It’s the final week of my league, Gutterdusters at Mont Clare. The standings are fixed and really, we’re just bowling for fun. My teammate, Tony, uses this as an opportunity to bring a couple extra orbs of destruction, a good idea on his part. It’s typically not a good idea to debut a new ball during league play. Tony knows he’ll be bowling at Mont Clare again, as will I, so what better time to test out a new ball or two when nothing is on the line?

Way to go Tony!

Tony has less hand in his ball than I. He’s a true stroker and tends to use aggressive equipment to get to the pocket on oily conditions. I, on the other hand, often find myself moving WAY left to keep my shot to the right of the head pin. I’m actually a stroker as well, but I get really good rotation off my hand. Couple that with the fact I typic…I digress.

During shadow ball, I see Tony roll a ball that I can only dream of rolling myself. Right up the 10th board. It doesn’t move an inch till the back-end and rides a rail to the pocket. Like I said, Tony rolls a straighter ball than I, but I’d never seen him roll one like this. I asked him about it and he gave me a proud grin. The kind of grin a guy gives you when you make a comment about his new car. “It’s urethane” he beamed. My eyebrow raised…it made sense. A urethane coverstock would explain why Tony’s ball rolled arrow straight till the backend. I hadn’t got a good look at it yet. It was black, dull shine, and no logo of graphic that I could see. I assumed it was a vintage ball.

When it was my turn to throw a practice ball, I asked Tony if I could use his ball. It was then that I got my first surprise: It’s a brand new ball, with inserts and a slug for the thumb. I also see the logo, but don’t pay it much attention. His span is a touch shorter than mine, but otherwise the ball fits my hand almost perfect. The thumb is snug, but bearable. After seeing him throw it, I set my feet to roll it up 10 as well. Because the thumb is snug, I take it easy. 1-2-3-4-5, roll…

Bliss!

I was prepared to be disappointed. Like I said, I have much more rotation to my stroke than Tony. I figured the ball would start reading the lane about midway down, then break way past the head pin. But that’s not what happened. It spun-up as soon as it left my hand, rode the 10th board to the back-end, and when it hit the pocket…WHAM! It crushed it. Better than my Eraser. The booming strike caught the attention of more teammates. I crossed to the other lane and waited for the ball to come back. In the meantime, I turn to Tony and shrug. The ball comes back and I give it a better look. I see that not only does it roll beautiful, it looks beautiful. Black with a sheen, but not shine, the word “Natural” in a retro font similar to Magneto, and a super cool chevron logo – all in a 1950′s inspired teal.

This time I pay a little more attention to how the ball sits in my hand. I also focus more on my marks. I threw the first ball leisurely, not really paying close attention to my feet or target. But it got my full attention now. I double check my feet, take a deep breath, test my thumb and remind myself not to let my backswing get too high. 1,2,3,4,5…

WHAM!!!

I crushed the pocket again. I took particular note of how well the ball carried through the rack. A real good strike, nothing sloppy about it. As a matter of fact, these last to strikes I threw felt too easy. Almost like I was cheating. When the game started I rolled the Natural a couple more times, each time being a resounding strike, with the exception of when I simply missed my mark. This is the ball I’ve been looking for…for years. And soon, it will be mine.

I didn’t bring both spheres of mayhem last week, but this week I will. I expect to throw the Big Hit in the 1st game, all the while watching the line to see how I’ll attack it with the Eraser in games 2 & 3. I’m feeling confident and relaxed, and I pity whomever our opponent is

I had the privilege of presenting at this event. This is a vid of the pre-event activities. I’m hoping I can get hold of some media of me *during* my presentation as well. I’ll be adding the slides as a vid soon as well. 

FTR: Today I got a BIG Wreck on wheat, instead of 2Xmeat. It did the job

Nowadays things are very different. My ear for music has matured quite a bit, in genres and sound. But, the role music plays in my life has changed quite a bit as well. A good harbinger of this is my first .mp3 player. Not a dedicated sound device at all, instead a PDA. Music to me now is one of several timelines or streams in my day. Sometimes that stream is muted or empty, but it’s always present, concurrent to the other streams in my life. When I moved from the Tungsten to my first Treo (650) this concept of life streams really took shape. In fact, the framework of my day-to-day experience hasn’t changed much since then.

You say, “I thought this post was about some amazing value?” I say: Who’s blog is this? Look up if you’re confused…go ahead, I’ll wait. –

Right, it says TreoBenny 2009, which means the posts here go like I want, being TreoBenny and all. Now if you don’t mind, I’d like to continue for those that like to read my writing…all four of them.

While still carrying the 650, I made the jump to Bluetooth audio. Mostly because my wired solution was killed do to a drop, but that’s another story. While there is reduction in sound quality, it’s a price I pay readily for scrapping wires. As I eluded to earlier, the role digital music has in my life is one of support. It goes alongside all of my other activities and needs to be extremely mobile. Bluetooth accomplishes this famously. I use my BT headphones at home as well, thanks to a class 1 USB dongle. So, for a long time I had no use for wired headphones at all. Then I re-entered the mobile PC world with a netbook and notebook purchase. Because I spend significantly more time on the notebook than netbook, I realized I’d need some kind of personal audio solution. I was damn tempted to get a mobile Bluetooth adapter (c’mon, it’s cute as hell) but I fought off the urge. Besides, this model of notebook has only 2 USB ports (I know, crazy) one for the air card, one for the mobile HDD. I have a hub but…ok I’m getting off topic again.  So, I decided I need some headphones. I wanted earbuds, small as possible. I wasn’t too concerned with quality, just as long as I could hear the music in something no louder than a coffee shop or restaurant. And dear.God.not.white!

Enter Peanutz

I decided to give Walgreen’s a try after looking online for decent earbuds. $40? Really? I was prepared to sacrifice quality and comfort, I just wanted something small and inexpensive. Low and behold, i come across these gems.

Enter netbook…

Constraints on cash and the rising Geek popularity of netbooks met, had dinner, had a great time, and hooked up on the living room couch to conceive my netbook purchase. An Asus Eee PC 900A. 4GB SSD, Xandros Linux distro, no Webcam. At $199, I was comfortably under-budget and I added an 8GB SD card to supplement the otherwise tiny SSD (solid-state drive.) I did a fair amount of research on this particular model, only the price surprised me. When I first started looking around at netbooks, Best Buy still had the Linux models online. About 2 weeks into my search, all the Linux models disappeared from the Web site. I was a little nervous that maybe the Linux models weren’t being sold at all. Part of the netbook charm to me was returning to Linux. (Inspired by a class, I installed Fedora 8 on a box I bought on Craigslist, but had to abandon it.) I decided to go into the store to see what I could find, rather than my typical buy-online-pickup-in-store. Once in the store the choice was clear, the price had me sold.

During my research of this particular model I saw that some people had issues with wi-fi. I didn’t have wi-fi issues however. I opened it up, browsed to my router, put in the key and there I was, in the familiar online place. The biggest dig against this machine was its distro. Every account of Xandros described it as clunky, bloated (leaving just a few MBs after updates) and unpleasant overall. Alongside of these negative reviews was often mentioned an ubuntu distro specifically optimized for the Eee PC, originally titled ubuntu-eee. I assumed I could install ubuntu-eee onto the 8GB SD card and boot from it, so the cramped 4GB SSD never really worried me. However, I made a few discoveries once I had my netbook in hand. First was that booting from the SD card was not an easy undertaking, like simply changing the boot order in the BIOS. From what I found, it can be done, but it was more of an undertaking than I expected, and honestly, well beyond my familiarity of Linux. So, I decided to go ahead and install ubuntu-eee over Xandros. I would need to create a USB install stick. The first few forums I found said very clearly that this install stick had to be created in ubuntu. Having had enough experience with Linux to know there is live media (runs entirely from an optical disc or USB stick,) I downloaded the latest ubuntu to my desktop and then followed the instructions from a couple forums to create the bootable media.

Much to my surprise, the tool itself, unetbootin, suggests creating the bootable media using Windows, not ubuntu as the forums said. Oh well, I had already installed ubuntu inside Windows, which was easy and although I don’t use it on my Pavilion desktop to date, I’m glad I did. Ok, back to topic. I don’t have a small capacity USB drive anymore, just a 120GB mobile drive. So, what I did was use one of my 2GB SD cards in a USB adapter. (I bought a 2 X 2GB pack and have always kinda had an extra one.) It worked just fine.

Worthy of note, ubuntu-eee was the pre-1.0 version. Once the distro debuted in earnest, at 1.0, it took on the name Easy Peasy. To compare Xandros on the Eee PC to Easy Peasy is not a comparison at all. Xandros required some acrobatics just to get repositories configured and updates proper. Easy Peasy just.works.

At Home	On the Train	At Work

I’ve included my Curve in a couple of the pics to show the relationship in size. I consider the two related in a way. I’ll get to that later.

That’s a screenshot of my machine in the Favorites tab. (Didn’t know I was on Skype did you?) I’d like to draw your attention to the Tweetdeck icon. Yes, it and Adobe AIR run in Linux. Takes just a little Googling to get them running. I later on had a tough run-in with AIR on my x64 notebook. But that’s for later in this ‘Toys and Their Joys’ series. Oh yeah, it’s a series

Well, there you have my initial netbook experience. Pt. II of this to come soon, well, yeah, soon. I’ll bring you up to speed on the current state of my Eee PC, and how I’ve been using it.

Looks like twitter tools is fixed again, so you can pick out the posts from twitter if you like. Personally, I’d like you to subscribe. My blogging style is quite robust & heavy with imagery, formatting and even videos. Sometimes this doesn’t fit into the 140-character lifestyle. I’d rather you view TreoBenny 2009 when you’ve made the decision to set aside some time and consume some good content. See you soon!

I started as an online student with the International Academy of Design & Technology in Oct. of 2007 as an AS in Web Design candidate. I have worked for a school at Northwestern University for 10 years now, and my co-workers all had snide remarks when I chose IADT Online. “What do you know about this program? Have you compared it to others? Aren’t you worried about the stigma of online education?” My replies were always very simple. IADT Online offered a ‘Web Design’ degree, which was very important to me (versus visual communications or digital media or whatever…) I felt an online degree was my only chance at going to college.

I believe in using the Web to its fullest: for communication, productivity, and of course, education. Why attend a fairly new program in the already murky waters of online education? To make an impact. There is newness all around me. I’m a new artist to a new media, a new student in a new school. There are two major ways to deal with newness: resistance, and complacency. However, I believe that all the great people of history, (and many other great people that will one day become great people of history) dealt with newness as an opportunity.

So…my first tangible effort of making an impact at IADT Online is starting the Graduation Committee, GradComm. To this effort I will be traveling to Tampa, FL, the campus that houses the Academy Online staff. The nitty gritty of GradComm is for another forum. This post is mainly to announce my trip to Tampa and a general idea of why.

Now for the fun…if you are in the Tampa area and would like to meet myself and other design minded, social media driven, fun times loving, and all around TEH AWESOME people, join us at Splitsville Lanes in Channelside Plaza, Friday March 20, around 9pm.

Listen to all the happenings of my GradComm trip online via:

	@IADT_GradComm on twitter
	TreoBenny on brightkite
	@TreoBenny on twitter
	TreoBenny on qik
	TreoBenny on viddler
	TreoBenny on seesmic