fantasai: Worthy Products

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

Consumer Goods

• 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've been using 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.

Internet bookings: there are so many crappy travel sites out there, but these stand out as being uncluttered and easy-to-use as well as finding you the best tickets.

• Expedia. I book almost all my travel through them. Their website is easy to use, and they tend to have the best prices as well. US billing only, unfortunately.
• SNCF The French train system. Their website is pretty slick, too, and this is the simplified homepage. 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 Kate most of the time. I would like to recommend Thunderbird, but it's IMAP support is too flaky. (I use it anyway.)