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Language Evolves, But Some People Are just Sloppy With It

A lot of offers drop into my email inbox. Sometimes companies are trying to sell me stuff. Quite often they want me to join in on their free “webinar!” I’ve made no secret of the fact that I hate the word “webinar.” It’s an abomination.

Over the years I’ve used Citrix GotoMeeting quite a lot. It’s a bit scary to think of how long I’ve paid them their monthly pound of flesh, but the service has truly changed my life. It allows me to perform remote support and maintenance processes without physically travelling to the customer site. When Citrix later offered GotoManage, a service more optimized around remote admin functions, my employer adopted it company-wide.

So, you see, I’m open to the use of such services…but I despise the way the language is warping around their use. “Webinars” don’t typically happen on the web. They happen online. You may access a web site into order to get into the session, but they don’t actually occur on the web. If they occurred on the web there’d be no installable applet involved. It would all happen inside the web browser with no plug-in required. It would all happen over HTTP.

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Some Thoughts On Keyboards In A Post-PC World

Two-Tablets-&-PhoneThis past week I’ve been getting to know Google’s Nexus 7. So far I’m liking it a lot. It’s interesting to see where I find it useful and where I still reach for my cell phone, netbook, laptop or desktop. How the Nexus7 changes my relationship with those devices is possibly one of the more interesting things about the tablet.

Of course, the Nexus7 is not my first attempt to make a tablet part of my routine. Last year I bought a Viewsonic gTablet, which is a 10” tablet running Android 2.2. I went so far as loading Cyanogen Mod to it, but eventually lost interest. it was simply too limited to be useful.

Last summer we bought an HP Touchpad running WebOS. The fire sale price was attractive. My wife ended up claiming that as her own. When she thought she’d lost it we ended up with a second Touchpad. That one was almost refit with Android 4.1…and may yet in fact.

Finally, in a fit of bad judgment I bought the HP Slate 500. That was an 8.7” tablet running Windows 7. I purchased it with a specific, work related project in mind. When that project failed to materialize I decided to resell it on E-bay, but not before I had also purchased the companion Bluetooth keyboard and protective cover.

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Take Two Tablets & Call Me In Six Months

When HP did their now famous about-face on WebOS I saw it as an opportunity to acquire a Touchpad at a fire sale price. So did a great many others. What limited inventory HP had sold out very quickly.

We eventually managed to obtain one, which my wife claimed as her own. I was ok with that. I had a chance to get to know the Touchpad here and there. It was enough maintain my impression that tablets are better for media consumption than creative tasks. In essence, the touchpad made me appreciate my aging HP5102 netbook..enough to justify the move to an SSD.

Back in May my wife reported that she had lost the Touchpad. She was certain that she left it somewhere off-site and it was surely lost forever. We also hunted all around the house and office, just in case it could be found. It wasn’t. Much changing of passwords ensued.

A few days later Woot.com offered refurbished Touchpads for $199. I informed Stella, suggesting while I had purchased the first touchpad, she might like to purchase another. She eventually decided to buy one.

When this new Touchpad arrived it was defective. It would not find any wifi, as if the radio was disconnected. Woot advised me to deal with HP WebOS support, which I did. That process took a week or two but they eventually replaced the defective device.

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Mini-Me And The SSD

SanDisk-SSD & HP-5103A couple of weeks ago one of the daily deals emails from New Egg made an offer that I found I could not resist. I am weak, it’s true. The offer in question was a 120 GB SanDisk Ultra solid state disk (SSD) drive for a mere $120.  Most SSDs of that size are $180+.

The appeal of SSDs is rooted in the same kind of sensibility that had me building Asterisk appliances that boot from flash media. Flash offers an attractive combination of performance and reliability.

The trade-off presented by SSDs is very high cost-per-gigabyte of storage. This offer, which was basically $1/GB, seemed like a nice chance to try an SSD for the first time. I wasn’t really certain how I’d use it, but I ordered one anyway.

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Who Can Resist The HP Touchpad For $99?

hp-touchpad5 ….not I, as it happens. When the demise of the Touchpad saw it’s price drop to $99 and $149 for the 16 GB & 32 GB models respectively it seems that world+dog wanted them.

From the time the price drop took effect Saturday, August 20th in the early am hours retailers & e-tailers who had stock saw huge demand. By Sunday afternoon most were simply sold out.

Even HP itself resorted to building a list and promising to inform prospective customers when they had more available. Sunday morning I put myself on HP’s list, noting that I’d take a 32 GB model if they had some.

Then Monday morning I saw by way of Twitter that Barnes & Noble had stock and was taking orders. Acting quickly, I managed to place an order for a 16 GB model.

I have an account with Barnes and Noble, stemming from when I purchased the Color Nook for my wife last Christmas. Of course, I couldn’t recall the password for that account at the moment.

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