Tech Eye: Keeping secrets and other things
This seems to happen with particular frequency during Asthma-and-Allergy-Awareness Month (May) when we doff our clothes to run freely through crowds of wheezy people, stealing their puffers, until whole groups of twitching asthmatics are circled 'round a single inhaler (our record is 15 gaspers to one gadget). The village's annual mannequin-wrassle is another occasion when things get inexplicably lost.
The worst part is not so much the losing of things, but the result of other people's finding them. When Techeye once dropped our house keys in the local Catholic Girls' School (before the restraining order, honest) we returned home to discover Great Aunt Techeye freed from her cage and headed to the local vicarage with a taser gun, a stash of viagra and a Scooby-doo outfit. Another time we misplaced a nerd from Microsoft somewhere between Tijuana and Panama City. Nobody's heard directly from him since, but regional El Chupacabra legends have been joined by fearsome stories of El Softwareengineer, a gaunt creature fabled to discomfit every woman within a two-mile radius.
Deviant relatives and geeks are one thing, but some treasures are best left unfound, like, for example, our collection of digital man-bites-moose photos or the thousands of dirty haiku we've authored. Most precious of all, of course, are the files we've stuffed with interesting morsels stumbled upon during our full-moon rambles, like the local barber's attempts to breed a half-frog, half-pigeon mutant and the fact that libidinous Nurse Sarah has Luxembourg-shaped patches of back hair.
It was the security of this byte-sized booty we had in mind when we decided to check out Sony's Vaio G11 series laptop. Its 100GB hard disk offers plenty of capacity, while at 1.12 kg it won't hinder efforts to evade capture. The G11's price hasn't been fixed yet, but don't expect to walk away with a full wallet. Still, its fingerprint-recognition technology and carbon-fiber-laminate construction mean your business partners (blackmailees) will have a tough time prying their secrets out of you.
