fantasai: Worthy Products

The following items/services are things I use and would recommend to anybody.

Consumer Goods

• Uniball Signo EX and Signo 207 pens. Beautifully bold colors, delightfully smooth writing, and lots of colors. If you're looking for sparkly ink, buy from Sakura instead, but for solid color writing you can't beat a Uniball Signo.
• Pentel Techniclick side-advance automatic pencils. Great design, and they have never gotten jammed on me. Pentel guarantees their pencils for life. When one of mine broke, I sent it in to their QA dept and they sent me back a replacement!
• ECallChina Rechargeable Pinless Speed Dial phone card. The quality is very good: I used it to call New Zealand for years, and I used to use it every week to call in to the CSS Working Group telecon over my cell phone. You can check out the rates yourself.
• Nokia phones, because they make quality stuff. My Nokia phone (the cheapest unlocked model then available in Oslo) has lasted since June 2004: it still works despite many drops, still charges properly because Nokia's power plugs aren't wimpy bits of plastic, and still gets decent battery life on its original battery. My mom's newer Nokia is comfortable to hold and enjoyably easy to use. I'd buy Nokia again if I needed a new phone.

Travel-related

If you travel to the south of France for W3C meetings, you're likely to be stationed either in Sophia-Antipolis or in Mandelieu-la-Napoule. If you don't want to spend a fortune on your hotel room, I have a few recommendations.

• Hipmunk Has a really slick interface for finding good flights.
• SNCF The French train system. Note that if you're from the Americas, you must pick France as your pickup location because they can't send to the Americas.

Software. Last because it's the most boring. :P

• Unicode because everyone should use it
• Firefox Need I say more?
• Crimson Editor for Windows
• screen, which lets me disconnect from a server without interrupting the application I'm running within it

I would like to recommend a Linux text editor, but I haven't found any good ones. I use Geany or Kate most of the time. I don't have a mail client I love, either, but Thunderbird works well enough.