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It’s tiny, black, costs about £300 quid and attracts slightly unusual folk on the Tube like moths to a flame.

What is it? OK, it’s my new Eee PC. That was clear from the blog post title. This is its story.

Months of research, reading blogs, review sites, magazines… trying to persuade myself not to buy a Netbook. I’d just about persuaded myself that, while I was not going to get one, the one I was least likely not to get would be an Eee 901. In black. 20 gig. I was so set on not getting one I’d wandered all over Tottenham Court Road trying out all the options and despite their awesomeness, resolutely not falling for them not constructing elaborate financial models in my head whereby I wouldn’t have to worry about why I’d splashed cash on a flash laptop the size of my hand.

So everything was going well until I went to a dinner with some friends, and one of them – a young lady of several years’ acquaintance – thought she might show us her new toy. Lo, of course, it was an Eee 901. Like the smell of cigarette smoke to a smoker feebly trying to quit… I was drawn in. 20 mins later I’d free’d up a gig of her main SSD and convinced myself that my fingers were not, in fact, too big for the keyboard.

My girlfriend looked on with some concern, as I was clearly in the inescapable consumer tractor beam.

So, a little over a day later, I owned one. Ah well.

I was in San Francisco a few weeks ago with work, and as I had planned the trip so I had a Sunday to recover from my jetlag, I thought I’d do something which for a change wasn’t entirely inspired by the excellent exchange rate.

I’ve been to a few Modern Art museums in my time – the SF MoMA isn’t particularly big (not helped by one entire floor being closed for refitting when I visited) but managed to fill a good 2 and a half hours of my day without boring me too much.

The highlights included Navigating the Imagination by the appropriately-named “Jeff Wall” – huge, wall-sized prints of genuinely interesting photos. They reminded me a bit of a Where’s Wally cartoon – the sheer size of the prints and width of the lens means you’re constantly searching for the focal point of the image – in one, your eye searches up and down rows of identical American suburban houses until you finally realise why the photo is entitled “eviction” – there’s a tiny little man being dragged from his home as his neighbours look on in astonishment.

Also memorable was Take Your Time by Olafur Eliasson, which was a series of interactive/ immersive exhibits. It included a room lit with bright orange light, which had the bizarre effect of removing all colour from your vision leaving only contrast, a hole in the wall which turned out to house a series of mirrors giving the impression you and an infinite number of other “you”s were all looking out the side of a building, and an ingenious setup where walking on creaky floorboards disturbed a pool of water which was in turn projected onto the wall – very disorientating and cool.

I had some tasty posh gnocchi and a glass of red wine while sitting outside the front of the museum before embarking on a 5-hour walk in the sunshine around North SF – that was a good day.

OK, so I’m mainly posting this because it drives me mad every time I use a different PC and can’t remember how to turn it off. You know how, when you have a nicely-arranged slide containing plots, text and tables, and all you want to do is paste in the piece-de-resistance – a plot you made for a presentation a few weeks ago? Invariably, Powerpoint will promptly resize all your beautiful objects so it can wedge in the new one, thus rending pointless hours (minutes) of work.

There’s a simple solution! However, it’s not where you might expect it to be. Go to Tools> AutoCorrect Options… and then unclick “Automatic layout for inserted objects.” And lo, it will stop bothering you.

I went on a work trip to California in December 2006, and someone suggested on my way over that I could look into buying a Nintendo Wii.

“Pah,” I said, “what would I want with a games system anyway?”

A bit of research later, and I was intrigued… 10 shops which had sold out later, and I was HOOKED.  You learn a lot about yourself when things like this unfold.

So my weekends for the last couple of months have been dominated by streams of phone calls to Woolworths, HMVs and random games stores across London in the hope that somewhere had one in stock.  I found that the HMV near work had taken delivery of a couple at some point, and in what was approaching desperation resolved to pop in every day at lunchtime, just in case.

Of course, the only day I took off sick… they received 5 at once, so a very coughy and ill-advised (health-wise) dash along the District Line later I was the proud of a brand new Wii, complete with 2 games, an extra Wii-mote and a memory card.

I’ll be writing more about my thoughts later on this blog, but it’s safe to say that it is a really robust piece of design, and everyone who tried it over the weekend (20+ people) is now thinking about getting one themselves.

Nice one.

My biggest irritation about the many increasingly complex mobile phones I’ve had over the years has been the time it takes to actually answer a call.

You feel the phone vibrate or hear it ring, then pick it up or pull it out of the case, flip the screen around (in the case of my old MDA Pro) to see who’s calling, fumble your way to the “answer” button… and the call’s already gone to answerphone.

Happily, anyone with thumbs can easily change how long the phone rings for before going to answerphone, if you know these nifty GSM codes… (more…)