Netbooking

So I bought a netbook. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a year or so, and the recent changes in my circumstances meant I could indulge myself. As I usually do, I dwelled on this for weeks, trying out different models, experimenting, researching … my mothers have a Dell Mini 10, which I’ve used and liked. When the Dells went on sale after Christmas I thought I’d made my choice.

But the Dells were sold out, so I went shopping, and ended up with a Compaq Mini 110, only because the store I went to had really fantastic customer service and the sales guy figured out that I was willing to trade some features for a larger keyboard. That turned out to be crucial. I am large, and my hands are big and clumsy; a tiny keyboard would not work for me. Had he not noted that, I might not be so happy. Thank you, Mike at Staples Business Depot.

This is why my previous experimentation with subnotebooks failed. About 10 years ago, I bought a Toshiba Libretto from a pawn shop. It seemed like a good idea at the time: a paperback-sized minicomputer, running Windows CE, that I could use in my work as a reporter and writer. But it was useless. I couldn’t type on it. It couldn’t transfer files easily (this is pre-USB key, folks … pre-CD burner, too, for that matter). Its operating system was a joke. It couldn’t go online. After a few weeks, I put it down somewhere. I couldn’t tell you where it is now.

Years later, I would buy a Compaq EVO laptop, second-hand, a weird little machine with a docking station. Undocked, it’s an inch thick, a truly compact laptop running Windows 2000. It still runs. It was my primary computer for a couple of years, and got me through some times when I really needed to be portable.

As I write this on my Compaq Presario desktop, my new Compaq netbook is sitting on top of my closed Compaq laptop. We’re a three-Compaq family now, with Papa Bear, Mama Bear and Baby bear. Years of use, years of good performance. I can’t argue with that. Yeah, my Mac is here to the left, and I’ll be going back over there once I’m done this. And I’m still dead set on buying that 27-inch iMac in 2010, or, at the very least, a MacBook Pro.

The Compaq netbook:

• Pros: Fast, light and simple. Starts up quickly. Has a 160-gig hard drive, a 1.6-ghz Atom processor with a gig of RAM (I plan to upgrade that to 2 gigs this week) and a matte monitor (more important for me than for you). Keyboard is close to regular size. Holds a charge for about three hours of heavy use, including watching the digital edition of Star Trek included on the DVD release. Crystal-clear video display. Finds other networks effortlessly, and connects on its own. Charges really quickly when plugged in.
• Cons: Half-sized shift key on the left, which is where I shift, and a weird placement of the backslash near the return key, meaning a lot of typos. The casing feels cheap and brittle, and the shiny finish holds every single fingerprint. The touchpad doesn’t always do what you want it to, and the placement of the buttons on the side is strange and awkward. There’s a single audio port for both headphones and a microphone. Overall audio quality is poor.

A note: There’s no Bluetooth on this thing. At first I was a bit ticked, but then I remembered that I have Bluetooth on my two desktop computers and I’ve never actually used it. You know what I miss? IR ports. My old phone and my old laptop used to swap photos via infrared. A great system.

For now, I’m loving the netbook. I’m a journalist; I need that quick, easy access to the web, to word processing, to photos. I used it to take notes at a meeting the other night, and just finished editing a short video on it — with its built-in card reader, no less — and it’s firing on all cylinders. The next step is to test audio recording and editing. I’m still downloading software (VLC, Audacity, iTunes, Ad-Aware, Chrome, OpenOffice) to it in stages.

It’s a real wonder tool. It may not last; I have concerns about the build quality. But really, it’s a $260 computer; worst-case scenario, I give it to one of the kids, and it’s used to visit Littlest Pet Shop Online.

Wait, that’s what happened to the Libretto. I remember now. It became someone’s Tetris machine, kind of an early Nintendo DS, but with a keyboard, and probably covered in Doritos dust. It disappointed a whole new generation. And then it was donated to the Dharma Initiative.

Failed Futurists: Predictions Gone Wrong

Here’s a list of famous technological predictions that got things horribly, horribly wrong. One of these predictions is fake. I know because I made it up.

• “The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys,” Sir William Preece, chief engineer at the British Post Office, 1878.
• “Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?” H.M. Warner, Warner Bros., 1927.
• “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers,” Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.
• “Television won’t be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night,” Darryl Zanuck, 20th Century Fox, 1946.
• “The world potential market for copying machines is 5,000 at most,” IBM executives to the eventual founders of Xerox, 1959.
• “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home,” Ken Olsen, founder of mainframe-producer Digital Equipment Corp., 1977.
• “People won’t want to play these electronic games for more than a week, not once we start selling pinball machines for the home,” Gus Bally, Arcade Inc., 1979.
• “No one will need more than 637 kb of memory for a personal computer—640K ought to be enough for anybody,” Bill Gates, Microsoft, 1981.
• “Next Christmas the iPod will be dead, finished, gone, kaput,” Sir Alan Sugar, British entrepreneur, 2005.
• “I’d say three pounds of bacon will be enough for breakfast.” Weathereye, 2009

I can remember the first time I used a personal computer. It was a Commodore Pet that was brought to my school when I was about 10 or 11. At that point, I had played Pong and Night Driver in a video arcade, and was fascinated. A year later, a friend got the Atari 2600, and before long the Tron movie opened the world of computers up to our young imaginations.

My kids are baffled by the concept that we didn’t have video games when we were young. “That’s not all,” I tell them. “If you wanted to watch a movie, you had to go to the theatre or wait til it came on TV. And we only had two channels.”

As a young sci-fi geek with a big imagination, I had a lot of ideas when I was younger. A friend and I formed a small software startup in 1984, writing games for the VIC 20, and we had an idea to somehow create comic books that would be sold on cassette tape and “played” on the VIC. Our plan was to spin that off into books, magazines and maybe even television and radio shows. Sadly, the VIC 20 does not lend itself to large-scale technological development, and once I discovered the guitar that was pretty much it for our idea.

What might have been …

The changes in technology within my lifetime — since the 1960s — are immense. The changes over the course of the past 120 years are staggering. Our world has changed more since 1890 than it did in the millions of years of human presence before that. I don’t blame those people quoted above for being unable to see outside their narrow window. None of us did. I’m still marvelling at fax machines even as I read about the Apple tablet. Now, though, we are suitable acclimatized to rapid change that we can predict, or create, the future, and new developments are less of a surprise. If I’m writing on one of those Tom Cruise Minority Report floating holo-computer thingies in a couple of years, I will probably not be surprised.

Anyway, the tech predictions I listed above come from a very good Wall Street Journal article you can read here.

Mac & Me: Two Decades Later

I’m actually a year late. Last year was the 20th anniversary of a pretty major moment in my life: the day I first used a Macintosh computer.

I didn’t realize how big the moment was at the time, because I was not the gadgety techy Internetty geek you know and love today. I was a journalism student at a Canadian college. We were learning the craft the old-fashioned way, using phototypesetters and PMT cameras to build our weekly newspaper. Pagination was a fairly new concept at the time, and we had heard about PageMaker, but none of us had ever used it. And then the Macs showed up. Three of them, those classic little boxes with the tiny black-and-white screens … man, these things were cool.

It’s easy to forget how revolutionary the Macintosh was. My computing experience had been limited to writing games in BASIC on Commodore PETs and on my first home machine, a VIC-20. I had tinkered with an IBM XT, but I never cared much for DOS and, to be honest, during the mid-to-late 80s I was less interested in computers and more interested in getting my hair just right and cruising around in a K-Car. I was a very cool guy.

The Mac was something new. It had a mouse; it wasn’t the first computer to use one, but it was the first to make it work well. It had a GUI, a classic and simple design that set the standard we still use today, whether we’re on Vista, Linux or OSX. And it sure speeded up our production process. Within weeks, the phototypesetting machine had a dust cover on it, and once we got our hands on a scanner that was it for the PMT camera.

But what I liked most about that Mac was its MacDraw and MacPaint software. I was, back then, still an avid artist and cartoonist, and the ability to produce art on-screen — in black and white, of course — was revolutionary for me. (I even considered dumping J-school for a career in graphic design, for about five minutes.)

Looking back, I can see the foundations of most of my interests — personal and professional — in those funny-looking little beige computers. Art, music, journalism, podcasting, web design … all the things I do for fun and money are possible because of what Apple came up with all those years ago. I knew those Macs were something special that first day, and I was right.

Over the years, I would own several of my own, although it has now been five years since I started using Windows at home. Not for much longer, though.

We’re talking about an overhaul of our home computing setup. My kids are old enough now for their own computers, and we’re looking for the right fit. We already have computers all over the place, but a couple of them are getting pretty old and aren’t much good for anything other than a free chess game I downloaded in 1997.

This got me thinking about going back to Mac, putting at least one Mac in the house, on our network.

I admit this is probably more for me than for the kids; they aren’t fussy. They just want to play those online flash games and type up lists of reasons why my cooking sucks. But a new Mac would greatly increase my own productivity. Honest.

Bringing a Mac back into the house would make me pretty happy. It’s just a matter of finding the right one. Wait, what’s this?

Today’s Morons: PC World Staffers

I have never shopped at PC World, because the electronics chain is in England and I am not. But I am a gadgety guy, and I shop in a lot of similar stores, and I know what it can be like. Techie nerds who work in techie stores sometimes display a kind of contempt for those of us who do not know as much as they do about things with a lot of initials, like ADSL, DRAM, BIOS and PMU. It’s all GIGO to me.

Here’s a real conversation I had in 1995, when I decided to try out this “Internet” thing and went to the storefront operation run by the only Internet Service Provider in town.

• Me: “I’d like to get the Internet running on my computer at home.”
• Sales Dork: “Great! Blah blah blah $16.99 a month for X amount of minutes, here’s the floppy disk that’ll install it all. Just put it in your PC and away you go!”
• Me: “I’m on Mac.”
• Sales Dork: “Oooh, Mac, yeah, I’m not sure if Macs can go on the Internet …”
• Sales Dork Supervisor: “Sure they can! I’ll take over from here. We can offer you the same Internet package as our PC users, sir.”
• Me: “Great!”
• Sales Dork Supervisor: “But we don’t have the setup software available. No problem, though. All you have to do is go to our FTP site and download it.”
• Me: “Uh, how do I get to the FTP site if I don’t have Internet access?”
• Sales Dork Supervisor: “Just go to the FTP site and download it.”
• Me: “Like I said, how would I do that? How would I go to the FTP site to get the software I need to go online if I can’t get online in the first place?”
• Sales Dork Supervisor, after a long pause: “I guess … uh … go to the FTP?”

Luckily, I had a friend who had a friend who could fix me up, and I was up and running. And going online with a Mac — in the days when you couldn’t cross-platform things like floppies, CD-ROMS, peripherals and even websites, in some cases — was no easy task. I spent years dealing with small-town computer sales dorks … by the time things stabilized, I had somehow ended up as a Windows user anyway. Go figure.

I had a point here. Oh, yeah: PC World morons in England have been caught using a Facebook group to insult their customers. This seems to fit with the way PC World staffers have been described in the past. “Our chain has been repeatedly criticized for poor service, and customers are leaving, and retail in general is suffering, and electronic retailing in particular is hurting, and jobs are being lost … let’s tell the people who keep trying to give us money that they’re annoying losers.”

Until today, the only things I know about PC World came from the occasional remark made by some of my British associates, who will often mention the chain as being particularly poor when it comes to decent service. Also, I used Google to learn more. Now, though, as I read about this Facebookery gone wrong, I have to shake my head. Again and again, people land here at Today’s Moron by forgetting that what they do online can actually be read by other people. For computer-industry “professionals” to make that mistake points to a bigger problem.

Here’s my solution for PC World: Don’t just hire the first dink who shows up. Screen your candidates. Train them. Treat them well. And make sure they know that they’re there to take that money from people who want to spend it. Pissing customers off is no way to save a business. Letting your staff get away with it makes them think they can keep doing it online.

Here’s my solution for PC World workers: Some customers will be assholes. They will be rude. They will not know what they want, or have a limited understanding of what they’re asking for. You will not like this. Too bad. They’re there to give you money, and you should do whatever they want.

Here’s my solution for customers: If you get even the slightest taste of bad service, walk away. I’ve done it. It works. Just this week, I spent 15 minutes in line at the pharmacy while the one cashier on duty dawdled. I was running late, and couldn’t wait any longer, so I turned, left my purchases on a vacant checkout, and walked out. A manager chased me down, opened a till, processed my purchase and treated me like gold. That’s class.

I’ll bet you he didn’t complain about me on Facebook afterwards, either.

The Great Video Game Divide

I don’t know much about video games. This became clear when I listened to the latest episode of Nerd Hurdles, which was all about video games. Actually, it’s made clear all the time when I try to play Lego Batman with my kid, who groans and moans when I don’t understand what “hit right, triangle, triangle, square, Dad!” means.

By rights, I should love video games. I’m from the first video game generation. When I was a kid, pinball arcades started bringing in the first wave of coin-operated video games: Night Driver, Pong, Gunfighter … simply, basic games that caught my attention. Later, a friend received an Atari 2600; that was a blast. I had a VIC-20, a cousin had ColecoVision, and I spent a lot of time and a lot of money in arcades during those shiny, glorious early 80s, playing Tron, Vanguard, Gorf, Pac-Man, Pole Position …

But by the mid-80s, I had moved on to other interests, and I missed the so-called collapse of the home console industry, the rise of Nintendo and the spread of home gaming. It wasn’t until I bought my oldest son a Sega Genesis in 1993 that I realized how huge things had gotten. I remember playing NHL 94 on it and marvelling at the “realistic” graphics. Later, someone gave me Wolfenstein 3D for my Mac LC275, and I played it a lot while waiting for Mosaic to load early WWW pages.

Since then, though, I’ve never really played video games. I worked through HalfLife on the PC over the course of a year, and I did buy the Sims, although I lost interest fairly quickly. Now and then I’ll play something with the kids, and I’ll confess I’ve found the original Wolfenstein 3D online, and I’ve been playing that again.

I suspect my age has something to do with it. People under 35 grew up with video games everywhere. They were never new to them. People even younger think that Sega Genesis is “old.” But I was right at that age to take advantage of the early rise, then lose interest when things got shitty in the mid 80s. Remember Dragon’s Lair? All the hype about that? I think that was the end of video games for me.

No, I think the fact that I entered my peak rockin’ years — 16 to 24 — right as the gaming industry was in a slump was the factor. This is why I own more guitars than I do game controllers, and why I suck at Tetris. By the time the industry flared back up again, I was too old to learn new tricks. And while I was long-haired and wild, ignoring computers and gaming, a lot of guys stuck with it. They’re the ones making games now, or working in software development, or inventing BlackBerries. I’ll bet they’re still jealous of me.

Today’s Moron: Whoever Fixed This Computer

I had some time on my hands, so I decided to take a look at the old computer in my 10-year-old son’s room. It’s ancient, an old Windows 98 from Compaq, nothing fancy, a practical machine in its day, but not really used much since about 2005. My boy has it available, but rarely touches it, as it isn’t plugged into the Internet and has the graphics capability of an old Atari. He is unimpressed.

He told me a couple of weeks ago that it wasn’t working. I suspected at the time that this had more to do with his habit of turning off the power bar to shut it down — a big no-no he just ignores — and less to do with the age of the machine. All it’s really used for is chess, Wolfenstein 3D and a few other freeware games he likes, along with typing out swear words in 48-point Arial when he thinks I don’t notice.

So I hauled it down to the workbench tonight. You will note my amazing manly workbench in the first photo above. You won’t see many tools; they’re out in the garage now, as spring has more or less sprung. But the bench is what the kids call “Daddy’s Dollar Store,” where you go if you need batteries, tape of any kind, a flashlight or those things you put on your car to make deer get out of the way on the road at night. There’s also a Hello Kitty MP3 player hanging around.

The first step was easy. The screws holding the side panels to the tower were missing, and the two panels popped right off. Right away, I noticed dust: lots of dust. Enough to weave a wig. The second thing I noticed was my first surprise: long strips of electrical tape holding the motherboard to the case.

What the … ?

After gently cleaning the dust with a cloth and some compressed air, I took a closer look at that electrical tape. It was wrapped around the top of the motherboard, big sloppy X-shaped Z-grade MacGuyvers. I’m no handyman, not really, but this was embarassing. So I peeled off the tape.

That’s when I found my second surprise: the motherboard was being propped up from below. By broken clothespins. Seriously. Wedged in under the motherboard, which was not attached to the case in any way, were several clothespins, propping it up so the tape could do its work. You’ll see a bit of tape in this photo, along with the clothespins:

I pulled them out. The tape gave way, and the motherboard flopped to one side. And I discovered my third surprise: in addition to the clothespins, there was something else holding the motherboard in place: rocks. Small, jagged rocks, like something from a driveway or a gravel path, were jammed in wherever the modem, sound card and graphics card outputs met the case. Now I understood why the whole thing seemed so shaky whenever I plugged in the mouse after cleaning it.

I inherited this computer, and it was old then. Somewhere along the line, in its strange, sad existence, it was repaired by someone with zero knowledge of computers, electronics, repairs, or basic common sense.

So I re-installed the motherboard, correctly, and hooked the whole thing back up in my son’s room. He was happy to see it working again, and promptly started playing BattleTanks on it. He complained that he needs a flatscreen monitor for it — never mind the Windows 98; he’ll accept that if he can get an LCD monitor — but he was happy to have a computer in his room again.

For about 15 minutes. Then he calmly threw the switch on the power bar, flopped onto his bed, and fired up his Nintendo DS.

Maybe I’ll turn that old computer into a music server.

And the monitor into a fish tank.