Day 3 - Internet Outage

Today I got the interesting privilege (trying to be an optimist here) of having my internet go out, which meant that I got to see, in a real life sort of situation, what it would be like to try to use ChromeOS without being online. I could still connect to my home network and such, just no internet.

Well it sucked. I knew it was going to suck before I even tried to do anything. The only app that I could do anything at all in was the Scratchpad, and that is obviously limited and not very much fun. However, webpages that are already loaded, like this blogger window or Docs, allows me to continue typing until I am connected, which is nice. Gmail, especially surprising, allowed me to go from my inbox to a new mail, which I then wrote (my contacts were even available) and then I just had to connect to send. Cool!

Not wanting to delve into my 100 mbs of 3g yet (we'll get to that later), I instead packed up and headed out to a Starbucks.

This, too, led to a mildly frustrating experience. Naturally, for your computer to authenticate and allow you to log in, you have to be able to connect to Google's servers. This is a good thing for security, as the computer being stolen does not in any way at all affect your files. Unfortunately, with Starbucks and their free AT&T internet, you have to connect, and then accept the terms of use to get online. This is also how many schools, libraries and other public WiFi spots are designed.

What this means for ChromeOS is that you have to sign in as a guest to authenticate, and then log out and sign in on your normal account. That's annoying. Or I could use a megabyte or two of my 3g and go that way.

However, tomorrow morning I'm going out of town for 3 days. Part of that trip is going to be measuring how well ChromeOS will stand up on a trip, especially given that I'm going to a remote-ish area of the Oregon coast and there's no telling if I will have a connection of any sort at all.

No pictures, I'm stealing internet from the neighbors and it's iffy at best. Also no OMG post tonight, although I'll try to draft something up and maybe drive into town to post it or something.