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Find me a laptop bag!

So I have been searching for a new laptop bag since my old one started to fall apart. It was OK when I got here but I think the constant everyday abuse which I put my bags though is finally starting to show. The material is starting to fray, stitches are coming loose and padded shoulder strap is now anything but padded. Or complete for that matter of fact.

So I decided to start searching the Web for a bag worthy of the abuse I can give my belongings and protecting my various bits of gear. (NB: I have been known to carry three laptops at once, or xBox’s and laptops all in the one bag). It would need to be strong. A padded shoulder strap was also a definite as I wear my bag on my pacemaker shoulder. It needed to be roomy and looking nice is always an added bonus. It also has to be subtle. I hate bags that seem to scream “Hey everyone! Look, This guy is carrying a laptop! Can everyone see?!” which is one of the reasons I prefect satchel or messenger style bags.

 

 The Bag of Holding

I started my search over at ThinkGeek where I had recently seen an interesting bag. That bag was The Bag of Holding

 

The Bag of Holding gets its name from the game Dungeons & Dragons, where a similar in-game item exists. The Bag of Holding is a mystical object which would hold /a lot more/ than it looked like it could. The same is said to be true of ThinkGeeks tribute.

From the picutres and reviews around the web, the bag does indeed appear to be larger inside than out. The heavy canvas material its made of looks sturdy and lifting up the flap reveals a world of wonder underneath. There is room for a laptop, games, power brick, accessories, books, binders, gadgets, MP3 players, phones and anything else you care to cram into it.

For me though, as awesome as this bag looks it has two major drawbacks:

  1. The bag strap has no padding whatsoever. Its just a canvas strap.
  2. It ships from the US only, which means $42.50 in shipping. Not. Cool.

However at $59.99 that would be an overal cost of 102.50 and at todays exchange rate that works out at about £65. So one to think about.

Then my eyes set upon this.

 

Booq Taipan Shadow M

Booq have a nack of making incredibly good looking products and then take advntage of this by photographins them in amazing conditions and perfect lighting, to make an object that is instantly lustable. They leave no stone undturned on the products portfolio either, showing you in depth pictures of all the areas of the bag – something I have found a lack of while on this bag searh.

Along with a padded section fo a laptop upto 15.6″ (Work laptop or my Macbook) it also has tons of space for books and accessories along with pouches and pockets galore for quick access to things like pens, passports or airplane tickets.

The reviews around the web state that the build quality of this bag is second to none, with very close attention to detail being paid to the stitching, padding and overall construction of the bag. The strap is heavily padded which is great, and overall it looks inconspicious and professional.

There is one problem though, and that is the price. In the US this bag is $99.99 which I think is a great price. The problem is, in Europe, this bag is €99.99 which is a lot more. And odd becuase I’m pretty sure Booq is a Dutch company, as they offer both English and Ditch languages on their US site.

So that prompted me to keep on searching. I found some nice bags along the way from the likes of Timbuk2 and Crumpler but there were was very little that looked roomy enough for what I wanted. I then came across a brand I had never heard of before but that seems to be quite popular.

 

Everki Track Messenger Bag

This is a bag to rival the Booq, although it did turn out it had the same flaw, but more on that later

There is a ton of room in this bag, but it doesn’t really show it in the photos. However, this bag can confortably hold a laptop and all of its accessories – not only that but it also packs them into seperate pouches to stop them moving about or sratching anything else that might be in your bag. And it doesn’t stop at comptuer accessories either – there are pouches for pens, phone, MP3 player, earphones, papers, books – it even has collapsable sections if you want the bag to be smaller. And better yet, it has a paaded tablet slot designed specifically for the iPad, so not only can your laptop right in stye but your tablet can come along too, snug and cosy.

There is also a very padded strap included and the construct of the bag is excellent. But there was that one problem though, and that is that this bag is also from a US company. I did find it on ebay for £65 which puts it ahead of the similar Booq.

So, now I’m stuck. I have 3 great bags to choose from…so tell me people…thoughts?

P.S. Personal blog to come soon!

Blog

Busy Busy Busy…

So I failed my CCNA last Wednesday which kinda sucks, but on the optimistic side, at least I didn’t fail it by a really small amount. In fact, I failed by 20% (82.5% being the pass and me obtaining 63.4%) so I don’t get to beat myself up over a few points. So I’m working hard to correct that failure and additionally have started studying for the CCNP Route exam which I will be taking next week.

I have also asked my ever patient Fiancée to make me a logo for the site given that I don’t really have the time to be working on it, so expect to see something up above by the end of the week. In other news I decided to bite the bullet and get my iMac shipped over here. I really am getting tired of stiff necks from leaning over laptops so I’m looking forward to having a decent screen and hardware to work with.

And totally off topic, recently I have been having a lot of flashbacks to a game I used to play in my childhood – that game being Descent, and more specifically Descent II.  When I was a kid playing games I tended to just play for the fun and generally used cheats to get me past the big bosses. However I’m very tempted to try a quick play through at some point with no cheats to see how far I get. It really was an epic game.

Buuut it is now rather late, so I shall leave it here for tonight. Hopefully this won’t be the last post this week!

Blog Reviews Site Updates

Featuriffic vs Minimalist

Every time I think about a re-design of the blog I fight an internal battle between a straightforward and simple layout and a cool ‘hacker-like’ theme, filled with transparencies and cool images. I’ve always enjoyed the so-called Fantasy User Interfaces you see on TV on shows like CSI and 24 and in movies like Die Hard 4 which are full of swift animations, sleek window design and overall damned good looks. (Check out Mark Coleran’s work)

On the flipside, when it comes to blogging the key focus is the writing, and smooth minimalist designs that really bring the focus back to the text can be very attractive. So when I chose my current theme, I thought I was getting a mixture of both. An interesting and eye catching design but with a clean and straightforward layout for the posts. But it took me a while to settle on a theme, and even now I’m not particular sure I like it. So I thought I would give you a look into the themes I narrowed it down to.

 

The Minimalist

Surprisingly, a large proportion of my choices were in this area. I think its hard because at times I want my site to be a full featured site, with daily updates full of interesting news and articles collected from all over the web. Conversely, I have no time to do any of that and my site reverts to a standard blog, and the minimalist themes suit that style of writing better.

Elegant Grunge

Besides having a cool name, this theme offered a nice blend of dark and light. I love charcoal greys and really thought the contract of the header and body was attractive. What I didn’t like was the way it tended to mangle my tweets on the right hand side, and the lack of justification in the sidebar made it feel untidy and distracting.

Simple Dark

Another elegant theme, the dark gradient really appealed to me, as did the better separation of the twitter posts, making it much easier on the eyes. I only steered clear of this one as I often use dark themes and wanted to go for something with lighter colours.

Margot

Another neat theme with a good contrast between light and dark. Once again however, the lack of support for my Twitter feed caused me to toss this one aside. The design is very smooth however, and very much appeals to me if I were just reading/writing posts.

 

The Pretty

These few themes were ones that I found visually attractive. I actually have a lot more, but I am trying to move away from this sort of style and into something a bit cleaner and more professional.

Motion

Motion is a beautiful theme to look at, incorporating transparent bars and a futuristic background along with a clearly separated sidebar area. However, it’s almost a little too distracting and really takes away from the posts themselves. In this case, eye candy isn’t everything.

Game Site

Game site is a theme designed for news and articles. It was originally made for games but can be used along with wordpress categories to create a fully integrated platform, with featured posts, thumbed posts, javascript and ajax functionality. However, in order to do all that considerable time must be spent in configuration along with graphics design and implementation. Far too much work for me…

 

The Blend

These are the themes that I felt had a nice mix of simplistic layouts but pleasing to look at as well.

White Gold

This theme uses a 3 column layout – something I normally don’t like, but its blend of colours and slight 3D looks from the shadows makes it feel very natural. When it comes to reading, the layout is simple and concise although it doesn’t seem to like line breaks in text. For someone like me who loves paragraphs as a way to break up subjects or topics, it was a major downside to an otherwise great theme.

Desk Scape

Perhaps by the time you are reading this the above theme is how my site looks. This is because Desk Scape is the one other theme that I would really consider sticking with.  It’s layout is clean and simple with great use of layers. The one problem that turned me away from this theme is the post summarising which occurs beneath the most recent post. As I would be moving towards a blog, this would be one feature that I think would decrease readability and flow.

zeePersonal & zeeSynergie

Both these themes have a nice clean feel to them and each provides an easy to read post. One thing that I really don’t like about them however is their use of the categories as a sidebar, and difficulty in making them a top bar. However as simple but attractive layouts go, these two are pretty good.

 

 

So there you have it. My current theme was the best out of this bunch although there are still plenty out there if I ever feel the need to change. What do you think? Drop me a comment (top right) and let me know!

Site Updates

A new look

So the themes have been switching around a bit lately which is mainly due to my standard theme Mystique being updated by its developers. This caused an untold amount of annoyance becuase they changed everything and I admittidly didn’t read the change log and assumed it was a minor update.

Given that, I have finally settled on a new theme. It took me a while to choose but I’m pretty happy with the results. More on that tomorrow though.

Additionally, you might notice that we no longer have a logo. This is a temporary situation while I interface with my graphical consultants and decide where to go next with it. Let me know if you have any thoughts! The comments link is on the top right!

Blog

Motivation and Inspiration

It’s interesting how I find motivation at the oddest times.

Usually I’m motivated in the evenings, with thoughts moving around in my head after a nice dinner and a chance to relax. Lately though that hasn’t been the case at all. I thought I would welcome the regularity to my life that routine would bring but so far all it’s doing is draining me.

I get up about 6.45am. Wash, have breakfast (assuming I have milk, I do never seen to have enough) brust my teeth and leave. I catch the 7.49 metro to Gare Centrale where I get on the oldest, roughest train in all of Brussels and ride it rather slowly to Diegem. Thankfully the company pays for this as two weeks of tickets cost me €57.20 (expenses for the win). We study from 9am to 5.30pm and I go home, shop if I need anything, make dinner and then get back to studying. Sleep come after that (although not easily given the heat) and the process repeats again.

There is no time to be inspired to do anything but study and even then, that’s hard enough after a fully day of it. My motivation levels since I started here have just tailed off, although I’m not the only one experiencing this. So I find it odd that I’m sitting here at 9.30am in a classroom, listening to our (awesome) trainer teaching about Inter VLAN routing and I felt the urge to write something. It also kinda allowed me to show that I haven’t been lazy with updates, I’ve just been really busy/tired.

And don’t think I’m not paying attention either – writing seems to flow off the top of my head when I really want to write and I can listen at the same time. Rather odd.. but my understanding of VLANs is much better now. I think its a throwback from uni days of writing notes while still listening to the lecturer.

So, I’ll make a real effort to keep blogging or even just writing over the next few weeks. Don’t always expect blogs!