, and a flip case of Microsoft Windows crap (for helping others, not for me..)
AT&T mobile broadband dongle goodness
key for my office lappy lock
lappy screen wipe
Mini-Mag light
office access card lanyard
spare crackberry battery
mini-to-1/4″ stereo adapter
2 ethernet cables
yet another USB cable
the take-with-me lappy lock
travel itinerary printout
last year’s Debconf Proceedings
very important mail that needed to be looked into (unread for months..)

um, yeah.. all that..

The Order of the Blue Polo

I just got my blue polo from the OpenNMS guys, and had to write a quick post on the certificate included in the package. It says:

Certificate of Merit
Let this Certify that
Michael Shuler
has demonstrated outstanding judgment in becoming a member of
The Order of the Blue Polo

What can we say? Although “bestest” isn’t a word, it should be, cause that’s what you are: The Bestest. You have all the intelligence of those people on Star Trek with the big foreheads, but you have really cool, normal foreheads. People Magazine won’t run your picture because they are afraid of making the models mad. Thank you so much for talking about OpenNMS until you are blue in the face. You are the reason we exist.

OpenNMS
Tarus Balog, Project Maintainer