Month: January 2010

Seen on a bumper sticker on my way to work this morning:

Wag more. Bark less.

I love my Dell Mini 9 netbook, which I bought the first day they became available. It’s a great little piece of hardware the size of a hardback book, with enough computing power for me to run a full version of Linux, browse the web, read email and news, and do all of the little sit-on-the-couch-and-hack tasks I need. Plus, it never fails to impress the chicks. (I can’t even count the number of women who have told me it’s “so cute”.)

Yet netbooks are under attack lately, possibly because Google has finally released their Nexus One smartphone– which is without a doubt a handy little piece of work. There seems to be a growing consensus that netbooks are bulkier than smartphones, while also smaller and less capable than full laptops. They apparently occupy some middle ground that’s a dead space of computing. Either you should get a smartphone for low-end computing and super portability, or a laptop for mainstream computing and relative portability.

Regardless of these naysayers, I think netbooks fill a perfect niche. They sit between smartphones and laptops, and that’s exactly where they should be. I don’t want a phone with a keyboard so small I can hardly read the keys, much less tap them; at the same time I don’t want to lug around a five-pound laptop the size of a two-inch binder. I can walk into a meeting with my Mini 9 and take notes. I can’t do that (well) on a phone, and a laptop is too big and power-hungry.

So I was gratified to see other bloggers standing up for the maligned netbook, saying the really cool thing about them– which I hadn’t really considered– was that unlike smartphones, they’re not “tethered” to a carrier who subsidizes their cost and then locks you into a two-year contract. They’re more powerful but have the same incredible draw that smartphones do: in the words of Jeff Atwood, they provide “unlimited access to the complete sum of human knowledge, and free, unfettered communication with anyone on earth. For everyone.”

A couple hundred bucks and a wireless connection is all it takes to access books and articles about anything, and communicate almost instantly with people anywhere on earth. Who would have thought it possible ten years ago?

Long live the netbook.

I was cleaning up my e-mail today and shuffled the last messages of 2009 into my annual “Sent” folder. Out of curiosity I checked how many e-mails I wrote last year.

14,596.

That’s an average of 40 per day. Man, what would I do without e-mail?

Today marks Day Five of Laralee’s trip to Idaho with the kids to visit her family. For the past few days I’ve always had stuff to do (work, going out with friends, New Year’s parties) but today has been pretty slow. I worked on taxes for a bit– whee!– but soon hit a wall because I don’t have all of the necessary paperwork. I guess I’ll have to wait for that particular pain.

Anyway, this evening I’ve been planning the curriculum for the second-grade science class La and I are going to teach this semester. Our first class is this Friday so we need a list of lessons, materials, and a general feel for how we’re going to fill an hour every Friday with interesting, fun, and educational science experiments. Should be fun.

After a while of that I started poking around Wikipedia, because I wanted some ideas about topics we could discuss. I realized that since every article is heavily linked to related information, one can hop topic to topic pretty quickly, diving into either deep details about a particular thing, or hopping over into a completely different field. It’s actually quite fun, and this evening I’ve read about all sorts of esoteric things:

• the Oort Cloud and Kuiper Belt
• the Permian Extinction
• the Antarctic Convergence Zone
• the Pangaea supercontinent, and the ten or so that preceded it
• what determines the timberline on a mountain
• where the phrase “beating a dead horse” originated
• why having a certain muscle attachment on the femur allowed early dinosaurs to dominate the biosphere
• the “island of stability” in high atomic numbers

Of course not all of this will be useful for a group of a dozen second-graders, but it’s sure fun to learn something new. A day without learning something is truly a day wasted.