travel prep saturday

Today was completely without form and plan... other than the normal Saturday morning stuff... or at least it started out that way and then kinda grew organically... but it ended up being useful (if slightly costly) for sorting ourselves out for heading off to Brisbane in a week's time.

Given that I now have the digital SLR which has it's own bag, I was a little concerned about carting that AND my normal red Crumpler bag AND my laptop bag over to Brisbane... it all seemed a bit much really.

Whether I can actually fit the camera bag inside my Crumpler bag or not remains to be seen... but since Ma had also been weighing up the pros and cons of carting her own laptop around, we decided to head out to look at netbooks...

I'm going to say right now that going to see the nice blonde geek woman who works at Good Guys is generally very dangerous... she's the one I bought Beast from... she's the one Ma bought her laptop from... so if anyone is likely to get us to buy things (without really trying terribly hard I have to say... but then she does also give us the best deal she can), it's her.

All I really want from a netbook is it being easy to transport, the ability to play the odd movie, somewhere to store photos while we're travelling, somewhere to type up blog posts and the ability to connect to the net would be nice.

Oh, and I didn't really want to spend more than about $350...

Anyway, we looked, she showed us a couple of options, but we figured we'd head down to JB HiFi at West Lakes to see what they had... the short answer to that was "pretty much the same thing".

Oh and I picked up a new tube of Face Protector from the Body Shop since mine is getting a little low and a little grotty.

On the way down I was commenting on the fact my current pencil case (yes, I have a pencil case, get off my dress) and had decided on a plan of heading down to the Smiggle in the Mall during the week to buy a new one... except we weren't that far from Harbourtown... and they have a Smiggle...

Cue one brief detour where I bought the exact same pencil case, just the half as long version.

Really, today was pretty much about driving from one place to another...

Anyway, I was kinda still weighing up my options regarding getting a netbook now versus getting an iPad later... or getting a netbook now, using it for this trip, then giving it to Ma when I buy an iPad from The Temple Of Shiny during the Sydney trip in November.

But really, I was thinking about it, and while I can kinda see a use for the iPad here in the house, I don't know how often I would actually take it out of the house... and would I really want to write long rambly blog posts (like the travel ones or like the ones I do at Christmas, since I could use it for that too) on an iPad... I could, but then there's stands and keyboards and blah blah blah...

So I figured I would let destiny make the decision... they only had one unit left at JB HiFi, so if they had more than one unit at Good Guys, Ma and I would both get one... if not, Ma gets it and I struggle through with the laptop this time.

Say hello to Beast 2.0... or possibly Mirage... or maybe Shockwave... I haven't actually decided yet.

It's a 10" Acer Aspire One D257... sadly though it's not all sexy faux-Mac white... or even the cool blue they have... it's just black (but it was on special, so what do you expect)... and the ripple pattern on the lid, that's real and it's actually a physical ripple in the plastic lid.

And no, while it's very cool, that wasn't actually what made me buy it.

It's not really, really, really tiny... but I'm also not going to have to cut off a couple of fingers to be able to use the keyboard effectively.

I also grabbed a copy of Microsoft Office 2010, since I only have Works on Beast (and pretty much never use it). And since it's the three license version I can put a copy on Beast, a copy on Beast 2.0/Mirage/Shockwave (I really am running out of good Transformer based names for my electronic gadgets) and have a copy left...

And that was about it...

I think I've now officially spent my tax refund though...

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