Robert X Cringely prepares to flee a hurricane:
Given that my personal space in the Town & Country minivan is just enough for a briefcase, here’s what I’m putting in mine. I’m taking my notebook computer so I can work on the road. I’m taking an IEEE 1394 FireWire external hard drive containing every operating system, language, compiler and application I care about, plus all associated data. The FireWire drive holds 250 gigabytes and I only have it about half full, which seems pitiful for having spent half of a lifetime doing this stuff. Finally, I have on my wrist a watch with a built-in 256 megabyte USB flash drive holding all my e-mail since 1993, everything I have written since the late 1980s, and a bootable Linux partition. So worst case, I can buy a new PC wherever we land, plug-in the watch and be up and running again in minutes with most of the stuff I need.
Say one thing for the years since 1945: they have made it easier for a writer to be a refugee, assuming that there is the right technology at the other end. I am haunted by the suicide of Stefan Zweig and his wife, who killed themselves in Brazil in 1942. There are two interpretations of his death. One — favoured by the writer I have linked to — says that he was was despondent over the rise of Nazism; the second, that he could not bear, as a writer, to be cut off from his native tongue. So a modern Zweig flees with all his works to somewhere sufficiently remote and primitive to be safe — and kills himself because he can’t get a driver for his firewire disk.