Cloudbook, You Will Be Missed

My adventure with the cloudbook ended some time between 7:00 and 8:00am today. It was during that hour that I was attending an early morning meeting - and enjoying some pancakes - that my car was broken into as I sat in local diner attending a breakfast meeting.

I didn't think anything was amiss until I opened the driver's side door to get in and could see out the other window like it wasn't there. That's because it was in tiny pieces all over the seat and parking lot.

Instant inventory told me that they had grabbed my vintage red Dreamforce bag which had been sitting on the front seat (not smart, I know, but I wasn't thinking about car prowlers at 7 in the morning). In my bag was my Cr-48, a digital camera, a check book and my digital voice recorder. The thief didn't disturb anything else.

As I called the police to report the theft a waitress at the diner explained that I was the fourth or fifth smash-and-grab victim in the last two weeks. So someone had figured out that people with laptops like to have breakfast at this particular diner. It's a smart bet, as Beaverton is alternately known as the "Silicone Forest" because of the close proximity of microchip fabrication facilities.

The irony in all this is that the thief got their hands on a laptop that they could have had for free. That, and unless they went out and bought a power converter, the laptop would be dead in a few hours of use. I didn't have the cloudbook's converter with me.

UPDATE: The red Dreamforce bag was found a few miles away, dumped and cleaned out of all electronics.

Week 2.5 in Review: a stickerectomy is performed and part of my brain has a party

Rest In Peace, cool Chrome sticker.

General Notes
I had intended this to be Week 2 In Review but, well, things got busy. That, and there just wasn't much to write about.

It's been almost three weeks of running Google OS and this is now my computer for 97.3% of the things I do on the internet. That, by the way, is a rough estimate. The only thing I can't use the CloudBook for is getting content off my camera and into the cloud. But, thanks to a post over at the Google Chrome Browser blog, I'll be trying their work-around this weekend.

Music in the Clouds

As I've explained in last week's summation post, working on a three-year-old laptop is, in many ways, like using this CloudBook. Similar, but not the same. My old Vaio is bigger. It's heavier. It doesn't hold a charge. It's much, much slower. Oh yeah, and it has a hard drive.

Being a freelance writer - which means a microscopic budget - and owning such an old computer has meant some creative solutions to common computing problems. In fact, it is the road to cheap and practical solutions that has led me to the clouds. It has also meant that it has been a natural shift to this new CloudBook.

Cloud Computing and the CloudBook: the news of week one in review

Because of the "real" work that needed to get done this week, I didn't get a chance to document my first week of CloudBook evaluation as well as an amateur geek should have. With all the writing I was doing, I didn't get a chance to post any processing data, app evaluations, reviews, or opinions about whether Chrome should "be killed" or cries of alarm as information moves away from my computer. I left that for others to do. 

I do have one thing to report: as a professional writer and future cloud app consultant/admin the CloudBook works.

Week One in Review: The CloudBook

Technically, my Chrome OS laptop came a week ago yesterday. Yet I didn't actually start using my CloudBook until the day after I received it. As much as I wanted to pull that sucker out of the box and start putting it through its paces, in a rare act of self-control I followed the instructions to the letter and waited for the battery to fully charge before using it. I didn't want to take an opportunity like this for granted. Friday was the first full day of CloudBook usage, and by executive decree, I'm picking Friday as my CloudBook's anniversary day.

Like many of life's blessings, my CloudBook couldn't have arrived at a more inconvenient time.

Battery Torture Test

If your definition of  cloud includes wireless, then I went "pure" cloud Saturday morning in a very non-scientific test to see how long the Cr-48 CloudBook could go without charging. As you can see from the photos on my very first post, the battery is almost half the size of this tiny laptop and probably makes up about half its weight as well. So the curious lets-poke-it-with-a-stick kid in me decided to test its charge longevity.

After all, Google did insist that I "kick the tires."

Sharp as a Marble, That's Me

My ChromeOS laptop is smarter than me.

I just figured out, after about 12 hours of use, that it wasn't simply lack of oxygen; this laptop's screen brightens and dims depending on the amount of light the camera is picking up. Oh yeah. The little lens at the top of the screen is a light sensor when it's not taking pictures of my gorgeous self.

Too bad it doesn't have a lit keyboard that activates at the same time the screen dims. That would keep words like laptop from turning into ;a[tp[ (try typing in the dark - it happens!).

- Captain B.