Mark talks about his keys. I expand on this a bit.

I posted a bit in Mark's comments (which are far fancier than mine) and I wanted to share and expand on it here.


I carry fairly small keys. House key, car key, car lock-fob, knife and the key to the padlock of our storage locker. Oh, there's a connector to another keyring that has the keys to a friend's truck. My work keys have an RSA keyfob, four door keys and a computer key.

This pretty much came about because I don't like too much in my pockets. I hate having my wallet in my back pocket, but it takes up too much room in the front. I get around this in various ways. Cargo pants, put it in my messenger bag, fanny pack, I've even been know to hide it in my car.

The flip side of this is that I sometimes wish I had [insert whatever here]. Back in college I carried a fanny pack. It started out as a generic condura backpack. You know the ones that came in dull colors and had leather bottom sections. It was too much. About halfway through college I switched from full size binders/notebooks to half size notebooks. I rarely needed a non-folded piece of 8.5x11" paper, so it worked out well. I got a medium size fanny pack and away I went. I was essentially a purse. It had my wallet, keys, notebook, pens/pencils, pocket knife, checkbook, etc. It worked very well for me. Amazingly, it was never stolen...

Now, my messenger bag has taken over that role. In addition to much of that stuff, it also carries my PowerBook (and it's pals the cables, adaptors, CDs, etc.). In some ways this is fine. In others, it's not. It works well for coming and going to work, but on weekends it kinda sucks to have jumped into my car and zoomed off to the store, only to realize that the hopping list and my wallet are at home snuggled up in my bag... Taking the whole bag to Costco wouldn't work either.

maybe I need to find a computer bag that has a "sub-purse" or fanny pack that I could pull out with all my vital gear. I'll have to see if InCase (website not quite functional) or Crumpler makes anything like that...