Blech, horrible handling

The gravel roads here were completely unplowed and horribly rutted, the air temp was 36 degrees so the snow was essentially grease. There were stretches where I couldn't keep the bike upright at all, at any speed. This was really a first for me, I haven't seen anything quite like these conditions before. At first I was cursing the new studded tires, but I think that may have been unfair. It's unclear that even the old ones would have done any better on these conditions. I think I'd better reserve judgment until later in the season.

It's also possible I should lower my tire pressure, it's still up at 80 PSI. It's conditions like this that make me think maybe I should have a 26" junker mountain bike with big fat knobbies on it though.

New laptop ordered

I don't use laptops much. It's mainly because, honestly, they're too damn big. I might use one around the house but they are big, heavy, and hot. As a result, the one I have, bought for something like $2200 5 years ago, has been used probably a grand total of 20 days by me, though it's been my daughter's primary machine for the last year or so.

However, I do have a few uses for them. I'm in charge of taking notes for a committee that I'm on, for instance, and that goes a lot better if I have a laptop (I send the notes out to the membership 5 minutes after getting back from the meeting, instead of getting around to transcribing my handwritten notes 3 weeks later).

I'd also like something to take to conventions; it's starting to look like I might someday be able to start attending conventions again that happen between November and April (tax busy season), but I'd need a laptop to take with me in case of emergency at work.

It IS nice to have one at home in case something at work melts down and I have to work late, because my main machine is in the bedroom and that way I don't have to bother a slumbering spouse.

Anyway, today I ordered an MSI Wind netbook. 2.3 pounds, 10" 1024x600 screen, apparently decent keyboard (as one reviewer said, crap compared to an Apple laptop, but wonderful compared to an EEE PC), 1GB RAM, 120G HD, very small, $299 after rebate. Honestly, I'm amazed at what you can get for a few hundred bucks these days.

Apparently the Wind is super easy to install OSX on, if you're into that. I'd like to play with OSX but Apple won't license it to run on other hardware, and IMO that means that they're not selling what I want. Besides, if I wanted to run an OS that I'd have to buy/learn all new software for, Linux works great for that. I don't doubt that I'll be dual-booting Ubuntu on it. Heck, for the kinds of things I want to do on a laptop, I may very well wind up with Ubuntu as the main machine and just boot WinXP in a VM if I need it for something.

The competition was the EEE and the Lenovo. The EEE loses big here; it had really nothing going for it over the MSI and was $100+ more. The Lenovo had an ExpressCard slot, which was tempting, but less drive space and half the RAM at $130 more. I don't need an ExpressCard really, I just like expandability. But given that I'd probably never use it, I decided to just skip it. And the MSI has been very well reviewed by many people.