Graves On SOHO Technology

Back in January I made a trip to Fresno where I found that the newly renovated airport took a decidedly 1980′s approach to publicly available AC power. That is, they basically didn’t provide any beyond the occasional outlet to allow someone to polish the floors.

A recent trip to Knoxville TN presents a splendid contrast. Arriving at Knoxville’s McGhee Tyson airport I found a new-ish facility that had taken a more enlightened approach to providing travelers with power for their gadgetry…they had built it into otherwise normal seating.

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Recently, my parents decided to pay us a visit. It was their way to escape the Canadian winter for a short while, and see how their most distant son lives. Amongst the many things that we did was they were here was to tour the The Doc Porter Museum of Telephone History.  It was something that I had been meaning to do ever since I learned of its location some years ago.

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[Begin music: Beach Boys, “I Get Around”]

Recent projects have had me in Chicago, Milwaukee, Washington DC and Nashville. Suffice it to say that over the past few months I’ve rented cars on several occasions.

[Change music: Max Webster, “Battle Scar”]

Most typically I book what the rental companies call an “SCAR.” That’s their code for a “Standard Car” but I’ve come to believe that it also describes the relationship between domestic auto makers and the auto renting public…scarred.

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Now that Verizon Wireless is getting traction with the iPhone 4 on their CDMA network AT&T is left trying to find ways of differentiating itself. While it’s too early to know how much of a bloodletting AT&T will suffer, it’s clear that in many parts of the country Verizon’s much touted network supremacy will win over a significant number of frustrated AT&T customers, even if it means buying a new CDMA capable iPhone4.

Perhaps the biggest difference between the two carriers is the type of networks they operate. Networks based upon GSM standards, like AT&T and T-Mobile here in the US, allow the simultaneous use of voice and data. In marked contrast, CDMA networks like Verizon’s, simply don’t do this.

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This post is inspired by the recent release of the HP Mini 5103. I’ve been carrying its predecessor since April, and meaning to share my recent experience with netbooks, especially in the light of the coming onslaught of tablets.

There are aspects of my working life that lands me squarely in the category of “Road Warrior.” Business has me visiting customers locations all over North America, and occasionally locations overseas. This very fact of my routine travel has dictated that I carry a laptop. Remember that my employers business is broadcast graphics equipment, so our laptops are on the more capable side of things…meaning more powerful, bigger & heavier. Recently our staff have started carrying “mobile workstations.”

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I suspect that there is a netbook in my near-term future. My travel to and from Toronto last week reinforced this sense. At three hours that flight is about as long as you’d want to be on a 50 seat regional jet. Such is the reality of air travel these days. Smaller aircraft are being used on longer flights so that they can still offer a few flights a day on less traveled routes. While really do like my HP NX8510p notebook it’s just too large to be useful in small spaces, like on a regional jet.

Further, a lot of the stuff that I’m doing these days is “in-the-cloud” as they say. So many of my activities don’t require major applications installed on the platform before me. It would seem that a netbook with some reasonable amount of local storage would make some sense for me. I’m not sure I’d go for one with inboard 3G ‘net access. They seem to costly at the moment.

Tim Higgins over at Small Net Builder has been in a protracted search for a netbook. He’s actually taken delivery of three different models;

• MSI Wind U100
• Samsung NC-10
• Lenovo IdeaPad S-10

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