Yet Another Thing to Add to the Travel Bag

Ah. Yet another thing to add to the travel bag. From tidbits.com:

Adam wrote from the friendly skies...

Hmm. Maybe I should start traveling with a power strip purely so I can use - and then share with my fellow power-hungry travelers - any outlet I can find. If I'm arrested for theft of services, promise you'll all send me cookies in prison.

I started carrying an extension cord with multiple connections after one airport experience in which another traveler got snotty about needing BOTH plugs at an outlet.

But it's a two-prong extension cord, which I realized was a problem on my last trip, since I fairly recently started using the PowerBook's adapter with the three-prong cord attached, instead of the little two-prong block. Guess I should start carrying the two-prong block for emergencies.

A small grounded power strip would be a good idea; I think we have some of those at work. But I should keep the extension cord in my bag for the occasions when I happen upon a two-prong outlet.

Much of the problem is that most airports were designed 10-50 years ago with the power needs of the occasional vacuum cleaner in mind, not the relatively recent explosion of recharging needs of the traveling public. Most of the gate areas of the airport buildings are little more than metal and glass walls, so there's no place to add an outlet, and no wiring in the relevant places to add it to. Retrofitting them would be a non-trivial task, but as new facilities are built and old ones are renovated, there are almost always more outlets being added.