The wall is only a speed bump

It's all in your head, literally. I don't know about you but as I'm pushing, moving, striving, succeeding, driving, and embodying the concept of being an unstoppable force and that immovable object, I get a dose of reality and hit a brick wall. There are many things that I have realized and come to grips with over the course of my life. And some of the most profound things that I have learned all have to do with problem solving. I'm an engineer and a man of strong faith. This means I approach problems with a hefty bit of logic and a lot of belief in the impossible. Most people would think that these 2 things clash but they actually work together to produce tremendous results. The engineer and the man of faith have two things in common:

1. Nothing is impossible
2. If it is impossible I'm going to figure out how to make it possible

The average mind says, "I've hit a barrier. It stopped everyone else so I have to stop also."
The engineering mind says, "I've hit a barrier. It stopped everyone else when they tried to go over it. Let me go around it. I couldn't go around it so let me go under it. I couldn't go under it so let me keep chiseling away at it so that I can go through it."
The believing and faithful mind says, "As I look back over all the barriers I've been through I look at this as nothing but a speed bump"

Problems never get easier and they never change so that we can solve them. The best way to solve a problem is to look at it differently, break it down to it's smallest parts, solve each part individually, and keep on moving.

I thought this video said it best.

Net Books, What's the Big Deal

Finally decided to post something here. I have been trying to figure out and thoroughly understand the "new" netbook phenomenon. Adding more hype and excitement to this whole thing is rumors of a pending announcement by Apple to enter the netbook/tablet game. There has been a major convergence of digital devices in the past 4 or 5 years. Smart phones became smarter, PC's became smaller, and wireless communications (3G, CDMA, WiFi, WiMax, LTE) became more vibrant to say the least.

Enter the netbook; smaller than a laptop with the wireless connectivity of a smartphone. Not quite the power of a good desktop PC but then again enough processor speed, ram, and hard drive space to get the job done.

Why am I writing this? I feel like we've been here before (minus the phenomenal wireless technologies of the day).

Enter the Toshiba Libretto! What geek over the age of 25 doesn't remember this device?

I had the Libretto 100 with the following specs

Intel Pentium 166 MHz MMX, 32 MB RAM (64MB max), 2.1 GB hard disk, 7.1" TFT display

Those specs don't look like much now but at the time this machine was a beast! The real fun was getting linux to run on it. (Because running windows NT on this thing was a pain!). The best I remember being able to do was to get linux (redhat I believe) running with a console only view of the OS. It was fun while it lasted.