My New Electronic Toy Companion

What can I say? I've been looking at this ultra portable for a while now and finally decided to bite the bullet since there was a great rebate and mainly because I'll be starting to teach in a few months and need something I can take with me and not have to worry about. So placed the order from Amazon on Sunday and via UPS today, this arrived!

Shipped on Monday, here by Wednesday morning. Boy UPS is getting fast to Hawaii! Used to take at least three days using second day air.

So what is so great about this thing? Well I'm actually not really sure yet other than it is really small and there seems to be a very passionate and large group of users out there for this machine. One of the places where I did a lot of my research was at www.EEEUser.com. They have some great members there and more information than anyone could care to find.

The Asus I bought is the Asus EEE PC900 20GB Linux version. It has a 8.9" screen and weighs just a little under 2lbs according to the specs. The neat thing about it is it is all solid state (do people still use that term?) and so the 20GB "hard drive" is not really a hard drive at all and is more like a memory card built into the computer with the OS loaded on it. As mentioned I purchased the Linux version and partially it was because it came with a bigger drive, but the other thing was that I wanted to see if I could actually have a usable device for which there would be no software purchases necessary to do the typical office and web surfing type stuff and this fit the bill perfectly.

In any case, I've had it out of the box for about 8 hours now. Not all of it was spent playing around with it as I did have a lot of work that I needed to do today, but as I needed a little distraction I did manage to start it up and see what it could do. And so far I'm pretty impressed with how well it works. The Linux part is going to be the biggest challenge for me I think as it has been a while since I've worked with a command line type of system and although there is a lot you can do without typing Linux commands, there is also a lot that seems to involve doing just that so it will be a learning experience. Especially since the keyboard is a little smaller than I imagined, but I can't really complain as I expected it to be small since a lot of people mention that when they first purchase the machine.

Have a lot more to do before I think I'll really be ready to say if it was a smart purchase or not, but the first impressions are it will definitely be workable and will be yet another learning experience for me and that already makes it worthwhile.

Onward!

Lunch at Grace's

Just came back from a trip to pickup a new router for the house since the one we got is going bad and doing weird things. Also picked up a mouse for my new laptop (more to come on this).

Decided to get some food on the way back and so I stopped at Graces (see pic) in Kapahulu. Shoyu Roast Pork plate all rice for lunch. Just sitting here waiting for it and decided to drop a quick note to the new blog since it is too long for a Tweet. Hahaha.

Am REALLY hungry!

UPDATE: Here is what my plate lunch looked like right before I scarfed the whole thing down in record time. Boy am I full now!

But sure was an ONO lunch! Didn't quite finish the last scoop of rice completely, but enough of it to make it too much for sure. Heh.

Laterz!

Another Test and Alex

Ok, so after a day of wondering why my MMS picture message wasn't being sent I finally figured out that I broke it. When trying to clean up space on my phone to be able to send it I deleted my WAP/GPRS settings which is needed to get these messages off.

In any case, after much web surfing tonight I think I fixed it. So this post with the picture of Alex who has been laughing at me all this time is a test to see if this works.

If this does work then it means that I can email in my photos with some text, but it also means that I can't add text to an MMS message and send it in because that didn't work earlier tonight. All I got was a bunch of blank images and the text in my blog.

So here goes nothing and something!

PS. My Asus EEE shipped today and is coming via UPS so it should be here in a couple of days, whoo hoo!

Pool time!

Uncle Steven is the target of this spur of the moment fun day in the pool! Trey is hiding behind the green chair trying to protect himself from the stray shots.

Took this with my SDA camera phone and emailed it to my blog. Not bad as far as how long it took and how it came over. Will try the next one later today at the girls games if I remember.

First Day of Blogging

Ok, so decided to finally set one of these things up. Mainly so that I can try sending picture messages from my phone to it and to see how that works out.

So here we go! Is there really enough going on in my life to make it worth saying out loud for everyone to read? I guess only this blog and time will tell.