dgoodwin's blog

It looks as though the Mrs and I will soon be homeowners, we have an offer accepted for a townhouse condo as of yesterday. Still a few final t's to cross in the next week but assuming all goes well with inspection we should be moving in at the end of March. Haven't been able to take any photos myself yet but the listing photos can be seen in this flickr set.

We saw the place first in late November but sort of glazed over it for a larger and less expensive home in a much less attractive neighborhood, which we ended up walking away from for that reason. Started thinking about these units again last week and did some heavy financial analysis to make sure we could afford it and went in for a second look on Sunday. Gnucash was invaluable, I've imported all our spending for the entire year of 2007 and getting that whole picture of exactly what goes where and averaging it out per month was really helpful.

Condo is in great shape and very nicely furnished on the upper two floors. The basement remains unfinished but we've got plans to undertake that ourselves this summer, which actually sounds like a lot of fun. Really looking forward to the location as well. Quiet and surrounded by greenbelt, but there's a pile of amenities within walking distance and pretty much anything you could imagine within a 5 minute drive. All good when you work from home.

The whole process has been remarkably easy. We were fortunate enough to get a really excellent realtor recommendation and she in turn has walked us through absolutely everything, and in turn made great recommendations for all the other people we have to deal with. (mortgage broker, lawyer, inspector, etc) When it came time to negotiate she has us walking away with a very large price reduction (much larger than we thought we'd pull off), inclusion of a brand new washer dryer, and the current tenant staying an extra month to coincide with our apartment lease termination. We literally gave up nothing.

As if that weren't enough, my Nokia N800 arrived on Monday. I was a little apprehensive at first, finding it very hard to navigate in a timely fashion and the small display was giving me headaches. Started getting the hang of it within the first couple days, playing with larger fonts, found the mobile versions of GMail and Google Reader, and now quite enjoying it. Just a different way to browse the web. Haven't tried much video playback yet, just Youtube which is unwatchable (even after upgrading to OS2008). Browsing is clunky using the full Google app interfaces but the mobile versions are nice. Normal web pages are not bad if you get the font size up a little. Mostly just enjoying Pidgin for IM and IRC, reading my normal sites, and internet radio.

Gonna be a long wait these next few months but at least it'll mean lots of time to get everything ready for the last move we'll undertake in a very long time.

I'm leaning pretty heavily toward buying some kind of a Linux powered mobile internet device, but am having a terrible time deciding between the Asus EEE PC, the Nokia N810, and the slightly older but drastically less expensive N800.

I'm looking for something that'll mainly be used loafing around the house, but hopefully powerful enough that it'll be all I need when traveling. Working from home I can't stand the sight of my desk in the evenings and the laptop has become my wife's primary computer, so I'd like something casual to poke around the web myself. Typical usage would be:

• web browsing (mainly Google Reader)
• e-mail (GMail currently, but mutt if I can tear myself away from the curse of Google convenience)
• IRC (probably via terminal over ssh)
• light instant messaging
• occasional text editing
• audio (internet streams, perhaps some mp3 as well)
• video (mainly xvid encoded tv shows)

The Asus EEE PC strikes me as the most powerful. It's borderline full on laptop functionality for an extremely low price (considering). It should be able to do all the above and more. I like that it has an ethernet jack in addition to the wifi support, which neither of the Nokia's does. (although this would rarely be used) I also like that there's the option to install other Linux distributions down the road and easily flash back to the factory installed OS within seconds. The full laptop'ish layout strikes me as the most convenient for actually getting some work done. I can't type for long on a laptop keyboard due to pain in the wrists and I suspect this would be even worse, but for short periods of time it should get the job done. The EEE strikes me as the most capable for travel, taking this should do everything I'd need.

The Nokia N810 however has tremendous appeal. It packs the same resolution on a screen several inches smaller than the EEE, slide out thumb keypad, GPS (albeit with limited software functionality), and a very vibrant user community. I don't consider it as hackable in that I doubt I'll be experimenting with any Linux distributions on the thing, but the platform is very open for development and it sounds like great apps are being written for it. It looks spectacular, is much smaller than the others, and strikes me as the most convenient device to just pickup and use. It *looks* like it's powerful enough to play video content from some kind of storage medium, but I don't think it's quite as potent as the EEE. I'm not sure if it's powerful or comfortable enough to be the only device used while traveling, but if not it's extremely close. The biggest problem however is the price. I didn't make the cut for a developer discount and without that it's the most expensive device of them all at around $475 CDN. ($75 more than the EEE model I'm looking at, and $200-$275 more than the N800 from Dell)

So finally there's the N800, very similar to the N810 and about half the price. No hardware keyboard (the most enticing), no GPS, slightly larger, slightly less powerful, and not as readable outside. While the N810 has advantages they don't read like enough to justify the drastic price difference.

So all said I'm kind of leaning towards the N810, but it just seems too overpriced to commit right now. The Asus strikes me as the most practical choice of them all, it's easily small enough to carry around just about anywhere, but I'm not sure if I want an uber-small laptop or an even smaller pocket sized tablet. The N800 is attractive only in that it's almost as cool as the N810 for a much more reasonable price, but then maybe the best bet is to wait on the N810 to drop. (although that'll probably then be followed by a newer hipper device and the whole cycle repeats itself again)

Having a hard time making a decision on this one.