I’m sitting in this idyllic beach house in Lavallette on the New Jersey Shore. My HP Pavillion laptop is open before me, with my Verizon USB720 broadband wireless modem plugged into the side and giving me broadband access on the company’s new Rev-A network. I’m blazing away. After a decade of playing the occasional road warrior, I’m finally getting the hang of traveling and working.

It helps the technology and creature comforts have caught up. A few elements have helped improve working from the road (at least as an occasional Road Warrior; the seasoned veterans I’ve written about in the past seem to have it down). One is that the technology is getting smaller and more powerful. Laptops are smaller, and have connectivity in mind (what with internal wireless cards, even internal broadband wireless cards available). My Kingston Data Traveler II Migo-enabled USB flash drive is plugged into one of the three USB ports on the laptop. Migo is providing me a snapshot of my desktop back home, complete with 30-days of my email and recent docs. Heck, with its eight gigs of space, it carries everything I need; it even has the picture from my desktop of my kids at the Empire State Building. Just like my home (office).

The second is that life can be Web based. With Google’s Gmail, I can search and organize my mail from anywhere. My BlackBerry Pearl lets me receive and reply to my mail from the beach, the road, even the couch. (Again, in the interest of full disclosure, I may be a Crackberry addict, but I’ve got good reason. When you take two weeks off for a trip to the Shore, is it so much to ask that I sneak a peek at my email a few times a day? I’m still working; it’s 7 am as I write this blog. But as a home officer or teleworker on vacation, it’s important that we stay productive – without demanding too much indulgence from the family. They don’t care. Why should anyone else point an accusatory finger?).

What’s really cool, though, is how the softgoods are catching up as well. I’m traveling with my new Logitech Kinetik backpack for notebooks. FINALLY, a lightweight backpack with some pockets and pouches designed to reduce the rat’s nest of wires and cables that inevitably exists at the bottom of the road warriors’ travel case. It’s pretty cool, with various internal pockets and pouches, slots and sleeves, and a kind of contour and “exo-shell” that provides a form that holds packed stuff upright. I’ve written exensively about the lack of a real solution to this nagging problem; if anyone has a solution for all the cables we often travel with (like power bricks for the laptop and the digital camera, the wireless mouse, the Webcam, the cellphone charger, the laptop cable lock, etc., etc., etc.), PLEASE let me know (jeff at chief home office dot com).

I don’t care how much you travel, playing the Road Warrior remains much easier said than executed. But at least some of the tech and accessories are catching up to help improve the experience. From the Verizon network and my Crackberry to my Kinetik case to Kingston Migo’s portable version of my desktop back home, it’s almost like being there – if there was a beachfront cottage on the Jersey Shore…