a pen
a notebook, folded up into my back pocket - though only if i plan on writing something, working on something. otherwise, no paper - as usually i can find something to write on if i need to.
pocket watch
house key
wallet with cash and train card and calling card
i used to wear glasses, but gave those up. only for distance. and i stopped driving.
oh - and the ubiquitous appointment/address/phone book. that fits in the back pocket.

I love my Handsrping Visor, because it is so cheap, $50 in the sale bin at Target. If I lose it or trash it it is a backed up on my computer. I have it in a small booklike wallet with my credit cards and cash. I have it loaded with classic books as well and the Bible. I am reading Saint Francis Of Assisi.
I also hall around my cell an ancient nokia 6150 (4 years old, dropped in the toliet but revived with 30 days of electrical current to burn crystalization off the circuits.)
I also sometimes carry my $50 Aiptek mini video camera for video captures and video clips. (see Flashed sample of family here. But the camera is usually perched on my computer for video confrencing.
I don't like carrying all those devices though. I want them to converge into one. Along with my MP3 player. I also almost never take my Mac G3 laptop anywhere other than from the countertop to the couch while I watch Seinfeld reruns and surf boingboing.net (okay sometimes linkfilter.org).

Great. I have a t28. Hope my relatives get a lot of money from Sony when I'm dead.

Ericsson T39M mobile -- it's tiny. A bunch of house keys with a blue LED torch and a Swiss Army Cyberchamp knife as a key fob. The iPod goes even if I don't take headphones along -- it's the offsite backup drive for my Mac, so as long as it's with me I've got my work safe (even if the house burns down). If I'm going to use it as a music machine, along comes a pair of headphones -- currently a pair of Koss portapro ones. There's my wallet, which often has a spare CDROM business card in it, and then there's the palmtop -- a Psion 5MX (I've decided PalmOS is a dead end; I need a keyboard). If I'm going to be out of the house for any length of time, the 5MX will be replaced by a Psion Netbook, which has a screen and keyboard good enough for serious text mangling. Oh, and a folding umbrella that packs down into a 5 x 2 x 10 centimetre rectangle, and my glasses, and a pen.

What I want is to compress this lot into three items -- a pocket Swiss Army bush robot, a spray-can of utility fog, and a gigabit per second of bandwidth straight into my cranial firewall.

a hewlett packard 48 GX calculator- not only does it crunch numbers but it doubles as my personal organizer

motorola v90 cellular phone
memorex CD/Mp3 player- super cheap way to listen to my music that can get banged around with out me feeling too bad

-A notepad and pen in my back pocket.
-The world's coolest swiss army knife. It's 3 1/2 inch blade, locks in place, and the first useful scredriver I've seen on a swiss army knife. Also, the handle is this snazzy black pistol grip. It's like the sort of thing the clumsy, hamfisted, geek boy youngest child in a family of ninjas would be trusted with.
-My wallet and change purse. The latter contains any number of trick coins I can use to fail at impressing cute girls on the bus with, and the former important currency and Monopoly money in various denominations.
-My harmonica. A Hohner Bluesband in the key of C.
-A deck of Bicycle Rider Backs
-A notebook
-Disposable cameras.
-Polaroid Digital Organizer. With handy international currency translator.
-Whatever book I happen to be reading. Right now, that's "Don Quixote".

In thinking about how I could be better 'equiped' after the 9-11 attacks, I try to always carry:

1. Spydeco serrated pocket knife (I'm trained to fight with a knife, but it is more of a tool. The serrates are good for stripping CAT-5 UTP cable.)

2. Small Red Cross CPR mask on my key chain. Besides protecting me during rescue breathing, if a person has face injuries it is a big help in getting breathes into their lungs.

3. Nokia cell phone. I love it: stores dates and numbers, sends email, tells me time with an alarm, and even plays games I like. I can also IR link it to my laptop for backups. I decided I didn't need a PDA with all these features. Communication is the most important thing for counter-terrorism.

When I fly on planes or go to secure areas, I substitute a metal ballpoint pen for the knife. (Besides writing, I can fight with it -- but not strip cable!)

On carrying film cameras:

I've got a professional-photographer uncle, Lee Friedlander, who always has a camera with him. I don't recall a huge bag, just something big enough for a 35mm and a spare roll.

Unguarded moments at family get-togethers occasionally turn up in his books . . .

I wrote up my manifest with notes on my blog, rather than post the whole thing here in QT (it's a bit long).

Since other folks mentioned their pistols, sometimes I carry a Russian Makarov 9 mm. I like it because it is double action on the first shot, so I can carry it with a round in the chamber, hammer down and safety off. It also only cost me $200. I load it with a mix of hollow points and Soviet steel core (armor peircing more or less).

I used to get death threats on the job, so I started carrying this all the time when off duty. In NM it was only a misdemeanor to carry a concealed pistol -- a knife was a felony!

In my pockets: Nothing, when I can help it. I like to wear tight jeans to show off my cute butt.

In my backpack:

• Visor Edge, mostly used for phonebook and notes. Contains the very occasional e-book.
• GPS module for the Visor. Half the Visor's capacity is well-spent on a street map of all of LA County.
• Wallet, keys.
• Sketchbook. 9x12, black hardbound, something painted quickly on the front to give it handedness.
• Tin pencil-case with 'Pochacco' from the Sanrio stable on it. At the moment, it's got a Ticonderoga #2 pencil, a Ti. #2 5/10, a red Col-Erase pencil, a Pentel .5mm side-advance mechanical pencil, a white Staedler pencil, a white gel pen, a black Prismacolor marker, a white plastic eraser, and a Rotring ArtPen (cartridge fountain pen that rules mightily).
• Battery-powered pencil sharpener.
• Whatever I'm reading at the moment. Sometimes no book to give me extra impetus to draw.
• Aging Discman; cheap Aiwa noise-cancelling headphones; some CDs. I don't have several hundred spare bucks for an iPod, though I'd love to have one.
  

Wow, I feel so low-tech and under-equipped.

Thinking about the contents of my pockets, I realized that I'm carrying things that are probably older than some of the posters here! Some of these things I've been carrying in the same pocket (in different pants) for over 2 decades now.

Wallet - paper money, plastic money (credit & debit), miscellaneous membership cards, a few family pictures, bits of paper and receipts.

Change purse - suede, flat with a zipper, sewn for me by my mother when I was a teenager in the late 70s. Too much change in it. That's one non-mass-produced item (though of course the zipper was mass-produced).

Victorinox Swiss Army knife - smaller version of the "climber" model, you never know when someone will ask for a corkscrew. My Swiss grandfather brought this over for me as a high-school graduation present. Ever since, I've carried it in my left-front pants pocket except in facism zones (airplanes, court houses, nightclubs, anyplace where it's likely to be confiscated because of its deadly 3-inch non-locking blade). It's got a sort of fob I made out of nylon cord while playing with wall-and-crown based knots from the Ashley Book of Knots back in the mid-80s. I guess that could count as another 1/2 non-mass-produced item.

House & car keys, on a silver Navajo keyring given to me by my wife the first Christmas we were dating. Hey, the keyring is non-mass-produced, too, though some of the components are mass-produced. Actually, the decorative silver part may have been hand cast in a mold carved out of a block of charcoal; what's the dividing line for "mass" production?

My house key and a Princeton Tek LED light are on a removable clip (actually an old ID-badge clip), so I don't have to take the rest of the keys when I go jogging. The light is the newest thing in my pockets, I like it because it has both a momentary push-switch and a latching switch.

I often carry my PalmIIIc in a RipOff case clipped to my belt or a pocket. I store phone numbers & addresses, my appointments (not many, but I tend to forget them otherwise), and a few games and e-books (currently reading Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom a little at a time). I also keep track of things I want to do, books or authors I'm interested in looking for, and notes about things I want or need to buy.

I wear a watch when I'm out of the house, usually my Suunto Advizor. I use the heartrate monitor when running, I haven't had much need for the altimeter or compass lately. When dressed up, I replace it with a fairly generic stainless analog ("diver's") watch.

I sometimes carry my wife's old Nokia 5100 phone, someday I'll probably break down and get my own.

At work I wear a cubicle-dweller's fetish bundle around my neck, with a picture ID, 2 RF (I think) access cards, and a SecurID. If I'm formally attired, the bundle goes in my shirt pocket; if I'm in a t-shirt, I just cope with the annoyance of having it bang into anything I bend over.

I have a bunch of little odds and ends in my laptop bag, but that pretty much just goes house to car to office, living under my desk at either end, I don't really keep it with me.

What I've learned from this blog:

bQ had the best stuff in the cutest purse--I want.

Sakusha has perfect stuff zen. I keep promising myself that I will simplify, then I clean out the backpack and find another power cord.

There are a number of boingers I wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley (how the hell do you put up a fight with a metal pen?)

I'm going to start looking at Leatherman multitools. A thousand boingers can't be wrong.

People love to talk about their stuff and I love to read about it.

Someone will write an article about this soon--probably Mark.

> Someone will write an article about this soon--probably Mark.

I was thinking the same thing myself!

Edited by author 03-10-2003 04:43 PM
On the belt, a Motorola V101. Sure, it's ugly as sin, bulky as hell, and sucks for actual voice calls. But it has a screen that you can actually read some text on and it's beautiful for sending SMSes and using the ICQMobile integration just kicks ass. I think this phone is only available in Canada.

In my bag:

• Apple Newton MessagePad 2100. Still the most usable PDA ever created. I organize my life and my work tasks on this puppy, and wouldn't change that for the world. Of course, I'm a little biased since I happen to also run a very large Newton mailing list... This is actually kept in a BurroPak padded sleeve inside the bag. If you were a Newton user and you remember the BurroPak from Landware, you get a gold star.
• Game Boy Advance with a 128 megabit flash cartridge. Real games on the go, and even Classic Nintendo games to boot.
• AVC Soul Player CD/MP3 player. Coupled with some Sony MDR-V150 headphones. I don't need an iPod; CDRs are still cheap. If I scratch one, I just re-burn it from my hard disk at home.
• Canon PowerShot S230 camera. Man, I love this camera. It's tiny, it's 3.1MP, it uses CompactFlash, it shoots movie clips with sound, it has great low-light performance, and digital zoom that actually looks good. It has a Lexar 128MB CF card in it.
• AComData USB CompactFlash reader. It's also nice and small. It's mostly for using a 16MB CF card that I use to ferry files back and forth from work without exposing data to the wilds of the net. Also for showing photos from the camera on any PC, of course. For $20 minus $20 rebate, I wish I had bought two.
• Leatherman PST II multitool. For everything from a quick nail file to cutting wire. Also has a decent phillips-head screwdriver and three sizes of slot drivers, well suited for the inside of a PC case.
• Sanford PhD Multi. Stylus, Pen, Pencil, and only $15.
  

(shameless blog promotion: www.chuma.org)

Yes, an article, with pictures of Boingers standing in front of tables full of their pocket stuff, would be cool.

* * *

Leathermen are great. I got out of the habit of carrying mine, because I got sick of people asking me if it was an insulin pump. Or, knowing what it was, *why* I carried it.