Welp, I Ordered Me a Chromebook

A surprisingly hard act to follow!

Some personal history: although I've traditionally written a goodly portion of first drafts by hand (speaking primarily of fiction here), once I get the ball rolling it's nice to have the speed of a keyboard--not to mention it's nice not to have to do quite as much double work, reentering all the text.

On the other hand, I have the attention span of a gnat, and a fully capable large screened computer offers many distractions. Also, having my text all spread out on a big screen a) makes it feel like I'm filling a water tower one drop at a time and b) makes me inclined to endless editing, since I can scan back through bunches of text at once and find fault with it. I compose most of my blog posts in a small Notepad window on my big screen, but that's not really practical for longer work.

Several years back, I discovered and fell in love with Renaissance Learning's Alphasmart word processors, specifically the Neo. They were rugged, their battery life could be measured in months or even years, they displayed just a few lines of text at a time, and they had a great keyboard. Basically, they were a miniature portable typewriter that saved to memory instead of paper. They only did one thing, but they did it well. I've loved mine. However, there are a few caveats: first of all, getting text from the device to the computer can be fairly time consuming and requires cables. I loathe cables. I lose cables. Secondly, the thing looks like a business class Speak and Spell. I never got truly comfortable with using it out in the public eye.

For some time, I've been longing for an Alphasmart successor: a simple, highly portable, unpretentious device which would allow me to create documents and sync them wirelessly.

I briefly owned a lipstick pink Samsung netbook and still remember it with fondness--I wrote a ridiculous number of short stories on that thing--but it was so slow, especially when booting up, and backing up my documents or syncing the between computers took a bit of thought. It was close, but no cigar.

A few years ago, Chromebooks began to pop up. I was mildly intrigued. Google has been a friend of mine since the days of invite-only G-mail and I already had quite a few documents in the Google eco-system. However, at the time, Chromebooks didn't really have any off-line capability (though I'm usually connected, I'd like that now and again), and were almost a public beta. I liked the concept, but didn't feel like they were ready for prime time.

The current crop feels a lot more polished to me, and I've decided to take the leap. I ordered an Asus Flip C100. This device is part tablet as well as part mini-laptop. The keyboard is small, but actually a bit bigger than the netbook of old, so I'm not too worried. It only has a 10.1 inch screen (tablet sized), but it's a nice bright IPS panel, and although 1200x800 is low for a tablet, it's better than the old netbook. I think it'll be very comfortable.

On top of all that, it has a touch screen, and if you flip the keyboard back, you can use it as a tablet. Granted, Chrome OS isn't really optimized for touch right now, and the screen is no iPad Retina thing, but my primary use case would be browsing or looking at PDFs, and I think it will be just fine for that.

You can also stand it up tent style, or flip the keyboard back far enough to use as a stand for watching movies (Netflix and Amazon Prime should both work) or displaying recipes. That covers just about everything I'd like to be able to do with a small portable device. Document editing comes above all, but I've never owned a tablet and, while I'm not expecting anything like iPad performance, I'm intrigued by the possibilities.

It should be here sometime in the next week. More thoughts once I've had a chance to incorporate it into my workflow. It could be the perfect first draft machine--if I can avoid the siren call of other Chrome tabs. The little guy only weighs about two pounds and will fit easily in my writing bag for coffee shop trips and lunch breaks. Best of all, whatever I type will instantly be available from my other computers.

A bonus: this is childish, but I've always kind of wanted to put stickers all over a computer, but have never had one I felt I could decorate like that. I am *so* gonna sticker this little thing once the brand new wears off.

Anyway, I'm tentatively excited.

Places to See #2

This week's passel o' links I found entertaining or of interest:

► The oldest recorded melody? I find this one particularly fascinating, even a bit spine tingling. If this is anything *close* to accurate, we're hearing music that fell on the ears of the ancients, eons ago.

► Interesting glimpses of New York diaries from all different time periods and very different personalities...as always, I'm intrigued by variances in handwriting and style.

► 10 words that need to die immediately. (They do, they do!)

► The Lamy Safari color of the year, 2012.

► Cats as fonts--cute. (Thanks to notagain at Manual Entry for this one...)

► Guitars in space!

► Speaking of guitar, wanna buy a guitar boat?

► How to make a duct tape rose. Well, *I* thought it was cool!

► And this round's "just because" entry, cat caught barking...

Not Dead Yet

Reason #1 I haven't been blogging: I've been obsessively practicing mandolin and learning new tunes.  Tunes I've learned since the beginning of November:


OK, I confess, I'd played Banish Misfortune before, but not memorized it, so maybe that one's a lie.  Still, not bad all told, if I do say so myself.  And most of them, I know well enough to play at the local Irish session, without toooo many stumbles.  However, the list of commonly played tunes they gave me when I first started attending is sixty tunes long, and it seems like people toss out new ones every week, so this list is a drop in the bucket.  I still have a lot of work cut out for me.  Fun work, though, for the most part, with the exception of Lark in the Morning Jig.  Don't ask me why, but I developed an instant antipathy for that tune.  Maybe I'm not as much of a morning person as I thought I was.  But I'll beat the Lark yet.

Reason #2 I haven't been blogging: I've been sucked down the e-reader rabbit hole.

Quite a number of family members have obtained Kindles over the past few months and all have been raving about them.  And these days, you can borrow library books on them, which knocks down one of the mental barriers I'd set up against them.  The selection of library e-books isn't great, but it's growing.  And Kindles have come down a lot in price.  A few years ago, they were what, $350?  Now, they're under a hundred. 

I got to play with my sister-in-law's new Kindle Touch for awhile over Christmas, and then when I was at Target on New Year's Eve, they had a returned one marked down to $69.  Plus I had a Target gift card.  Plus I am weak.  It came home with me.  Ended up having a bad USB cable, but my phone uses the same cable so I could charge it straight off, and Amazon customer service was happy to send a replacement for the original.  Good deal.

I have to say, I'm smitten.  There is much to be said for the ability to carry many, many large, heavy books in one bitty package, and the ability to request any classic (and a lot of other stuff) for free at the touch of a coupla buttons, without even getting off the couch.  Also, it's lighter and more comfortable to hold than a lot of big books, lays flat, and I can lazily turn pages with one hand whilst eating lunch or what have you.  I haven't bought much yet, aside from Mr. Speegle's short story collection, and Life of Pi, which I've been wanting to read for awhile and which I got for a dollar as one of the "special offers."  But I've gone through half a dozen library books with more in the queue, plus have a bunch of classics and out-of-print goodies waiting in the wings. (First up, some lighter reading: lotsa PG Wodehouse and a smattering of Mary Roberts Rinehart mysteries.)

It doesn't replace real books by any means.  There are still an awful lot of things not available for Kindle, for one thing, and I'm still likely to drag home large stacks of cheap used books, which isn't an option for e-books.  Still, I'm seriously pleased with the little thing.

Anyhow, between reading and music, I've barely had time for things like, oh, bathing, let alone blogging.  What did I miss?  Are we there yet?

Too Much

Some reflections, partially drawn from my recent brief blog hiatus (the virtual type-in dragged me back...;)