Thumb drives

Damn the man.

At work, our IT team is a bit stringent on what we have on our Macs. As an associate editorial director, it's deemed that I wouldn't need something like Audacity or Handbrake. They have administrative locks on our machines so I can't go download these gems, but I've managed to get around it using my trusty thumb drive.

The nice thing about running apps off a thumb drive is that you never have to worry about installing things onto the work desktop and getting flagged. Generally, I carry Portable Firefox preferences, the above mentioned Audacity, a few little games and the ohh so helpful KillBox on my drive (a Scandisk Micro Cruiser).

In all, I've learned that I'd much rather just take a thumb drive with me than a laptop. I don't have to pull the thumb drive out of my bag at airport security checks, don't get hassled by Campbell-Ewald's IT team and I still get to be the annoying tech geek at the office.

What about you guys? Any portable apps you're fond of? Do you use your portable drive? Oh, this particular post was inspired by a comment string for a poll on thumb drives over at Lifehacker. Click the link to check it out. As a side note, probably no blog tomorrow until late. I'm in Chicago all day for a creative presentation to Chevy .