Joel on Software

Gearing up

I'm still working ferociously on getting ready for the FogBugz World Tour. We won't have the final list of cities until we can get hotel meeting rooms confirmed in each city, but it looks like the first round will hit about 20 cities in the US and Canada plus a few stops in New Zealand, Australia, and Europe. In any case, I'm looking at about six weeks on the road.

Fog Creek's office manager Liz is planning all the logistics for the event. Today she faxed around about 80 RFPs to hotels to get meeting rooms lined up. (There's a huge business opportunity there--getting hotel event coordinators onto the Internet). I have to buy a bunch of gear:

• a very light, bright, robust video projector
• a very portable PA system and a couple of lavalier mics
• a subnotebook that can serve as my primary desktop while I'm on the road but which won't break my back

Is there such a thing as a video projector which connects to the PC using Cat-5 instead of video cable, so I don't have to carry a 50 foot video cable around?

What's a good subnotebook? Does anyone have any experience (good or bad) with the new flash-drive based notebooks?

What about the portable PA systems? Is there something self-contained that fits in the overhead bin on a plane?

Work with me, here! Fog Creek Software has great paid internships in software development for qualified college students. They’re in New York City. Free housing, lunch, and more. And you get to work on real, shipping software with the smartest developers in the business.

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You’re reading Joel on Software, stuffed with years and years of completely raving mad articles about software development, managing software teams, designing user interfaces, running successful software companies, and rubber duckies.

About the author.

I’m Joel Spolsky, founder of Fog Creek Software, a New York company that proves that you can treat programmers well and still be highly profitable. Programmers get private offices, free lunch, and work 40 hours a week. Customers only pay for software if they’re delighted. We make FogBugz, an enlightened project management system designed to help great teams develop brilliant software, and Fog Creek Copilot, which makes remote desktop access easy.