I spend a lot of time in the dark. Physically, I mean (though my wife might mean it otherwise). And, believe it or not, a lot of that time is spent reading and writing. Reading something called books, not blogs, and writing old-school style, with something called a pencil that's used to manually input characters onto this crazy substance called paper that doesn't require electricity. I do this stuff in bed, in the evenings on my back porch, sometimes in my car at the beach; you never know when or where I might get nuts like that. The thing is, these book things and this paper stuff isn't backlit. Which poses a real problem when you're trying to use them in the dark and you don't have a set of government-issued night vision goggles.

Thankfully, the New Jersey-based company Periscope offers up a whole series of solutions for this, one of which, the Executive Lighted Portfolio (which I'll henceforth call the ELP, not to be confused with the band Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, which does not have an attached light), I got my hands on last week. So let me say this about that:

My first impression of the ELP was that it's big. Really big. I've been using a netbook for portable computing for the last few months, and this thing dwarfs my Eee PC, making the poor thing feel small and weak. But that's not necessarily a bad thing: my netbook could use a little humility. Oh, and you get a nice big, full-featured workspace, too. But now I'm getting ahead of myself.

Unsnapping the two position (to allow for jamming plenty of stuff into the pockets) magnetic flap closure and busting the ELP open reveals the most full-featured lighting solution that Periscope offers. The right side holds an 8 1/2" x 11" pad, while the left side has five flat pockets (one of which is zippered) in which to store business cards, pens, and other assorted items. It also has a large expandable pocket which Periscope says makes the ELP "an ideal cover for the new Amazon Kindle DX " (or, I assume, the upcoming Barnes & Noble Nook that I pre-ordered).

Article Author: Bradford Schmidt

Bradford Schmidt has worked in television, music and digital strategy. He now writes regular commentary on his blog, Bone in the Fan as well as the weekly column

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