Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

On our IT PRO blog a review with a difference: conference bags.

You can tell I'm a technology journalist. It's not the perpetually dishevelled look, the scrawled notebook, the geeky t-shirts, or the laptop covered in stickers, though I'm sure they're clues.

No, it's the regularly changing collection of backpacks that really gives things away. Nearly every big event you go to, there's a new bag to take away. Some people might be satisfied with that, but I'm always on the lookout for the bag that I can use every day. Most I try for a while, but then go back to one of the old standbys. In my case those are a battered old Intel IDF back pack and a Microsoft PDC shoulder bag.

I'm sure our local Oxfam dreads our arrival with a car load of conference bags from all over the world. However, if we didn't pass them on to charity our office would quickly fill with unwanted bags. So how do we decide what to keep, especially in these days of ever decreasing baggage allowances. I tend to classify them as good (worth trying for a while), bad (straight out the door - sometimes into the fabric recycling bins), and indifferent (which wait for the next charity shop run).

Read on to find out why I'm using the bag I'm using, and just where it came from (and why marypcb is using the bag she's recently picked up).

So what's your favourite conference bag?