The Common Sense of  a Giant

Stealing shamelessly from Marvin Bower once of McKinsey & Co.  I want you all to know what kind of behavior we admire, and what kind of behavior we deplore:

• First, we admire people who work hard.  We dislike passengers who don’t pull their weight in the boat.
• We admire people with first-class brains, because you cannot run a great organization without brainy people.
• We admire people who avoid politics — office politics, I mean.
• We despise toadies who suck up to their bosses; they are generally the same people who bully their direct reports.
• We admire the great professionals, the craftsmen who do their jobs with superlative excellence.  We notice that these people always respect the professional expertise of their colleagues in other departments.
• We admire people who hire people who are good enough to succeed them. We pity people who are so insecure that they feel compelled to hire inferior people as their direct reports.
• We admire people who build up and develop their employees, because this is the only way we can promote from within the ranks.  We detest having to go outside to fill important jobs and look forward to the day when that will never be necessary.
• We admire people who practice delegation.  The more you delegate, the more responsibility will be loaded upon you.  The more you trust others to do their job, the more we all get done.
• We admire kindly people with gentle manners who treat other people as human beings.  We abhor quarrelsome people.  We abhor people who wage paper warfare.  We abhor buck passers and people who don’t tell the truth.
• We admire well-organized people who deliver their work on time.
• We admire people who are good citizens in their communities — people who work for their local hospitals, their church, the PTA, and so on.
• We admire people who accomplish a great deal while having fun.
• We admire you.

I couldn’t find the orignal source for this as I have it in hard-copy. I don’t take credit for the content here but support the sentiment.

There was a boat-load of excitement on my part when this came out.  So much so that I took the Best Buy gift cards that had been in my drawer for over a year and without thinking twice marched to Best Buy to get one.  I had messed around prior and created my own HTPC using many of the methods you can find online but they just never got it right.  I was thrilled to think Google had tackled this challenge.

Positives:

Initially, I wasn’t entirely let down.  I was scared of the Sony controller so I went with the LogitechRevue (and I already had a TV).  The keyboard had some great features like a dedicated search button with which you can search the internet or TV shows currently playing or playing in the future.  There is a nice trackpad in the upper right which allows for easy mousing about.  The keyboard is super light as well which is not the reason I am so tempted to toss it out the window…

Track This, Pad!

Although I just listed the trackpad as a positive it has some major shortcomings.  The first, is that the trackpad doesn’t click itself.  It’s not a button.  Ok that’s fine.  There is a button under it.  But only one button.  There is no right-click button.  If you’re only going to have one button, make the track-pad itself the button.  Furthermore, right next to the mouse-click button is the ‘Back’ button.  Easily 75% of the time I’m trying to click the mouse button I click the ‘Back’ button.  What’s more, there is no forward button in sight to quickly reverse the mayhem.  Enough on that.

Wire…less Refresh

The wireless on the revue device seems pretty horrible.  I barely get any wireless reception.  Yes, I have it on the shelf of a TV stand (so wood on all sides but one) but…they should have planned for that.  So while browsing, really enjoying surfing the web mid-TED talk and the internet gets lost.  Let me hit the refresh button.  That’s right, to compound the problem there isn’t a refresh button (unlike their new notebook).  I know that I can hit Ctrl-R but I’ve gone one hand on the control and the other wrapped around a Super Burrito.  Give me a friggin refresh key.

Au Reviour Alt

Onwards.  I mentioned the awesome search button but, alas, it replaced my favorite ‘alt’ key.  That’s right my favorite ‘alt’ key.  I do not care for the ‘alt’ key whatsoever on the right side of the keyboard.  I only use the one on the left.  Now it’s gone.  So to restart the revue, I now have to press Ctrl with one hand and alt and delete with the other hand.  I feel the carpal tunnel creeping up already.

TV Integration

So I don’t pay for cable.  I don’t steal it…but I plug my TV into the wall (or my wall into the TV) and I get channels.  This doesn’t Jive with GoogleTV so I don’t reap most of the benefits that it offers like searching your show directory, live TV, and PIP.  Those things will be sweet one day… For now though, they aren’t sweet.  What’s also not sweet is that the keyboard control doesn’t allow you to switch inputs on your tv.  It does act as a universal remote and I can set up hotkeys but come on.  Their is an input key (FN-TV) but all that does is take me from any other input on my TV to GoogleTV.  It doesn’t take me back.  Sad faic.

So although I eagerly await HuluPlus (or Hulu hack) and the Google TV App Store to make this purchase worthy of my nearly free purchase (remember the gift cards).  Overall, I say give this another 6 months before you think about buying yours.  If you have a cable box and want to be able to search that directory it may be worth it.  For me, right now, it’s not and it may see the old Customer Service/Returns desk at Best Buy real soon.

Feel free to ask me any questions you may have.  Happy Travels.

The design of the laptop itself is very nice.  I am not sure if this is close to the final design but I love the fact that there is no labeling on it, no stickers that leave goo that tell you who made the processor or what the OS is.  It is a black rubber-like finish that is very nice to feel.  Most edges are rounded particularly where your wrists rest which is an improvement over the relatively sharp edges of MacBooks.

The keyboad is a dream!  The typing action is splendid and I am crazy about a few key changes.  First (which you’ve all heard about) they removed Caps Lock which I’m not sure I had ever used anyway.  It is replaced with a Search button that opens a new tab and puts your cursor in the search field.  Hitting Ctrl-T is no longer my most used hotkey.

Additionally, there is a top row of buttons that is usually where the F1-F10 keys are or in some laptop cases they have some quasi-buttons that are oddly ordered and control different things like music or video players.  Google has taken the best aspects of both of those and made real nice to press buttons that aren’t mysterious Function keys but have very relevant purpose.  For example, they have Back and Forward buttons which totally makes sense when you’re OS is a browser…or whenever really.  They have a refresh button (Ok I miss F5 a little).  They have a fullscreen mode button, and a next window button.  All of these have been super helpful and noticebly save me from hitting Ctrl-Something on a regular basis.

The keyboard is missing one thing for me though.  It lacks lit keys or a lit keyboard which make it nearly impossible to see the keys in the dark.  This will matter less when my motor memory locks in this new keyboard but still it has been one of the most prominent pain points for me since I’ve been watching a lot of Naruto on this bad boy.  (Maybe the only other thing missing is a Delete key.  For some reason I’ve always used that more than backspace.  Perhaps I’m weird.)

So what about the software.  At the end of the day it is just their Chrome browser.  Which is a fantastic browser and the only one I use so I am pretty content.  I am the type of person who always looks for a webapp version before downloading anything so I’ve been pretty well-suited with this.  When you can do some sweet RPG gaming and web-based IDEs have figured out what they’re supposed to do this notebook will pretty much have everything I need…

…except maybe local storage.  One shortcoming to date has been their file storage system.  It is hard to navigate – once you open a folder I haven’t figured out how to get back to a parent folder – and the graphical design of it is lacking.  I figure this is one of those areas that they are continuing to work on and we’ll see updates later in the year.  I actually expected (and still anticipate) that there will be integrations for storage into some online storage apps like google docs storage or drop-box.

Another area where I feel a little empty inside is Notifications.  In product videos online I’ve seen these very active notification windows, showing emails arriving, tweets coming in, friends coming online.  I’ve been unable to get that to happen.  Perhaps it requires downloading the extensions but my expectation was that at minimum there would be the option for notifications from Google products like reader, buzz, voice, and gmail.

Overall, though it has been great and for the most part it has been the only computer I use around the house.  Also, it’s light enough for me to carry it pretty much anywhere without thinking twice.  I’ll get Grooveshark going and carry it around like a boom box in the Bronx.  I expect that over the year of this pilot program, Google will release updated versions of the OS which is when things will get really interesting.

Feel free to ask me questions in the comments to learn more.

“I got up on a desk, with a loudspeaker, and told everybody that I was giving one order: They were to treat anybody they came into contact with who had been affected by the storm like a member of their own family.  Their mother, father, brother, sister, whatever.  And I said, ‘If you do that, two things are going to happen.  Number one, if you make a mistake you’re going to err on the side of doing too much, and that’s okay.  Number two, if somebody has a problem with what you’ve done, their problem’s not with you, their problem’s with me.’

After I said that, a cheer broke out, because there had been so much stress from the pressure that had been exerted on the response and the perception that it wasn’t going well.  Just a simple set of core values- a North Star to steer by – was, I think, what they were looking for.”

Admiral Thad Allen, USCG (Ret.) on his first actions after taking over the Hurricane Katrina disaster relief efforts. http://hbr.org/2010/11/you-have-to-lead-from-everywhere/ar/1

This I beheld, or dreamed it in a dream:–
There spread a cloud of dust along a plain;
And underneath the cloud, or in it, raged
A furious battle, and men yelled, and swords
Shocked upon swords and shields. A prince’s banner
Wavered, then staggered backward, hemmed by foes.
A craven hung along the battle’s edge,
And thought, “Had I a sword of keener steel–
That blue blade that the king’s son bears, — but this
Blunt thing–!” he snapped and flung it from his hand,
And lowering crept away and left the field.
Then came the king’s son, wounded, sore bestead,
And weaponless, and saw the broken sword,
Hilt-buried in the dry and trodden sand,
And ran and snatched it, and with battle shout
Lifted afresh he hewed his enemy down,
And saved a great cause that heroic day.

- Edward Rowland Sill

- Justin Kan, Justin.tv  from the article The Way I Work Inc. Magazine July

So I began with javascript:

<script>

function chooseStyle() {

var css = new Array('1','2','3');

var i = Math.floor(Math.random()*css.length);

var style = "style"+css[i]+".css";

return style;

}

document.write('<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://www.chasenelson.com/wp-content/themes/default/'+chooseStyle()+'" type="text/css">');

</script>

That  works just fine but it will randomly select a stylesheet every time a page loads.  So as you navigate through your site it doesn’t maintain the same stylesheet.  So I decided to store my selected stylesheet in the session so that if a user comes to my site they will experience the same style for the remainder of that session.

I also decided to switch to PHP because I remembered immediately how to store session variables and I wasn’t using any other javascript in these pages:

<!-- Randomize stylsheet -->

<?php

if(isset($_SESSION['style'])){
$style = $_SESSION['style'];
}
else {
$styles = array('style1.css', 'style2.css', 'style3.css');
$style = array_rand(array_flip($styles), 1);
$_SESSION['style'] = $style;
}

?>

<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://www.chasenelson.com/wp-content/themes/default/<?php echo $style; ?>" type="text/css">

Seems to be working well.  As usual there is probably a much easier way to do this… Let me know if there are any improvements that you see.