This Week at Mobile Tech Manor #47: Unplugging is a Good Thing

Mobile Tech Manor Large 2The week is almost over, and it’s the time to look back on how the week went down and share it with you. The big holiday weekend in the U.S. started the week off on a good note. It was good to spend time with friends and family, and it drove home to me how important it is to unplug from the grid once in a while. The work week following the holiday made for a busy time, with less downtime, which countered the holiday goodness. I spent some time thinking about cheap netbook alternatives and found quite a few of them. Come on in and share my week with me.

Unplugging from the Grid

The holiday was on a Saturday, a bit of a waste, as holidays that fall on the weekend often don’t feel as beneficial. We had 25 people over for a barbecue, and we spent some quality time with friends and family. It drove home to me once again how important it is to unplug from the grid, and concentrate on the real world. Technology makes it far too easy to be “on” all the time, and that’s not really a good thing.

The reality is that news is always happening, and technology makes it possible to get informed in near real time. That is a good thing for keeping informed but it can also end up taking over your time, when it could be better spent. My brief time “off the grid” made that clear to me, something that doesn’t happen often enough. I also read something that my friend Steve Rubel wrote this week that reinforced how important it is to not let the “online life” take over. I follow Steve regularly, as he has good insights and I like to hear them. The last time he visited Houston, he and I had a nice breakfast together, and as always, the conversation was stimulating.

Steve is “lifestreaming” — he quit blogging to use social media to share all aspects of his life as it happens. That is something I personally would never do; my blogging is interactive enough for me. Steve has been traveling lately, and has been enjoying in-flight connectivity, which has allowed him to lifestream all the time, even when high in the air. A statement he made hit home to me:

I am writing this lifestream item from high above the US on American Airlines. It occurs to me up here that there are very few times these days when I am disconnected. And that experience, thanks to my smartphone, is getting a lot richer. This is changing my content consumption.

It used to be I would read/listen to dozens of books a year – mostly business and computer titles, occasionally nonfiction. However, I noticed that as the web becomes always on, so am I. This means that the times I would read, like on airplanes, I don’t anymore. The Net ate my books.

Steve is finding that he is never off the grid, even in situations that historically would force doing so (flights). The end result is that he has lost his leisure time, and that is a very bad thing in my book. My love of reading novels is well documented, and the time I spend reading is vital to my well-being. I not only enjoy the experience of sharing good stories with the authors who created them, I also cherish the time off the grid to do so. Steve is discovering that he has lost both of those benefits, and I hope he takes some time to reflect on that. Downtime is so important to our mental well-being.

I work at home, and that makes it far too easy to stay connected all the time. I take pains to insure that I don’t get overwhelmed with constantly being on the grid. I force myself to take breaks during the day, much as I would if I worked in an office. Those breaks will find me picking up the current book I am reading for a brief escape from reality. A 15-minute break reading a novel refreshes me, both mentally and physically, and I am then able to return to the grid with the proper perspective.

Mobile technology has advanced wonderfully but a negative side effect means it is far too easy to stay on the grid anywhere, as Steve is dealing with. That’s a big reason why I love using my smartphone to read e-books. I can do so anywhere as easily as I can get online, and I find it a far better use of my time.

Time to get off my soapbox now. The holiday weekend past was refreshing and recharged my mental juices. The Sunday after the holiday I stayed offline and did something I haven’t done for a long time. The wife and I sat in front of the TV all day, watching old syndicated shows and movies on cable. It turns out there was a “Leave it to Beaver” marathon, and we watched three hours of the old show. “Beaver” was my favorite show growing up and I’ll bet I have seen all of the episodes. It was still wonderful to see them again as it took me back to far simpler times, before the grid even existed. The trouble that Wally and Beaver got into marked how simple life was back then.

We also watched several movies and one of them ended up with a surprising tech angle. One of the actors in the movie was very familiar to both my wife and I — we spent the entire movie trying to figure out who he was and where we had seen him before. It was one of those situations where we both knew we’d seen him on TV shows, that he was funny, but for the life of us we couldn’t place him. When the movie was over we looked up the cast and my wife read the actor’s names aloud. When she hit “Justin Long” it hit me like a ton of bricks. He’s the guy who plays the Mac in all those Apple commercials. It demonstrated to both of us how effective Apple’s Mac commercials are. He has become a very familiar face, even to those who care nothing about the tech stuff (my wife).

Speaking of social media, thinking back to Steve’s lifestreaming thing, Twitter has become so big. I first heard about Michael Jackson’s death via Twitter, mere moments after the story first broke. It is hard to gauge the impact that the service has made in all facets of our lives. The local news teams are even using Twitter to do their jobs, something that adds to the “always connected” aspect of being on the grid.

BoingBoing pointed out something quite amusing about Twitter this past week. Twitter is famous for the 140-character limit to “tweets,” something that keeps things short and sweet. Companies are jumping on Twitter right and left, and retail giant Walmart is no exception. BoingBoing brought our attention to the Walmart Twitter Terms of Use Agreement. What is that? That’s the agreement you must make to access Walmart’s Twitter stream. Yes, to follow Walmart’s 140-character tweets you must read and agree to their terms of use, a 3,379 word agreement. It sort of defeats the purpose of Twitter, doesn’t it?

Cheap Notebooks

Any discussion you follow about netbooks nearly always touches on how cheap they are. While many like the highly portable form of netbooks, just as many feel that the primary benefit to netbooks is the low price. There is an alternative to netbooks for those in the latter camp, an alternative that has been around for a long time but is often overlooked.

That alternative is the refurbished notebook. Most major notebook makers have programs that refurbish older notebooks and then resell them at greatly reduced prices. The refurbishment process turns these old devices into the equivalent of brand-new notebooks, and often include a warranty.

These aren’t state-of-the-art notebooks by any means, but they often have components more powerful than those of netbooks. Reader J Slade sent me an email this week detailing the deal he found on a x61 notebook refurbished by Lenovo:

I went to lenovo.com’s outlet and found a Thinkpad x61 with 2gb RAM, 80gb HD (5400 rpm), and a 2.4 ghz  core 2 duo processor for $620.

The x61 can be upgraded to a 7200 rpm drive or a SSD. Memory can be expanded to 4gb.

On the site there were refurbished, redistributed, and new x61, x61s, x200, and x200s systems with different processors, memory, disk, and OS options.

All are more powerful than any netbook. All can have very long battery duration. All have the great Thinkpad keyboard.

Lenovo is not the only OEM that has a refurbish program, so it is a good idea to search around if a cheap notebook is what you’re after. HP has such a program for business notebooks that has some good deals. Dell has a refurb program too, with some great deals on notebooks. It is worth checking into this option instead of blindly pushing the button on a netbook, if price is your primary driver. There are some good deals; heck, there are even refurbished netbooks for a couple of hundred bucks.

E-books of the Week

This week I bounced between the Kindle and eReader. I read “Terminal Freeze” by Lincoln Child first. This exciting story set in the deep cold was a riveting page-turner. I then picked up “Lovers: A Thriller” by John Connolly. “Lovers” picks up the actions of Charlie Parker, a dark, brooding PI who investigates the suicide of his cop father. This is a wonderful book and I can’t put it down easily.

That’s All, Folks

This week is gone and so is this column. I enjoy sharing things with you and hope you do too. Next week looks to be a busy one, with an upcoming trip to California to prepare for. Until next week.

loading

Comments have been disabled for this post