For most of 2012 I was kept pretty busy with mending fences (quite often) and minor automotive repairs (okay, once) and otherwise maintaining house and home while we lived in Great Falls, Montana. Yes, I was a domestic technician, though from September of last year to February of this year I was employed as a Teacher Aide for Great Falls Public Schools at my kids' elementary school. With Mrs. Astro Chicken being a professional in the retail sector and being exploited in the wonderful world of overworked and underpaid salary employees, work, home and children kept me fairly busy, not to mention the hurried and scrambled mess of moving back to Spokane, Washington to keep her employment with the company. Since moving back and not being employed as of yet, I'm finding myself with an abundance of free time.
So what's the deal? I like to write. I'm not too bad at it. Sometimes I think I'm actually pretty good, occasionally, those times when I feel inspired and make the effort to fire up NeoOffice or open a browser and direct it to Blogger. Yeah, I've been a bit lazy since the move back. I felt like my back and knees were going to go on strike for a while, but that shouldn't have stopped me from writing. It's a simple thing really, just a few clicks of the mouse, or lately, taps on a screen. Since no one needs to be subjected to a deep self analysis by me, I'm choosing to blame my tablet.
The newest computer I have regular access to, I mean a traditional personal computer, is a 1.42GHz G4 Mac Mini. Yep, we bought that baby refurbed direct from Apple just before they were switching to Intel. Don't even get me started down that road. It's a bumpy one full of potholes filled with diminishing Apple fandom, perhaps the subject of a future blog post, if I get around to it. Anyway, as much as I like Safari, and it is a great browser, version 4.1.3 isn't really all that well equipped for modern web surfing. Also, the kids are accustomed to playing on various learning websites they discover at school, so it was either use my G3 iBook with it's nice but limited 800 x 600 display and chain it to the wall with a power supply or find another alternative. Enter the tablet.
Last year I considered myself fortunate enough to finally get an Android tablet. Since I don't have a smartphone and wanted something that would kind of fit the same bill yet be a little bigger, I figured the 7 inch display would work really well, and it has. But I'm not a touchscreen person, at least not when it comes to typing. Oh, I can fling tweets like flapjacks off a griddle, but when it comes to really formulating thoughts into words, especially where more than 140 characters are allowed, I likes me a keyboard. Don't get me wrong, I actually find myself trying to drag web pages using the mouse without the scroll bars, giving the page content a nice light blue highlight, but still, at heart, I miss my trackball most of the time.
The Blogger app for Android actually works really well for me, when I've used it, but there's something about typing on a touchscreen, for me, akin to driving over a spike strip. It just isn't conducive to helping me retain my train of thought and, when that train derails, no amount of The Fugitive train jumping is going to help that conversation get back to where it was originally headed. I love using my tablet for everything from checking email and tweeting to reading the news and watching Netflix and anything between, but I just need a tactile response that tells me I actually pushed a key. It's similar to using the manual shifting feature on my wife's car. I can bump the gears up or down, but it's just not the same as working the clutch and getting the satisfying feel of a manual transmission.
Do I ask for spousal permission to use some tax refund money and buy a new computer? That would certainly help with my recent fondness of playing the DayZ mod for Arma II on my son's PC, but do I really need a new computer? I'm really trying to employ the KISS principal as much as possible. I've got my Raspberry Pi and a hip deep pile of retro-computing history to keep me satisfied with trips down nerd-stalgia lane, and I wouldn't mind a newer PC for doing some A/V projects I have in mind, but I really only need a computer that can handle composing email and writing, whether it be for my blog or more creative projects.
So what to do? My tablet functions really well for watching Netflix and Youtube, shopping and casual web surfing. As appealing as a new notebook sounds, it turns out my 366MHz Indigo iBook G3 with its 800 x 600 display, Airport card and an impressive 320MB of RAM running Mac OS X 10.4 actually works really well with Blogger and Appleworks 6, and while I could easily purchase a descent notebook for under $500, I can get a new battery from OtherWorld Computing for under $60. Keep it simple, stupid...
