There is the Third Way which is increasingly workable (at least on Windows, can’t say about Mac). That is to put all your stuff on a 320GB Passport that fits (barely) in your shirtpocket and requires no wall-wart power supply to work reliably. With Windows, you can mount your USB drive at a known path/drive (e.g., I always mount mine as “C:\rlb”), so that your USB drive data and apps can even contain absolute pathnames and still work exactly the same when moved from one machine to another. There is *never* any synchronization with this approach; I’ve never used synchronization schemes for more than a matter of weeks without running into some situation where something was out-of-sync, requiring tedious manual intervention.

There are rough edges to this approach, though they are constantly getting smoother. It is safest to shut down your machine before removing a USB drive; if you insist on “yanking”, using an NTFS filesystem minimizes damage, IME. The “portable apps” movement is expanding the number of apps that are happy to live on a USB drive and not wrap their tentacles all over the current machine’s registry. For example, when I unplug my USB Passport from the home desktop, then plug it into my laptop on the road, Portable Firefox and Portable Thunderbird remember every little bit of the context of my last session with them. Microsoft apps, of course, are portable-hostile, and insist on spewing literally megabytes into the registry.

Backups, on the other hand, become trivial. On each of the three machines I work on, I run backup software in the background that simply copies the Passport to the local disk of that machine. Should one machine die, I can be up and running and productive again in the time it takes to walk to another machine and boot it up. Should my Passport die, I merely grab my backup Passport, and copy the local disk version of my data to that new portable drive (possibly having lost as much as 5 minutes worth of work, since that’s how often my background backup process runs).

Machines are (relatively) cheap. There is an epiphany when you realize that you can focus on having backup machines *instead* of having backup disk drives.

Say Ed, here’s a video you will especially love; it summarizes one of your books:

http://fr.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=21542666

Funny!

To me, the most thought-provoking thing (and I believe expensive!) part of the Air is the 64GB solid state drive.

I use Gmail with IMAP turned on…this feature was “turned on” in 2007. Works great.

BTW, I think your Verizon card is using EV-DO if it is reasonably current. GPRS would be through AT&T or T-Mobile and is a 2G technology.