Over the past year, I’ve spent a LOT of time in waiting rooms. Doctor offices, dentists, dermatologists, eye-doctors, and even a couple hours every week at the hair-dresser’s. Of course, none of these appointments were for me – they were/are for my grandparents (and now just “Grandma”). Since my grandfather first started getting sick last summer, my mother and I have acted as chauffeurs. Not surprisingly, old people have a lot of appointments.
In fact, I’m writing this entry from the waiting room at my grandmother’s hair dresser’s building. My grandmother has been seeing the same stylist for 24 years – Every friday, rain or shine. She claims that she MUST go, not only to keep up appearances, but also for “morale” and sanity. So I spend each Friday morning sitting in a waiting room for about 2.5 hours.
I really like my work and I’ll often subconsciously feel “guilty” and/or “anxious” when I could be working, but I’m not. It’s not a concious thought of “oh man, I need to be working”, it’s that behind-the-scenes, not-quite-right feeling that I should be doing something productive.
I used to bring a pen and notebook and try to update todo lists, organize projects, and jot down thoughts. (Maybe that’s where my fascination with notebooks took it’s foothold… but I digress…) After a while, that got to be “old” and I still had the “unproductive” feeling. I usually had to copy the todo lists and notes to my online storage places (rememberthemilk.com, wiki, etc.), so I felt like I was duplicating my efforts.
Then, at the beginning of the year I borrowed a friends Dell 8″ netbook for some international travel. I knew I wasn’t going to be working much, but still wanted to check email. And I KNEW I didn’t want to lug around a 10 pound 17″ laptop around Scotland just to check email. The 8″ netbook was okay for reading email, but the keyboard was just too tiny for my hands – I had to hunt-n-peck because the keys were too small. Not to mention when I tried to do a little programming on the flight home, a lot of the programming characters ({,[,],},|,etc.) were all “function” keys or otherwise oddly placed.
After that, I figured I wouldn’t bother getting a netbook, since I couldn’t use it to program, and that’s one of the things I like to do on planes and hotel-room-down-time. But a few weeks later I was at Costco and saw the new Acer Aspire One 10″ model. I tried the keyborad and it was small, but big enough for touch typing. Plus, a quick search for linux “support” showed that it worked great with ubuntu, right out of the box.
I was originally going to dual-boot the netbook with XP and ubuntu, but after I messed up the disk partitioning during ubuntu install, I hosed XP. Now it’s a linux/ubuntu laptop only – and I’m glad. It’s great. I don’t miss XP at all, and ubuntu’s netbook remix has been rock solid. The singular complaint/nuisance is that the volume just isn’t there like it was with XP. I’ve installed all kinds of tweaks for adjusting volume, but it just won’t go loud. O-well.
So now, while sitting in waiting rooms, I can work on my netbook. It’s small enough that I don’t have any issues carrying it. And with 3G, the internet is fast enough to be not annoying. If you travel a lot, or even a little, and don’t want/need to carry a huge laptop around, I highly recommend getting one.