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First post with the new Eee PC

This evening on the way home from work I purchased up an ASUS Eee PC. As much as I really like the MacBook I purchased about a year and a half ago (has it already been that long?), it is a little bit too heavy to carry around all the time and I’m always worried about using it on crowded trains, because I’m afraid some careless salaryman will whack it with his briefcase or something. With the Eee PC, however, both of these things are much less of a concern. First of all, this little thing weighs less than a kilogram, so carrying it around is no trouble at all. Also, because it uses a solid-state disk instead of a hard drive, even if it does get knocked around a bit, it probably won’t break.

The downside is that the screen is tiny 800x480 and the disk is only 4 GB, which means that with Windows XP SP3 installed, there’s only a few hundred megabytes of extra space left. Still, as long as I save most of my files to the SD card (also 4 GB) in the built-in card reader, I shouldn’t need too much extra space for what I have in mind, which is mostly lightweight document editing and maybe a bit of blogging here and there.

This post is being written in Windows Live Writer, which doesn’t seem too bad so far, but I get the feeling that it won’t be too long before I start itching to get rid of Windows and install Linux on this new toy of mine. In other markets, this model is actually sold with Linux installed by default, but here in Japan, it seems to be available only with Windows XP Home.

Ordinarily, I try to refrain from purchasing electronics that have been on the market for less than six months or so (this model debuted earlier this month), but the attraction to the Eee PC was just too great to resist. I’ve been waiting for PC manufacturers to catch onto the idea that compact, inexpensive machines with just the basics would be a great thing for busy people like me, but for the longest time the market for laptops seems to have been focused on cramming as much high-end, cutting-edge technology as possible into a machine that just barely fits the definition of “portable”. In this case, however, I’ve got a machine that does what I want, in a size that suits my needs, for less than 45,000 yen (about $435 at current exchange rates). I’m sure I will run into its limitations at some point, but for the time being I’m pretty pleased with it.

Corinne McKay on translating in OmegaT

In my day-to-day translation work, I get a lot of mileage out of a number of different computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools, one of which is the very impressive OmegaT, an open source translation memory tool that has an innovative approach to the way translation tasks are handled. One of the most impressive things about OmegaT, however, is that although it has many robust features, it is developed by a team of volunteers who make it available to anyone who would like to use it absolutely free of charge.

Because the developers do not ask for any sort of compensation for their efforts, I am always pleased when I see someone write a nice review of OmegaT, like the one Corinne McKay recently wrote in her blog, Thoughts On Translation. I hope other translators who have tried OmegaT and found it useful will do the same, because the word-of-mouth marketing helps call well deserved attention to this useful application.

Welcome to the world, UltraBaby!

I see that UltraBob and his wife have added another Ultra to the family. Congratulations to all involved. Linc, welcome to the world outside mommy’s belly.

UltraBob, I figure you’ve got two, maybe three years before we learn whether your computers prefer to drink milk or orange juice with their staples.

What took me so long?

After putting it off for entirely too long, I’ve now gotten around to setting up ScribeFire and Google Gears, which will enable me to read Google Reader and do a bit of light blogging even when offline. All of these things together should make it possible to return to a normal blogging lifestyle sometime soon.

Go, O!

Although I have previously expressed mild reservations about Barack Obama’s ability to get elected president, I have been very pleased to see that his big win in Iowa has propelled him to the front of the Democratic race.

I had long assumed that Hillary Clinton would steamroll her way to the nomination, but I’m glad to see that Obama has become much more of a contender now. Not that I have anything against Hillary winning the nomination—far from it!—but given a choice between the two, I’d rather see Obama get the nomination. Although Hillary makes a lot of her experience, I suspect her electoral strategy would end up being very similar to Kerry’s in 2004—and we all know how well that worked. We had an experienced candidate last time and another in 2000, and both of them lost to someone who was widely perceived as more personable. Why not try a charismatic candidate this time?

Ringo Rocks!

I went to a Ringo meeting tonight for the first time ever and ended up winning an iPod nano in a drawing held afterward. Will I be going back there again? You bet I will!

And thanks to the presentation Kilian Muster gave at the meeting, I might even be able to figure out what I am supposed to do with this thing.

All the World’s Knowledge in One Place

I remember a conversation I had once many years ago, when I was a young journalism student, with a friend of mine who worked part-time for a local ISP. I was telling him about all the amazing things I was learning in one of my information-gathering courses, a lot of which focused on how to make profitable use of library resources. He remarked casually that libraries would one day cease to exist, because any and all valuable information would eventually find its way onto the Internet. Although I didn’t doubt even then that such a thing might happen one day, I was taken aback by the confident assertion that followed: “Heck, almost everything worthwhile already is.”

I was reminded of that conversation when I came across this article at CNN:

Use with caution: The perils of Wikipedia

In particular, this part caught my attention:

[Former American Library Association president Michael Gorman] added that Google and Wikipedia were creating a generation of “intellectual sluggards incapable of moving beyond the Internet,” with no interest in exploring non-digital resources.

I know this is true simply by the attitudes of many of the people I know and work with. If they can’t find something with a few Google searches or a quick swing by Wikipedia, it might as well not exist. It’s a shame, really, because even as remarkable as Google and Wikipedia are, they both barely amount to a drop in the bucket of human knowledge. To consider either of them anything more than the starting point for any significant information need would be foolish.

But what can be done about it? If everyone assumes that all the world’s knowledge is available in one place, how will they ever find out otherwise?

Krugman’s Back from Behind the NYT Subscription Wall

After what feels like a really long time, The New York Times is finally allowing non-subscribers to read Paul Krugman’s columns again. Naturally, I think this is a very good thing. They should have never put his work behind the subscription wall in the first place, but I’m happy to see that they’ve now learned their lesson.

Magic Bar Yuzawa

The company where I work is located in an area called Shimomaruko, which is not particularly well known for anything except the fact that my company is headquartered there, but if you ever happen to be in Shimomaruko in the evening, it is well worth your time to stop by a place called “Magic Bar Yuzawa,” which is not far from Shimomaruko Station. It’s quickly becoming my favorite bar on Planet Earth.

The End of the Rove Era

It’s about time!

Karl Rove, Adviser to President Bush, to Resign

Karl Rove, the architect of President Bush’s two national campaigns and his most prominent adviser through 6-1/2 tumultuous years in the White House, announced today that he will resign at the end of the month…

The only bad thing about this news is that now Bush will be more reliant on Cheney to do most of his critical thinking.