| Quotables |
"Only I wasn't steering anything, not even myself. I just bumped from my hotel to work and to parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolleybus. ... I felt
very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo."
-- Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar |
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"On the surface, it sounds irresponsible, but to flourish in a rapidly changing world, you actually need to make more mistakes. Fail quickly. Fail often. If you do something and it
doesn't work, just recover in a hurry and try something else. ... Help develop a culture that is willing to fail its way to the future."
-- Price Pritchett, Culture Shift |
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"There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room. It's like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction -- every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and that excitement at about a million miles an hour."
-- Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar |
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| The Netbook |
| Wednesday, June 24, 2009 |
I finally did it. I went and got me one of those fancy Netbooks at the behest of my brother-in-law and sister, who sang its praises and steered me away from the Kindle in the process. Here are my thoughts on this puppy so far.
My brother-in-law heard I was fixin' to spend nearly $400 on a Kindle and said look... for quite a bit less than that, you can get yourself a Netbook, do all the same shit, and have all the functionality of a laptop at the same time. His was an Acer, and he had only good things to say about it; he even pointed me, some time ago, to several sites that offered e-books free of charge. So I gathered up my birthday money and Amazon gift cards and placed an order for an Asus instead (I had been warned about Acer computers by Gary, my IT guy) at the low, low price of $269.99.
So far, it's been worth every penny, although it seems a bit incongruous to substitute it for a Kindle; I can already tell you I'm still going to want one of those. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Its complete name is the Asus Eee PC 900HA 8.9-inch Netbook. It is quite a bit smaller than my sister's, as I remember, so she may have gotten the 10-inch screen, I'll have to ask her. It has a 1.6 GHz processor, 1 GB of RAM, which makes me happy, and a 160 GB hard drive, which is twice the size of my desktop. And it's running XP, which almost goes without saying, but I'm saying it because I'm happy about it, tools.
It is so small that it does not feature a CD-ROM of any description, but its compactness is part of what I like so much about it. And it does come with three USB ports, an ethernet port, an external monitor connection, and an SD card slot. The wi-fi is fantastic, and something I've never played with before, but an additional $50 at Microcenter snagged me a wireless router last night, and now I can be seen blogging and surfing goat porn all throughout my apartment and beyond. I am learning from it every day; I have never owned a laptop of any description.
At first, my main concern was the size of the keyboard. I am slowly getting used to it, but the first couple of days were filled with typos and cursing, cursing and typos; the shift key on the right side is one-third the size of the shift key on the left side, and I found myself hitting enter or 'up' every time I needed to shift. I've accidentally deleted entire paragraphs with this mistake; thankfully we have the 'undo' command at our disposal. But the more I type on it (I thought my product review would be less than sincere if I didn't write it up on the unit itself, so I am), the more I'm convinced it's something I can overcome with time. The small-ish space bar is also less accessible than I'd like, and occasionally, the touchpad is less sensitive than I would prefer as well.
No, the keyboard will not, in the end, be my primary complaint in an otherwise favorable review. What bothers me most is the battery life. The label on the keyboard boasts a five-hour battery life, which would be insufficient on its own, but the reality is that with a 98% charge, the battery monitor tells me I have 3.5 hours of operation left. That is simply inexcusable, and this is why the Netbook will never be a suitable substitute for the Kindle. The aforementioned battery life label displays a URL that is most likely aimed at teaching the user how to maximize the battery's charge, but when I enter it into the address bar, I only get an error message.
To be completely fair, though, charging the unit for one full hour will bring the battery back up above 80%, so the turnaround is quick in that respect. Plus, you can always use the machine while it's plugged in, as with any laptop.
Overall, it is one of the coolest things I've ever owned. It is extremely compact and transportable, it's powerful and has a ton of storage space, and it doubles as a portable DVD player even without a DVD-ROM; just plug it up to an external drive and transfer a movie onto its enormous hard drive, and you're set.
Oh yeah... I can see this thing costing me a lot of sleep over the next couple of weeks, and not in a bad way.
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posted by N.T. @ 11:41 PM  |
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