Thoughts From the Road

Carmel beach

NOTE: This was written during my travel yesterday, but I couldn’t post it due to an early boarding process.

I usually give my thoughts from the road while traveling, and since my short business trip is almost over here they are:

Carmel, California is one of the most beautiful places on earth.

Boingo is everywhere — at least it seems that way. Right now I am sitting in the Monterey Airport, at the gate, waiting for boarding to begin. I had noted previously that I was thinking of canceling my Boingo account as the MiFi makes it largely a moot point. I confess I have not gotten around to doing that however, and I am camped out on the Boingo hotstpot right now. It is simply amazing how many hotspots they have partnered with — it seems they have one almost everywhere.

The MiFi is a wonderful traveling gadget. I’m not using it right this moment but I used it constantly at the hotel in Carmel. The hotel Wi-Fi is free but I constantly battled the “too many users online” situation. I also found that the hotel Wi-Fi network could go from lightning fast to downright poky. It was not uncommon to see the Lenovo indicate the Wi-Fi signal strength was bouncing up and down. The MiFi, on the other hand, was consistently fast and available so I often just used it instead of the Wi-Fi.

The Lenovo ThinkPad T400s was a great addition to my gear bag for this trip. It handled everything I asked of it, and with good performance. Lenovo included two Windows Sidebar gadgets that are actually very useful, and I referred to them constantly this trip. One is the battery gauge which not only gives good visual indications of battery percentage and remaining life, but it also has a super simple slider bar to immediately alter the power scheme. The slider goes from max performance to maximum battery life and a simple slide makes the change on the fly. The other is the Wi-Fi gadget, that shows what hotspot is active along with the signal strength. It is coupled with the visual access manager which makes it a breeze to move around hotspots with impunity. Very well done.

The T400s has a multi-touch trackpad that is very nice to use. I mainly use it for two-finger scrolling in windows. I find it a snap to zoom in and out on web pages using the two-finger “pinch and zoom” gesture which is useful.

Google Chrome is much faster than Firefox under Windows Vista. I ended up totally switching to Chrome for the entire trip, the performance was that much better.

Windows Vista is still a dog. Enough said.

The one downside of taking the ThinkPad for the trip was the lack of a second battery. I was happy with the battery life of the ThinkPad, but only having the one battery I realized I was obsessing constantly about how much life I had left. A second battery removes that obsession and makes for a more pleasant working situation, at least for me. This made me realize how long it has been since I worried about having enough juice while mobile.

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