It’s been a funny week for all kinds of reasons, some personal and some I’m willing to talk about.

First, and I’ll come back to this topic, I’m writing this post on the Acer Aspire One netbook that arrived yesterday.  Did we really used to live with screens this small? I’ll come back to this in a minute for a decent rant.

Second, I presented at the Ignite thingie last night in Melbourne. Damn. I haven’t been that nervous since I got married. Serious. It was wierd. It’s not like I have no practice at presenting. I’ve done enough lecturing. I’ve stood in front of 150 students and gas bagged for 2 hours, no problem. So why was a 5 minute presentation last nigth so hard? I have no idea. I think I’ll post my basic premise here as a seperate post later, for anyone interested.

It *was* fun doing the presentation. I’m glad I did it. Apart from the crazy nerves thing, it was fun. Such a good challenge to try and condense some (any) topic down to a 5 minute presentation. I’d like another shot at it some time. Let’s hope I didn’t suck so bad they won’t have me back

I took my cue from Andrews Beyond Bullet Points crusade. None of my slides (20 of them, 15 seconds each) contained any actual information, although three of them included graphs. One graph was completely, and obviously, ficticious. The other two were real (using real data), but not intended for analysis, just illustration.

Of course it all would have gone better if I hadn’t have been so nervous that I fumbled over my lines.

Enough about last night.

Acer Aspire One.

This thing has a tiny keyboard, and I have such big fingers (all the better to mash a real keyboard with), and the track pad a joke (using external mouse is much better).

But it’s a cute little beast. It looks and feels like a toy, but it does work.

My biggest beef is actually with Zazz.com where I orderer it. Okay, they don’t actually promise that orders will take 5 working days, but they do say they usually ship in 5 -7 working days. This took 11 working days to arrive. And when it did, the advertised 16GB SSD was magicaly turned into an 8GB SSD. WTF?

There was an 8GB SD card in one of the two card reader slots, but since when was an 8GB SD card + an 8 GB SSD the same as an actual 16GB SSD?

I have raised this issue with Zazz. Hope this doesn’t turn into a saga. Stay tuned.