Our pre-Thanksgiving Holiday show examines some upcoming conferences:

• Search Engine Strategies Conference & Expo 2005 will be December 5-8 in Chicago, IL.
• SANS Firewalls, Perimeters and VPNs course will be offered starting Wednesday, January 18, 2006 in Orange County, California.  The course will be led by SANS mentor Craig Duerr of Motorola. 
• SANS Training Program for the CISSP Certification Exam will be offered in Sacramento, CA from February 6 – 11, 2006.  The course will be taught by Joey Niem.
• Also the big SANS 2006 conference is in Orlando, Florida from Feb. 24 – March 4, 2006 with tracks on Audit (3 levels), Mgmt (2 levels), Operations (2 levels), and Security (13 levels from Intro to Windows to Oracle to Wireless)
• Portals, Collaboration and Content Management Conference will be in San Diego, CA from April 4-6, 2006 

And after a short plug by Eric Rice we examine PC World’s article: "Solid $500 Laptops: Notebook prices have hit a new $500 low (with rebates).  We tested three budget units which proved surprisingly capable at standard office tasks" by Tom Spring. The laptops they looked at were:

• Acer Aspire 3003LCi {froogle}
• Dell Inspiron 1200 {froogle}
• HP Compaq Presario M200

The next GotoMeeting
& TechPocasts.com event for Dec. 2005 is currently being planned.