The hardware is awesome: brief report from San Diego power outage

I had a editing job sitting in my gmail, due at 9 am Friday, Tokyo time. Which is 5 pm Thursday in San Diego. It was going to take about an hour. I had put it off. Until 4. Which was a really bad time to realize you needed email in San Diego.

Luckily, I had my trusty Cr-48, with 3g, and Verizon can-you-hear-me-now 3g at that. I had slightly modified my Cr-48 with a bigger SSD and running Ubuntu, but this is a hardware story. With everything in the house shut down, having used my computer already throughout the day, it fired right, connected to Verizon, I downloaded that file, edited it, and had it shipped to Tokyo, receipt confirmed. In the middle of the biggest power outage in years.

Compared to the iPad and our iPhones, all on AT&T, Verizon definitely seemed snappier. Both systems were clearly degraded, but AT&T pages would just stop loading. Verizon, it just felt a little slow.

This is a reasonably common use case for me: no power for extended periods, no wi-fi. First at a huge conference, then in Japan for Fukushima, now here in sunny San Dog. The speed of an SSD is trivial to me compared to the energy efficiency. The 3g access is of course critical, though I'll certainly take wi-fi if I can get it.

Frankly, compared to the MacBook air, I'm also glad I have a matte black, plastic case. I'm in the military. Shocks and light reflections are non-trivial issues. Compared to the stock ChromeOS, I like not having to rely on the cloud for the computing itself. I'd much rather minimize my reliance on bandwidth. I have CAC authentication, so I can check work email, though I still haven't gotten citrix access to our clinical systems. Though I think that may be a problem with Juniper. Even a custom built LPS Linux hasn't been able to fix that problem. As it stands, this is the most capable piece of hardware I have ever owned, arguably custom made for my use case.