Man to spend a who month in the air

Well, not all of it in the air. But most of it. It seems that wired.com hired a guy to take complete advantage of the offer that JetBlue made a few weeks ago: buy one ticket, get the whole month of September free. So this guy will spend this whole month in planes and airports. A real life terminal man, kinda like the Tom Hanks movie.

Netbooks- Are They Really Worth it?

I would say that it depends on alot of different criteria. There is a certain craze over them in the wireless telecommunications community; the fact that they are lightweight and super small make it easy for companies like sprint, at&t, and vorizon to put some sim card dohicky thing into the netbook, and sell it with a two year contract. And the reason that it is so apealing to alot of people is that it’s a wireless internet connection all the time, anywhere you can get a cellphone signal.

Now here is the bone I had to pick with the notion that it is absolutely nessisary to have a wireless contract for these things: the fact of the matter is, if you’re a traveler and want the internet in a public place, then you can actually find wireless network connections either for a small fee or more often for free in places like the airport, cofe shops, donut shops, and even in a McDonalds. If it is that important to have internet(and I guess it is) then you can get it in any of those places, especially if you travel on business.

But I would say that there is one potential exception to this rule, and that would be truck drivers. They are out on the open road, and don’t often have access to the aformentioned establishments, and therefore need some sort of wireless plan.

But to cut to the chase, the point I’m trying to make is, be sure you know what your doing before you lock yourself into a two year deal with a company who’s only goal is to take your money. It’s not that expensive to just go out and buy yourself a nice netbook, and just use if for school, business travel, or if it suits you, as your main PC. These things work great on there own, and come with lots of the same amenities that a normal laptop does, even considering the smaller size.

Some important pieces of info to point out would be that first, these things don’t have disc drives. Nope, no cd, no dvd no nothin’. But you can hook it up to an external dvd drive with one of it’s usb ports. The other thing many may find is that a good chunk of the netbooks on the market have lackluster battery life, though that’s not to say they won’t fix those problems in the future. And finally, the size of the keyboard may just turn a few people off of the netbook category of computer for good. But all things considered, these little things are certainly filling a niche among business travelers, students, and those with a limited budget.

New 1TB Hardrives……

So, I thought that a 500GB hardrive was huge, but not with these new 1TB hardrives on the consumer electronics market. Imagine all the useless information you could store on something like that…..

Anyway, I digress. This is something of a landmark for me. I remember when we had 1, 2, and sometimes 10 gig hardrives, and we thought that they were huge, and that nothing could fill them. The whole storage thing come from the fact that our OS’s are getting bigger, the programs we run not only require more space, but even more ram(but that’s a whole different post for another day), and we tend to rely on those things for the storage of very important information more than we used to. Oh, and not to mention your school paper and your thousands and thousands of music, most of which, you might not even listen to.

Information, mostly the info we never even use, gets stored on that whole 1TB of space on that hardrive. This is a generation of digital pack-rats. How nice……..

New Things To Come

Well, just wanted to fill in whoever visits our website what we have coming up here in the near future. We are planning a few ‘how-to’ articles on a variety of subjects, in an effort to grow our knowledge base and reliability as a technology and consumer electronics website. 

If you have any questions or constructive input, we here at schoolyard tech would like to hear from you. You can leave you comments in the comments section.

Dan

The New X-Men Movie

So, I just got back from the movies, having seen the new X-Men movie. I do have to say that it was pretty good. There was a feeling that something was left to be desired, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Maybe it was the fact that there was so many x-men in the movie, but only a few of them were featured. Yep, I think that was it. Now I want to see a sequel…..

Anyway, if you want to see a lame scene, wait ’till the end of the credits.

Hola!

Glad to be aboard! I love to talk about technology, and to use it even more. All I want to do is talk about it and in the process to help people understand it a little bit more.

We’ve gone through some changes, added a discussion forum, and are looking for people to help us out. We hope to build this place into something people can rely on to answer questions about technology, and have fun doing it.

–Dan

SchoolYard Tech

Hello, and thank you for visiting SchoolYard Tech.com. This is the second reiteration of this website. The first had grand designs – almost too grand if you ask me. The main project leader then has now left and the job of managing this website has fallen to me.

I plan on simplifying things around the website, and focus mainly on a knowledge base type of posts. I really think there is a market for this type of website. I work as a Network Engineer during the day and spend A LOT of time troubleshooting problems and researching on the internet. Too many times I have had a hard time trying to find what I am looking for. It would be great if there was a website run by regular people posting fixes to problems they’ve had.

We will focus at first on Microsoft and Cisco entries – and branch out from there. We may even have some special projects and LAB’s down the line.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you come back and read again!

-Josh