April 4, 2009 – Prattling Before the Pratfall

I love you, man!

Greetings from Albania — I mean Albany! The WiFi service here at the Holiday Inn is pretty good, and I’m glad I brought the new Acer netbook.

Dennis and I are in New York’s capitol for a comic book show. It’s a nerd male bonding weekend! I wouldn’t be here except I had to stop training for the Boston Marathon because of my Achilles tendon problem.

On the way here Dennis had a neat surprise. A recording of us on the college radio station way back in 1976. You can count on me blogging that in the future.

Aspiring Netbook

I don’t own an iPod, nor do I have satellite radio, but I’m otherwise technologically up to date. For $250 at BJ’s Wholesale Warehouse, I bought an Acer Aspire One netbook, running XP Home with 1 GB of memory and a 160 GB drive.

I’m very impressed. Everything runs smoothly, including video that sputtered a bit on the SSD version of the Aspire One that I tried last week. This post was done entirely on the netbook, except shooting the video clips; which, come to think of it, I might have been able to do with the built-in Webcam and a mirror!

Here are some examples of video playback. First, from this page on my blog.

[MEDIA=32]

One of the things I wanted to do with the Acer Aspire One was manage my Netflix queue for the Roku Media Player, but Watch Instantly also plays fine on the netbook. Here’s a bit of Supersize Me on Netflix Watch Instantly.

[MEDIA=33]