• Location: Redmond Town Center
• Mood: calm
• Music: Ambient noise of people, store speaker systems, and a fountain

Work and recreation

I've been issued a Chromebook for work. Unlike all other computers my employer can issue, I've been requested to use this one for personal use (and let other people use it!) instead of defending it violently for work. I suppose that's confidence in the encryption and heavy-duty user isolation model.

I've negotiated an agreement with my boss: 1GB of cellular data is covered by the company per month, but I pay anything beyond that. My daily commute has about 15 minutes of sitting on the bus, and so for $20/mo they're getting about an extra hour of work per week out of me, for the 3/5 of mornings I spend checking my e-mail. This requires only a small fraction of the data, so the rest is for me to use, or more than that if I'd like to pay for the service.

I am discovering that having a cellular Internet connection on a very portable laptop-form-factor web browser with a long battery is a pleasant thing. So far, it's been put to good use getting me out of the summer heat; the air conditioner at the grocery store is a wonderful thing. But it's also let me just plain enjoy Redmond more. If I want to be out and about, but I don't have anything to do or that I want to do, that doesn't have to stop me; grab the computer and just go somewhere, and either something to do will come up or it won't, and it doesn't bother me either way.

So I suppose it's not about actually using it to browse the Internet whereeever. That's the idea, but just the idea of having it is enough to let me enjoy my community, even though I rarely use it.

I've migrated to DreamWidth. The original post is at http://kistaro.dreamwidth.org/485461.html. View comments at http://kistaro.dreamwidth.org/485461.html#comments; go ahead and use OpenID to post your own, or you can comment here.