The working environment for credentialed members of the media when I was at the Dodge Tour de Georgia was different every day. We worked in two different offices, a hotel conference room, the theater in the observation tower at Brasstown Bald, and a conference room at women’s club, depending on where the stage finished.
The two constants in our work environment were electricity and a WiFi network. Cramped working conditions and long walks with all of our gear just to arrive at some locations meant that having the laptop with the biggest display and desk footprint could be a drawback. Hassle-free wireless network capability was the key.
In a report from Rome called WiFi Working Again for Me, I lamented the fact that my laptop didn’t have built-in WiFi. My D-Link DWL-G650 AirPlus XtremeG Wireless Card that had worked well for a year became so flaky that it was effectively unusable. I had to replace it. I replaced it with the same brand and model WiFi card, but that didn’t work until I downloaded and installed a new driver off the Internet using a hard Ethernet connection.
It would have been a lot easier to cover the Tour de Georgia with a compact, easy-to-use laptop with built-in WiFi, and the laptop of choice in the media center was an Apple Powerbook.
I would have chosen a 12-inch Apple PowerBook with a 1.5GHz G4 processor, an 80-Gigabyte hard drive, and an 8x-Speed SuperDrive (DVD+RW/CD-RW). The small form factor would have worked well at the top of Brasstown Bald or at the women’s club in Dahlonega where we worked in pretty close proximity to each other. The 12-inch display still gives you 1024×768 resolution, which is good for the small size of the notebook itself, and would be good enough for photo selection and editing.
I would have teamed this up with a multi-function USB 2.0 memory card reader to make camera memory card handling painless.
These gadgets would have made me the master of the Tour de Georgia media work room.