Mobile Warrior Profile: Chloe O'Brian, CTU

Chloe O'Brian is one of the best portrayed geeks, if you will, on television. Her evolution from being just an uncomfortable geek who Jack Bauer found annoying to eventually tolerating her role in his endeavors to save Los Angeles from 6 days of some of the most horrific terrorist acts on American soil.


Now, what kind of gears would Chloe be using in 2008?  After all, even a lot has changed as far as the sophistication of the bad guys and CTU technology.  No longer do good guys use Macs and bad guys use Dells.


Laptop - Friends and I used to joke about how when IBM sold the Thinkpad line to Lenovo, a Communist Chinese company, we may find ourselves being spied on by the Chinese security apparatus.  Well, guess what?  She's got an X300  (Amazon) because of it's versatileness, light-weight, and sleekness.  And with the SSD drive, it makes it even more important in the stressful and turbulent times.


Mobile Phones - She probaby has two of them.  One would be the new Palm Treo Pro (Amazon).  Why?  Because it's what Jack' had used one in the past.  And to ensure compatibility with Windows Mobile, not to mention that Jack sometimes would call her up in the middle of the night when he's infiltrating a secret shipment of melamine-laced milk products brought into Long Beach port by the diabolical and dark group known as the Happy Cows of California who will try to frame Canadians, whose motive may be that they're bitter we've cut back on oil imports from them because of our sagging economy.  Anyway, Bauer will need help and Chloe seems like the obvious choice to contact.


Yes, that makes sense because it's "television".


As for her personal phone, that's a hard one.  She already has a PDA from CTU so she'll want something that works just as well, as robust, just as much value san the geekiness.  She'll wait for the Nokia N96 (Amazon). This works best for her. Again, she might go with an iPhone 3G if she didn't already have a PDA. Chloe has grown sexy over the last couple of "days" but she is still a bit self-conscious about people.


Bag - Chloe doesn't like violence but she realizes her capacity for dishing it out when the lives of her friends and family are at stake.  Also on occasion, she will have to go out into the field to retrieve hard drives, recover data, and pick up Jack's dry-cleaning.  I see Chloe carryng a Timbuk2 Messenger bag not unlike the one that Bauer carried in Season 5.


Car - Prius, right?  No.  She's not a manager and that means some measure of prestige.  And although she's a patriot, Chloe does work in LA and her affinity for American brand cars is not as strong as folks in the Midwest (then again, why would there be a CTU office in the middle of American anyway?).  She'll go with a Lexus X400 Hybrid.  No, not a Subaru.  I would have thought that a couple of seasons ago.  Today, she'll want the image and a luxury hybrid SUV is just the way to do it.


Solar Kit for her home.  Chloe knows all too well the dangers Los Angeles or any other major American face on any given day.  Nukes, biological weapons, and, again, Happy Cows.  She'll want her own solar kit.  Obviously, it would make sense for CTU to outfit her home with its own power source should she not be able to get to the central command.  I have seen some in the past with with portable power sources.  I imagine this could be something Chloe and other field agents might use in situations where they can't get back to their headquarter.


Other essentials:  Pepper spray, Taser, water and food rations for a week, first-aid kit with iodine tablets, field journals, thermal covers, flares, hand-crank radio and flashlight similar to the American Red Cross FR150 I had Mulder and Scully carry, Swiss Army Knife.


Also, read about last week's mobile warrior profile:

• Mobile Warrior Profile: Josh Gates of Destination Truth
• Mobile Warrior Profile: The X-Files:  Mulder and Scully
• Mobile Warrior Profile: Political Operative in 2008

Profile: Your Friendly Neighborhood Political Operative

It's the season.  No, not that one.  The political season.  Maybe we don't know it but most years, September through early November is heavy with political and election events.  Every four years, we have the Super Bowl of political elections, Race for the White House.

Things have changed a lot in how elections are conducted and largely, technology has had a helping hand.  How of often these days do you watch reporters updating us in the middle of their broadcast by reading off their Blackberries?

So, what do you need if you want to be a political operative?

For the average mobile warrior, you have a lot of choices with respects to mobile devices.  Windows Mobile, iPhone, and Blackberry.  For political operative his real choice is obvious.  It's a Blackberry.  Which one though?  Well, the Bold nor the Storm is available in the US yet.  And even if they were, it's not an option.  They might be good six months from the date they are made available but not before.  So our generic political operative will use the Curve or the 8820.  It's robust and proven.  On the other than hand, we have seen Carl Rove with his iPhone in the past.

Now, he's going to be traveling a lot.  Sometimes by him- or herself.  I think operative will go with the Knight Rider GPS.  And it works.  Not only does it work, it's voiced by William Daniels, KITT himself!  Here's a review if you want to seriously consider it.  Bottomline, it works.  But if our guy isn't into themed GPS units, I think he'll go with Garmin's Nuvi 880 .  Here is CNet's review.  It's a bit on the pricy side but bottomline is it works and accurate.

Obviously, our guy will want to be using the Macbook Air for his mobile computing but since no Apple laptop has a built-in 3G modem, that might be a stumbling block for our PO.  However, the image of it all, he might.  But he'll also consider a netbook with a built-in 3G modem.  Connectivity is more of a big help than bigger screen.  He's is not going to need to be looking at spreadsheets with poll numbers and crunching out scenarios.  It's a game for political operatives everywhere on every issue.  They know everything by heart.

Again, it's about mobile Internet access.  We're seeing some netbooks with 3G subscription across the pond but not here yet.  I think we'll see 2009 with more explosive growth in Mobile internet in no small thanks to netbooks equiped with 3G modems.

Now how is he going to carry all that in a briefcase, right?  Are you kidding?  That's so Washington culture!  No.  No briefcases.  PC Magazine has a few with different styles to satisfy our PO.  Our political operative will be traveling in and out of airports on a daily basis as we wind down to the 9th inning of the election.  He'll be lucky if he even checks into a hotel.  So, he's gonna need airport security friendly bags.  I like the Mobile Edge ScanFast and the CODi Phantom.

Oh, and he'll be carrying a Moleskine netbook.  Why?  Because a lot of writing and notetaking are still being done on papers.  Not only that, our mean seasoned PO will be looking to write a memoir or two one day.  Maybe even run for political office.  Move high enough, his notebooks and letters could be sitting in a Presidential library one day.

Also, read about last week's mobile warrior profile:

• Mobile Warrior Profile: Josh Gates of Destination Truth
• Mobile Warrior Profile: The X-Files:  Mulder and Scully