Thursday, September 26, 2013

Life with the Chromebook

Just recently I purchased a used Acer C-7 Chromebook, and the first thing I did was upgrade the 320GB hard drive with a 32GB SSD.

The upgrade only had one issue: the new drive is slightly bigger than the old one. I made it fit.

The installation of Chrome OS went without a hitch. Everything went exactly as it should have.

The Chromebook itself is... Boring. Seriously.

Everything does exactly what it's supposed to.  All the apps imported from my Google Chrome, so there was no more setup than logging in. It powers up, shuts down, hibernates. The touch pad is a little weird, but very versatile once you get used to it.

Battery life is a little disappointing at 4 hours, but I was aware of that when I bought this model. I understand the Samsung does better.

I've only run into one thing that I use on a regular basis that it can't handle.  Microsoft Silverlight.

Actually, that's not bad.

I think the Chromebook does exactly what it set out to do:  bring the web to the desktop simply and reliably.  And as a result I've taken the drastic step of powering my laptop down and putting it on a shelf.  Let's see how long it stays off.

Saturday, April 20, 2013

Patience

"The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."

We're all familiar with that quote, and while it's a pretty decent argument for taking that first step, it doesn't really address the step after that, and the thousands to follow.

I started blogging in 2003, I think.  I started on Wordpress and learned a lot playing around with PHP and embeddable code.  In October of 2005 I added  Google Adsense code.

Blogging is something that you have to want to do, or get paid to do.  You have to have the desire to share your opinion or knowledge with other people, and you can't be disappointed when you don't have thousands coming to your site.

Looking at my Adsense stats, I think it's safe to say I've achieved that.  As of today I have $95.00 in my account and I've never received a payout, having never hit the $100 limit.

I lost interest.  What I was saying was mostly for my friends so I constructed a complex internal system where technology related stuff went to Google+, jokes went to Facebook, and more inflammatory stuff went on the blog.

Eventually I stopped posting to the blog, because frankly I didn't care to be inflammatory any more.  I had bigger, more personal fish to fry.  (I have a theory on activism that I may expand on later) And I've sort of given up on Facebook.  The occasional post I miss from friends and acquaintances usually isn't important enough to worry about, and the important ones I hear about anyway.  Sorry to be a social media leach y'all.

And now Google is trying to integrate more of their services.  My blogger profile is associated with my G+ profile, and posts and comments can cross-post.  That makes it harder to "segregate" the parts of my personality, and easier to reach more eyes.

So why is this called "Patience?"  Because between Google and I, we've been waiting for $100 to change hands for almost 8 years.  Google profits were down to only $3.35bn this year, so I'd better get it while I still can.