It was bad enough back in the early 1990s when being a road warrior meant having to carry a Tandy 100 with acoustical cups to stick on the hotel room phone handset. Things haven’t gotten any easier. Exhibit A: Chicago-based Tripp Lite’s new pocket-sized surge protector designed to keep flaky hotel electrical service from frying the innards of your high tech stuff.
At $25 and backed by a $5,000 insurance policy should it sizzle your silicon, the SMP AC and Telephone Surge Suppressor boasts hotel room connections for your portable computer, your portable printer and your portable answering machine.
TEMPS TO SUITS:
DROP DEAD, BOSS FOR A DAY
A strange new Web site devoted to America’s growing subculture of temporary workers at www.temp24-7.com (24 hours a day, 7 days a week) sponsored by an outfit called Flypaper Press describes plans to “hijack” National Secretaries Day on April 22 and make it “Temp Day” instead.
To celebrate, temps all over America are invited to log on to a Duke Nukem-style game called Temps vs. Suits in which temps take out their frustrations by attacking full-timers with such weapons as poison-tipped paper clips, white-out grenades and pencil swords. Temp Day festivities on the 22nd include a drawing. The winner gets something very special to all temps–a six-month health benefits package.
CUBESPACE
JUST BETWEEN US PANDAS
The ads would make Sharon Stone blush, but the woman in the tight dress posed next to the futuristic desk with a black cube floating above is supposed to be drawing attention to Panda Project Inc.’s latest high-tech scheme.
Panda’s past efforts have included brilliant machines that run Pentium, PowerMac and Digital Alpha chips on the same motherboard, allowing one to change the nature of the whole machine by plugging in any one of those chips. The cube, called Rock City, is ostensibly a full-blown Pentium PC built into a cube of aviation-grade black aluminum that is balanced on one tip, but from the tone of company literature it appears to be a cash-raising scheme to finance other innovation. With an asking price just under $1,000, its ultra-slick look and those soft core ads, the cube appears headed for dorm rooms and computer geeks’ offices everywhere.
DUCK, BILL
YOU’VE GOT PIE
Bill Gates isn’t going to like it in the wake of the mindless and terrifying pie-in-the-face attack he recently endured in Europe, but some Microsoft haters at an outfit called R.I. Soft Systems in Woonsocket, R.I., are getting raves for a screen saver/game in which you stalk an animated Gates character, line up pies with your cursor and send them flying into the Microsoft mogul’s face with a tap at the space bar (www.risoftsystems.com).
