On Beyond Zebra

I gave in. I admit it. I am weak when it comes to geek gear. I’ve heard many interesting things about this wee Eee portable powerhouse from other writers I know who have them. After developing a hell of a shoulder-ache after dragging my beloved Sony VAIO around last year at Dragon*Con (and fighting the dwindling battery life) an ultra-portable was definitely on the menu this year. The way I see it, if I don’t like carrying a purse in day-to-day, why would I want to carry around a huge, bulky laptop bag at conventions?

So this evening I sat down and finally ordered one of the ASUS 4g Eee PCs after much debate. (Windows Vista and a Chicklet keyboard being the deal-breakers for me on the Fujitsu U810 I was originally considering.) Unlike many people I know, I have no intention of switching the OS off of Linux, though. I love Firefox and have heard nothing but good things about OpenOffice, so I can’t see any really big reason to bother. Linux = win. Although I will note that I am extremely interested in some of the mods/hacks for the Eee, and will undoubtedly be monkeying with that almost as soon as I get it charged up and ready to roll.

When it gets here I plan to take tons of pictures, squee a bunch, and perhaps do a series about My Life with the wee Eee. I’m especially curious to see how the Eee PC works tethered to my Crackberry 8800 as a cellular modem, if only for the sake of convention access. Of course, considering a goodly chunk of my city seems to have open wireless networks, it may be more of an adventure to try to find a dead spot.

For now, I have more mods to read up on!

[Image via the eeeuser Flickr pool)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 12th, 2008 at 10:39 pm and is filed under Work, Gadgets, Geek, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.