Link is Down Message

This is a follow-up to a previous post, Strange Icons.
I'm still having occasional sightings of this mysterious wifi icon. While I don't have the answer to what it's all about and why it appears, I have some new findings I thought I'd share. The other day I decided to look around the Eee in easy mode. I was hardwired in, and I immediately spotted a familiar icon. It was just like the mystery icon I had been noticing in advanced mode, only without the red warning symbol. Strange. Why would it appear when I was successfully connected through my wireless router?

The next time the strange icon appeared, I checked the network connection tab. There was a strange status message - "Link is down." What link? And if it is down, why could I still surf the web?

I think I can safely say the icon is not an indicator or government monitoring or that my Eee has developed self awareness, but I'm still not sure what it means. If I can still connect to the Internet, it can't be that big of a deal.

I should instead be worrying that Christmas is in less than a week and I haven't gone shopping yet.

Day 40

My thirty-something year old cousin asked me to drop by her house today to help set up a digital photo frame that she bought someone for Christmas. I had a few minutes to kill between holiday errands and when I told her I'd be there, so I hit up a Dunkin Donuts drive-thru and found an unencrypted wifi signal coming from a hotel nearby.

I don't know if it's related or not, but the first site I went to (Twitter - I actually just got back in to using this site. Follow me if you'd like!) brought up a certificate expiration warning, and so did Gmail and Digg. It was then that I noticed the clock in the corner of the screen was off by about 5 hours. Strange. I figured something wasn't set up right with the hotel's signal.

Tonight when I fired up Firefox I again got the same warnings. It at least reminded me to reset the clock. When I opened the clock menu, I found the reason for all the confusion. My Eee thought it was 2018.

I don't know what caused my Eee PC to age ten years in the course of a day, but I'm going to assume it had something to do with connecting to an unsecure wireless signal... Unless it happens again. Then I'll have to find something else to blame.


And on a somewhat related note - My cousin was excited to see me walk in with the Eee. She told me she bought one for her 14 year old son for Christmas. When I asked if it was loaded with Windows or Linux, she guessed Windows. I'm half hoping that it's really Xandros - it'll give me the opportunity to go over there and spread the good word to a new generation.

Strange icons

Day 33
Last night I noticed something strange while doing some last minute emailing before bed. Normally, the familiar green bars icon sits comfortably in my menu bar informing me that I have a good Internet connection. When I glanced down, I saw a different icon. I was still able to connect to the internet, so it wasn't a broken connection. I was actually quite paranoid that it was a cryptic message from Asus informing me that the government was reading my gmail, so I quickly restarted the laptop. When I reconnected, the green bar came back, and has remained ever since.

Any ideas?

Strange messages from the Eee PC.

Update (12/19/08): More strange messages concerning this strange icon.

Thanksgiving with the Eee

Day 23

I went to my Mom's house for Thanksgiving, and after too much turkey and fixings, my brothers and I ended up on the couch - me with the Eee, and them with their Macbooks. Here's what I observed:

1. The Macbooks discovered the unencrypted wireless signal way faster than the Eee. In fact, when I first searched for it nothing showed. Only after I turned wifi off then on again could I begin the lengthy process of waiting for the signal to change from pending to enabled.
2. Battery life on the Eee is much better than the Macbook. After an evening of sharing favorite sites, blogs, and trying to RickRoll each other, the Eee's battery life was 60% and the Macbook was at 50%. Realistically, this means the Eee would outlive the Macbook by about an hour.
   
3. According to my mom, size does matter. She said I looked funny sitting next to the other, larger Macbooks.

Dorks.

Pros and Cons

Day 8

Well, I made it though my first week with the Asus Eee PC. When I first half-jokingly proposed the idea of going cold turkey on all my other computers, I figured it would be much more difficult. While it hasn't been all kittens and tulips, I must say my overall experience with the Eee has been enjoyable.

Since today marks the completion of approximately 1/14^th of the experiment, I thought it might be fitting to give my initial pros and cons of the Eee PC. If they change enough maybe I'll do an updated list every week.

Pros

Size

The idea of a tiny laptop was what drew me to the Eee in the first place, but I wasn't sure if the novelty would wear off. How would I handle a screen roughly the size of one on an ATM, and a chicklet-sized keyboard? Surprisingly it was quite easy to adapt, although I found myself typing with my pinky far more than I ever did before. Overall, I'm still impressed by the ultra-portability of the Eee. Besides, nothing looks cooler than walking down the hall carrying a laptop with one hand like a paperback book.

Battery

I've been getting about four hours of life before getting to 10% and plugging the Eee in. That's almost double what I usually get on my HP. I've yet to have it completely die on me.

Linux

I got into a Linux kick last fall, so I have about a year's experience on the operating system. I'm most comfortable with Ubuntu, and I have a desktop with Google's G Os, but I've played around with all the popular flavors. Maybe this is why I didn't feel too lost when I first started up the default Xandros system. I'm listing Linux as pro for all the usual reasons – open source, fast, and flawless. In the first week, I've only had one error message (with Firefox), and I think it was an Internet connectivity issue, and not with the operating system.

Cons

Linux

If I had bought the Eee before last fall, I might

be singing a different tune – and this is why I'm also adding Linux to my cons list. Using Synaptic and the console are second nature for me now, but newbies may run into some serious trouble. In terms of customization, the Eee only has extremes. Easy mode is too restrictive, and advanced mode is truly for the advanced user.

Wireless

I'm having one hell of a time connecting to wireless signals. To be fair, I have only had the opportunity to do so with my home router, so I need to do some testing to rule out the possibility that it's a problem outside of the Eee. On average though, it takes about six minutes to connect. I've googled this problem, and it seems to be a consistent woe on Eee forums and wikis. The machine detects the signal, but then hangs forever before connecting.

The dreaded pending screen...

Applications

Again, I'm comfortable using open source applications such as Pidgin, Thunderbird, and the OpenOffice suite, but I'm trying to write this from the perspective of a novice user. Xandros in advanced mode looks and feels much like Windows, so users may do some chin scratching when the try to click on a familiar-looking icon. Plus, even with Synaptic, downloading new applications can be iffy. There are no repositories, so that's an extra step to the usual search-and-install Synaptic bliss.