Sunday, March 07, 2004

Laptopping it


Giving the ol' laptop a whirl for awhile. Heading back to my Dad's house to clean it out and put it up for sale - about a 10 hour drive, so at the moment am letting the wife drive while I tap away to keep myself amused (I hate riding). Now if I just had a Bluetooth phone and a bluetooh enabled laptop (actually I think I can buy some kind of bluetooth dongle for my laptop for cheap), i could even be cruising the Net! Oh well.... Decided to fire up bloggar which is a very handy offline tool that allows one to compose blog material offline and then easily post it to one's blog - free program and it can be found at Bloggar. Fortunately I have one album on this laptop - Oystein Sevag's Global House. Just unplug my earbuds from my little Otis audiobook player and plug them into the laptop and high quality tunes! Nice background music - New Age music is good for that.

Stopped for a moment at at Flying J truck stop to grab some grub off the buffett. Didn't have time to try out the $1.95/hr. wi-fi access, although I did fire up the laptop before leaving the parking lot and it grabbed the signal and sent me to a browser screen where I could pay up to get online, but didn't have the time, so...... Don't think Janet wanted to sit in the parking lot waiting on me while I endulged in such important work.

Saw a very cool wide screen (oxymoron?) 10.25" Sony laptop today at CompUSA.. Had built in web cam, gorgeous, highly reflective screen - 40 gig HD, 512mb RAM, wifi 802.11G built in - not sure of the weight but had to be under 3 lbs - slick. Just past $2000 mark. Then stumbled over to gasp and pee my pants over a 23" Apple active matrix LCD screen - good god was that gorgeous! A mere $1999. After seeing that , it made you want to buy a Mac on the spot! Off to the Handhelds - played with a Palm Tungsten T3 for awhile - liked it - slides open to reveal large screen - beautiful screen, seemed very fast. Wanted to check out the new Toshiba 850 with the 640x480 screen, but unfortunately someone had screwed with it and the screen wasn't functioning correctly. Built-in wifi though and also took CF I/II cards which means I could use my microdrive cards in it. Sure wish that screen had been working!

Meanwhile the little '92 Accord is humming along I-65 at a nice 75mph and still getting 30+mpg. Has been a very reliable car since buying it some 60K milies ago. And that's the news of the day - bet you can certainly rest peacefully now. :)