>The peak was, I think, when I accessed Excel over Citrix while sitting in the airport waiting for a flight.
I never had a N900, but I have a similar memory of fixing a work problem while traveling in the late 90's. I used a terminal on a Palm Pilot over a dial-up modem, typing into a shell using the "graffiti" handwriting. It was...painful and triumphant all at once :)
In the early 2000's, I did my company's payroll using a Sony phone (maybe an M600c — the one from the James Bond film), while on a hydrofoil between Hong Kong and Macau. At the time I thought, "The future is finally here!"
Ah, making me remember trying to monkey patch a script over ssh on my Blackberry Storm...
At that time I felt the future of system administration meant taking the manual things I could do over a smartphone and abstracting them into lists of tappable buttons, like "Provision Web Server" and "Set Up New Developer".
I never had a N900, but I have a similar memory of fixing a work problem while traveling in the late 90's. I used a terminal on a Palm Pilot over a dial-up modem, typing into a shell using the "graffiti" handwriting. It was...painful and triumphant all at once :)