Today is pretty much the definition of a lazy Sunday (photo cred above to Anne). We’re taking a well needed break while on vacation to rest up. We spent the morning and early afternoon just hanging out at the resort while waiting for Anne to arrive—Sophia did reading for her summer classes, while I wrote the bulk of this post (which is why the tense changes below). After Anne got here, she took some time to get settled in before we went out to dinner. Immediately after getting back from eating, we took a water taxi into town and picked up little souvenirs (mostly Sophia) for friends.
I’m taking advantage of this respite to just knock back and do some private meditating on life, what I’ve done, want I want to do, and where I’m going next. I got a lot of reflecting done today, but am not quite ready to share everything yet. I still have a lot of thinking to do in Peru! It does seem that a lot of my friends have gone through this exercise recently though so the timing is right. In Boston alone, four of my friends have all recently (within the last 3 weeks or so) ended their careers with large companies to start new ventures, pursue entirely different careers, move to a different part of the world, or any combination of the above.
Life can be pretty unpredictable and exciting, which is something that I usually like in a lot of random activities that I end up planning and doing, as many of my friends can attest to. However, for bigger life decisions, I think I have tended to try to plan out ahead and overthink things a bit.
On a completely unrelated side note, I want to take some time to extol my netbook—it has really been the little computer that could. Despite their lack of overall success in the market, I still think my netbook has been one of the best tech investments I have made over the last few years. I picked up this Acer EeePC 1000HE for like $350 right before my senior year (basically 5 years ago) to supplement my desktop, and it is still going strong. My key to being happy with it has been to understand its limitations and keep the niche it is intended to fill in mind.
My little netbook has been a pretty solid travel computer because of its size, weight, battery life, storage, and low cost.
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Size and Weight: at 3.2 lbs and with a 10” screen, it is small enough to fit easily in my backpack and not so fragile feeling that I worry about breaking it with every little drop. The small form factor has really been a lifesaver which made packing a whole lot easier.
Battery Life: I can still get a good 6 or so hours out of a full charge on this baby. Although my use over the past few years has been much lighter than it was in the first year, it’s not bad at all for a 5-year-old machine.
Storage: I’ve got a 160 gb harddrive on this thing and an additional SD card slot which still beats some of today’s macbook airs… five years later ;).
Price: At $350 in 2009 dollars, if this guy broke or was lost, I would be much more sad about losing the sentimental value than the actual pricetag.
Honestly, this little fellow has outlived its expected lifetime and I have probably squeezed much more utility out of it than the average user. I know it is not perfect (low res, only 2 gb ram, poor integrated video card) and it is isn’t the fastest machine (1.67 GHz Intel Atom), but it does well with what I ask it to do (fetch simple web pages, write blog posts, store my photos/videos, and recharge my devices). Also, it is still much much more powerful than all the computers that NASA had combined, when they first sent a man to the moon. It’s all about perspective 🙂