I'm sure it hasn't escaped the notice of my regular readers that I haven't been posting much lately about my reading. That's because there hasn't been much reading to post about. The problem started in late July when I discovered the wonderful world of netbooks. Netbooks are teeny tiny little laptops that work as ultra-portable satellite workstations. I've been wanting something like that for a long time but I didn't know they existed. As soon as I saw them, I was hooked.
The original netbook was the Eee PC, and its popularity has attracted the attention of other manufacturers so now it has some very stiff competition to contend with. The stiffest probably comes from the little beauty I am typing on right now, the Aspire One. It's affordable, powerful, versatile, and just plain pretty. If you want to know the specs, mine has a 1.6 GHz Atom processor, 1 GB RAM (upgradable), a 120 GB hard drive (other models come with solid state drives running Linux), wired and wireless network cards, three USB ports, two SD card slots (one of which reads as an extension of the hard drive), a spectacular display, and all the usual inputs and outputs you'd find on a computer these days. They say they keyboard is 85% of the size of a regular keyboard, and I find it to be plenty big enough. Even men who claim to have "sausage finger" don't seem to have any trouble with it. One thing it and other netbooks lack is an optical drive, so to load software (or play music or movies) you either have to download it off the web, connect an external drive, network to your desktop, or copy to a thumb drive or SD card. With all those options it's hardly an inconvenience.
As you can imagine, I've been quite occupied with getting my new toy up to speed. I've learned about the wonderful world of wifi, and have partaken of the hotspots at some local branch libraries. I've learned about the baffling world of networking, and with the help of my desktop have managed to load this baby up with all my favourite software, movies, and those all-important Firefox add-ons.
Just when I thought everything would be going back to normal, a very good friend of mine offered me his Office 2007 disk, which he had no use for, being a Mac user As a Microsoft drone, I greedily accepted the offer, and went to work installing it on both computers (which took far less time than it's taking me to write this) and started learning what's new in Office. I've discovered the joy of OneNote. (If you have this on your computer and haven't used it I definitely recommend having a look.) I also got started on cleaning up the thick sediment of email that has accumulated in Outlook. Then I got an idea (uh-oh): What if I could access my Outlook email on my netbook? After trying various options, and corrupting one or two email files, I've come to the conclusion that this can't be done in Outlook alone. However there are plenty of companies out there who would love to sell me a program to synchronize Outlook across my network.
I would be trying out one or two of those applications right now if not for Danielle's post in which she courageously faces her TBR piles (plural) and cuts them down to a size that she might be able to conquer in the 15 or so weeks until Christmas. What got my attention was the 15 weeks part. It still feels like summer here, but the calendar says that if I don't get cracking on my own Mount Everest I'll still be at base camp come 2009. So my netbook has been spending a little more time recharging, my desktop is spending more time in sleep mode, and I'm starting to get some reading done. Thanks, Danielle. :)
And if this happens again, feel free to send me one of these.
