Wombat Mobile I should be coding or sleeping instead of this...

I was looking for a new travel bag/case for my golf clubs a while ago. I have a small Travalite case, but I was looking for something bigger and I'm not crazy about how the lock mechanism works on the Travalite.

I'd narrowed the choice between an Ogio Strait Jacket and the BagBoy T-10. Both were going for about $70 on eBay at the time I was looking. I tried to find them in brick and mortar stores, but wasn't able to check either of them out in person.

I followed auctions for both types of bags on eBay and decided I would go with whichever one I could snipe at a better price.

Bad Move. I ended up with the Bagboy T-10 along with a lot of buyer's remorse. The T-10 is big. And heavy. I thought the protective hard shell on top would be a great feature, but it turns out to be a pain. I only use this thing maybe twice a year and keep it in the garage for the rest of the time, but since the Bagboy has a lot of hard, structural parts to it, it takes up a lot of storage space. I really should have gone with the soft-sided Ogio.

But the worst part about the T-10 is when actually traveling. It's very cumbersome and heavy and is really tough to navigate in a crowded airport line. And it takes up more space than it should in a rental car trunk. The hard shell top and the hard base make it really hard to pack a trunk efficiently.

True, there's a lot of space and pockets to fit your shoes, clothes, and everything else in it, but I found myself trying to pack things into my other bags just to keep the Bagboy at a managable weight. On the last golf trip I was on, the T-10 dwarfed everyone else's travel bags and its heft made it difficult for some of the smaller people on the trip to manage.

No question, if I have the chance again I go with the Ogio Straight Jacket over the Bagboy T-10.

I was perusing my logs last night and it was interesting to see how people stumble upon my blog. It made me want to experiment and see what would happen if I do less navel-gazing here and blog about stuff that might actually be interesting to someone else.

So, in that vein, I thought I'd start posting the notes that I keep when I'm researching buying crap. I often scour forums and review sites for even trivial purchases, and while I often end up with just a collection of links, getting this indexed in the search engines might save someone some time if they're in a similar situation down the road.

We've recently added another laptop to our house, a Dell Inspiron 700m, and we're going to need a new bag/case for it. I just went through this a few months ago, so it's still relatively fresh in my mind. I was torn between getting a backpack or a messenger bag, but I ended up with neither. I wanted something that didn't scream "steal this computer" on the subway, so I went with a Sumdex laptop sleeve from eBay that I could just use with my existing bags.

Here are some sites that I found useful when shopping for a notebook bag/case...

Manufacturers/Designers:

• Sumdex - sleeves, not very sleek, but cheap and good padding
• Shinza ZeroShock - better looking sleeves, but pricier. might be tough to find in US.
• Spire - cool bags that come with a protective sleeve
• booq - very slick bags, but pricey
• timbuk2 - lots of choices and colors
• Brenthaven - functional, conservative, look sturdy
• Boblbee - serious hard-shell cases for taking your laptop to the jungle. I'd consider these if I had a nice laptop, but I prefer to buy disposable, sub $1,000 Dells whenever there's a nice coupon code
• Manhattan Portage - meh
• Ogio

• genpi.com - Retailer with nice selection
• RoadWired - another retailer with a nice selection
• eBags - huge selection

• Ask Engadget: What’s the best gadget bag? - nice article on Gadget Bags/ManPurses with lots of links in the comments
• It's Not A Purse! A Buyer's Guide to Man-Bags - another good article with lots of examples
• arstechnica - Perpetual Laptop Bag/Backpack Thread