Chris Schmidt's Journal

I have a 5:45AM flight to Grand Cayman Island, where I will be until Sunday. I'll be scuba diving, and relaxing on the beach, and working on my OpenStreetMap map of Grand Cayman.

It's also going to be my first EeePC-only trip, but I think it's going to be okay.

EeePC has really nice little speakers. It appears as if I'm going to have the office to myself for most of the day today, so I'm using it to play music from last.fm (which I've never used before). It's quite nice to have a little laptop with all the 'non-work' things on it, like IRC, friends page, music, so that it doesn't distract quite so much from working.

Another benefit of the eee that I hadn't considered explicitly early on is that it's *quiet*. When I turn my computer on first thing in the morning, I'm usually prepared to flinch at the noise it makes -- I didn't actually realize this until this morning, when I flinched, and the noise never came.

The Macbook doesn't mind making noise. The optical drive 'is there a disk in me?' check is the most annoying noise, the startup 'boing' a close second -- and neither easy to 'mute', as far as I'm aware. (The latter won't happen if the sound is off on the laptop when it gets shut down, but that doesn't really count in my mind.)

It was so nice to turn the computer on this morning and hear... nothing.

The product of alcohol combined with a cute little laptop:



(Drawn with 'kolourpaint' on the eee by Mako/Mika at Grendel's tonight.)

(I still love the eee.)

Went out to Johnny D's this morning for breakfast with mako/mika/jgay/others. Showed off the new toy (EeePC), and talked about OpenStreetMap a bit. Found that the most recent cool OSM demo (here) is not nearly as effective on the Eee as it is on a desktop ;) (Screen is too small, so you can't show the full image at the same time.) Still, an effective display.

Also talked about licensing restrictions on Geodata, differences between US + UK (in a phrase: Database Protection), some of the status of OSM, how 'free' the editors are, etc.

Also, got to listen to the jazzy dude playing pop hits in Jazzy form.

Overall, a nice start to my weekend.