Monthly Archives: August 2009
ASUS eeepc 1005HA-P Review
I went and grabbed the Asus eeepc 1005HA-P for my upcoming Mystery Trip. It is very light and is quite powerful for its size, though there are some down sides. I’m dual booting Windows XP with Linux Mint as my primary OS and it’s pretty impressive.
The 1005HA-PU1X-BK, as it is officially known, is small in size, lightweight and gets 10.5 hours of battery life! I considered the 1101HA, which has a larger screen and slightly longer (advertised) battery life. But all the reviews said the processor was anemic (1.33GHz) so I decided to stay away and I’m happy with my decision.
That said, this is a very solid and capable netbook. It is built and designed quite well – it looks nice and feels sturdy and refined. The screen tucks behind the keyboard the way Macs do and the body is sleek and comfortable to hold. The system is very responsive and quick compared to the eeepc 900 – the last netbook I used – especially after upgrading it to 2GB of RAM.
I run Linux Mint most of the time and it is pretty well tailored for the eeepc. The current version (Gloria, based on Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope) installs fairly smoothly but, like with much new hardware, my network drivers weren’t loaded out of the box. That was easy enough to fix with these instructions, though, and the next version (based on Karmic Koala) seems to work with the hardware just fine. There is one issue I ran into with the eeepc tray software where the wireless network would drop out fairly often, but that was solved by adding the following line to my /etc/default/eeepc-acpi.local file:
WIFI_DRIVER=”ath9k”
Overall, I am very satisfied with the laptop and am sure it will make a great companion on my trip. I’ll keep you posted on how it works out – starting September 20th.
Here’s how the 1005HA stacks up against other netbooks:
Pros – powerful, long battery, sturdy and polished construction
Cons – hard-to-use trackpad
A note on netbooks
The size of all netbooks, however, has its disadvantages. The 1005HA is best-of-breed in many aspects, though there are inherent weaknesses in this breed. The screen size, though standard to large by netbook standards, is difficult to get used to. I can only see a few lines at a time and some interactive interfaces are too big to fit the 1024×600 screen. A higher resolution would have been MUCH appreciated. The keyboard and trackpad (again, standard to large by netbook standards) are also smaller than I prefer. I’ve got big hands and they are quite squished in the small space. It’s not very comfortable to type for long periods of time. And the processor, fastest available in its class at 1.66GHz, can be a bit sluggish. I can stream TED videos, for example, but sometimes it gets jumpy.
Filipino Cuisine
I was in San Francisco – one of my favorite cities – this week and went to a Filipino restaurant out there. I had no idea what to expect from the food – I was guessing pork-based or heavy on the seafood with Spanish influences. But beyond that I wasn’t sure.
If you can read the menu you can see that it is pork and fish based with Spanish influences. But they’ve also got some stuff that I’ve never seen on a menu before. Like paella with squid ink rice and squid flakes. And grilled cuttlefish stuffed with a fresh salsa-like concoction.
Everything was excellent. My favorite was the cuttlefish. It was less chewy than squid typically is with a little more flavor. You could taste the grilledness in it and the salsa fresca was excellent. The squid ink gave the paella a slight sea taste, though not quite fishy.The squid flakes were dried tentacles and were slightly crunchy.
The Tyranny Of The Bulkhead
The worst seat on a plane, IMO, is a bulkhead seat. Those are the ones that have a white wall in front of them. There’s no place for your feet. There’s no place for your eyes. It’s confining. Planes are already confining enough without that.
I’ve actually given up a First Class bulkhead seat for a coach seat! Now granted, it was on a CRJ-700 where the First Class is fairly limited (can’t even stand up in the bathroom). And I was moving to an exit row. And my only motivation was to kick my feet out and sleep. But still, bulkheads suck!
</rant>
Being Happy vs. Feeling Happy
I was thinking about people who eat fatty or sugary foods or indulge in drugs or who steal or who act solely on impulse in general. They’re doing it because it feels good at the time or they think it will get them what they want. And in the short term it does – a burst of adrenaline or endorphins or whatever they think will make them happy at that moment. But that isn’t sustainable and they have to keep doing those things to get the feeling back or to prolong it.
Other people, and I like to think I’m in this group, have an internal happiness that is naturally sustained. For these people, what they gain from doing the negative behaviors are small in comparison to what they already have. So there’s less real value gained, especially compared to the consequences.
Why do these groups of people differ? I think it’s because one group has, at some point, taken a step back from their day-to-day lives. They’ve had the opportunity to stand outside themselves and see things a little differently. And often they tend to see things from a higher vantage point where they can get a view of the bigger picture.
In your daily life you see yourself through your own lens. When you make a choice you always know the reasons and think that they’re good reasons.
Others are rarely privy to your reasoning. They see your behaviors without the knowledge that you have come up with a good reason for it. And many times their observation is more accurate than yours.
Many times these reasons are just rationalizations for making the decisions you have made. This is called cognitive dissonance and it’s caused when you have two conflicting ideas. On the one hand, you think of yourself as being nice and generous. On the other you’ve just done something that is mean or selfish.
In fact, many times we choose first and come up with reasons later. When you’re faced this conflicting view of yourself, you come up with a reason why you would have done it. These are tough to shake off. No one likes to think they’re selfish, rude, mean, thoughtless or evil, but sometimes that’s what it is when you take away rationalizations.
You have to take that step back to see your real self sometimes. And those who are truly happy with themselves are happy with who they are in the world. These people look at themselves from the outside fairly often and adjust their behavior to match what they want. In effect they shape who they really are to match who they think they are.
meanderingwoods 