applications' plists when running off an external

I'm stuck with a possibly borked internal hard drive on my iBook. In the mean time, I've been using Windows portable apps off a USB flash drive. I decided I wanted to updated my podcasts and my iPod, too, so I connected my external hard drive to a university Mac and made iTunes point to the music folder on it. (note: my university's computers create a separate user folder for each person, so it seems things are basically protected, though I don't keep any personal files on any of them of course). I thought maybe I could use quicksilver while using it, so I downloaded it to my external and created a temp folder and started it up. It worked just fine. Now I wonder, if I use any other applications I normally use (like Adium) off my external hard drive, where do the plists end up? on the computer or?...I used spotlight to look up my quicksilver plist file, but couldn't find it on the public computer I'm using.

Is there any way to keep preference and other necessary files on the external as well so I can just use any Mac and not set up preferences again? This is, of course, hopefully, temporary, but it's nice to have.

sps

 

actually..

Surprise, surprise, it looks like I have access to them...well at least the ones in my-user-name/Library. Hopefully I'll be able to paste what I copy onto another computer