I went to the Apple store and a brilliant genius bar guy, Fared, helped me solve most of my synchronizing problems.
He also showed me how to get photos from my Canon s90 on to the iPad without going through the laptop. Now the question is: can I put them into a blog entry?

It took an hour and I had to download an app and use Flickr but it looks like I can now make complete blog post from my iPad. So I should be able to go on the road without my computer and work.