Travel EMP

Submitted by mauzenne on Mon, 08/01/2011 - 03:05.
in

This guidance describes how to prepare for the inevitable loss of gadgets and gadget power, most likely on while traveling.

We did a cast once on having a printed copy at home of your professional contacts, and we got a SURPRISING amount of comments suggesting we were Luddites, that we didn't need to kill trees, that companies wouldn't do that, that you can just copy them onto other media for home. We're not Luddites, and at least one of us HAS been fired and had his laptop taken from him (stupidly). Thankfully, we also got SEVERAL mails from folks who offered their heartfelt thanks, because they did what we recommended, and then they got fired or laid off, and they had a contact list to reach out to because of our Luddite guidance.

And now we broaden that guidance a little, and recommend that when you travel, you prepare for the inevitable event that you run out of battery power for all your gadgets, and you need to be able to still get some simple things done. We call this cast Travel EMP after the ElectroMagnetic Pulse reward you can get in Call of Duty, a videogame, which knocks out all electronics. (And lest you think this is far-fetched, the former Soviet Union's fighter jets (the MiG-25 was particularly known for this, based on its design and one getting flown to Japan, as I recall, in a defection) actually were equipped with vacuum tubes to make their systems more resistant to the potential EMP caused by nuclear detonations, among other things.)


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mfprysl's picture
Submitted by mfprysl on Mon, 08/01/2011 - 14:10.

What about active anti-EMP?

 Hi,

Great podcast!

There is a topic related to losing your gadgets you did not touch in the discussion (maybe you save it for another day?):

How to protect your digital data from becoming effectively unreadable?

Say you go to a conference and the laptop you were given (by your IT folks or the organisers' one) does not have the fonts needed for your world changing presentation (character encoding incompatibilities, different hyphenation rules making important parts of the presentation spill off the screen &c.).

Or your serious presentation on the impact of the end of the Eurozone for your corporation formatted on PowerPoint for Mac looks like a gangsta' myspace page when displayed on PowerPoint for Windows (something like that happened to me -- all bullets were changed to stupid wingdings)

What I have found useful is having your presentation not only in the PowerPoint format but also in a PDF (Acrobat Reader has a nice slideshow functionality) and in a folder with JPG files for all the pages.

All this, together with DOC, PDF and a plain text (TXT) versions of important documents sits in four places:

1. My laptop

2. My tablet (six years ago it was a Palmtop...)

3. A pendrive with nothing else but my professional data neatly ordered in folders named after meetings

4. My email system accessible online

This way I can present on any equipment with any settings. This was very useful when I worked for a pan-european corporation: in Europe every country has a personalised version of Microsoft Windows and Office. And I have seen people fumble because cables brought from Denmark did not work in Holland...

 

PhilipR's picture
Submitted by PhilipR on Tue, 08/02/2011 - 14:41.

it's

You'll probably want to fix the typo, "based on it's design".

royd's picture
Submitted by royd on Wed, 08/03/2011 - 07:42.

good idea to have the pendrive encrypted

great ideas especially the pdf version - also a life saver for me

just a quick thought, you may consider using an encrypted pen drive, with encryption built in as opposed to via a program on the pc - and that works on a mac and a pc.

Roy

JPMasters's picture
Submitted by JPMasters on Mon, 08/29/2011 - 11:51.

 Have had a couple of these

 Have had a couple of these experiences, including the dead iPhone (out of battery) with my electronic boarding pass on it!  Fortunately through my FF card I was able to get a new pass without an issue.

Also have had the challenge of the conference organiser in another country forgetting  to tell the tech team I was using a Mac - fortunately I did the right thing and checked in with the tech team on my arrival at the conference (I was speaking on day 2) and was able to spend some time completely reformatting the presentation to work.