Ok, so here I am at my sister-in-law’s high school graduation, and I decided to take a little walk… Guess what I found 
Exhibit A: football field full of ~300 people about to graduate.
Exhibit B: the industrial high-flow sprinkler controller for the field that somebody just happened to leave UNLOCKED
I’m sure you can put two and two together at this point.
It sure would make one hell of a final ceremony…
Today I went to my local coffee shop before work to get some caffeine, and was stopped on the way in by one of the local homeless guys. I’ve seen him before, and he has asked me for some spare change before too, but today, he apparently decided to step up his game plan.
He started by catching me between the sidewalk and the door, and immediately started telling me his story of woe and why he needed some money. It went something along the lines of this.
He said he was traveling all across America to panhandle, trying to make $50. He was going from state to state panhandling. A traveling panhandler, this man was. He used the word “panhandle” more times than I had ever heard in my life. He said needed the $50 so he could open a bank account and get a lock box. He then reached into his pants pocket and produced an empty wallet, save for a California I.D. card… he didn’t say anything about it, but rather, he just kept fiddling with it between his fingers. When I looked down at it, it most definitely was not his I.D. card, but actually that of a man of a completely different ethnicity, and what looked like about 20 years age difference.
Why he pulled the card out I will never know… but he continued his story without taking a breath or letting me say a word.
He said he wasn’t able to get a lock-box yet because the poh-leece have his name on file, and he needed a tape worm removed.
Yes. You read that right. It made about as much sense to me as I bet it does to you. But I digress…
He reiterated the fact that he had family all across the United States and needed to go see them and was trying to make $50 today for traveling money and a lock box. He then finally got to the point and asked if I had anything I could spare. I simply told him I would see what I had after I went and got my coffee.
While getting my coffee, I was trying to digest everything he had told me, and I was even more dumbfounded than before, but I couldn’t help but just start laughing at nothing.
When I came out, I gave him $2 cash and told him to have a good one. He then proceeded on to his next client.
What he is planning on storing in that lock-box, and how he plans on getting that tape-worm removed, I hope to never find out, but one thing’s for sure… that was an amazing two dollars.
Over the past weekend, I checked my Gmail on my phone and was surprised to see over 100 emails all coming from what seemed to be a bunch of random and confused people who were also receiving the emails. After a few seconds of looking, it became apparent that this was in fact a mailing list group for the Cr-48 laptop, and we were all on it.
I didn’t mind all that much, since I knew that it would be easy enough to remove all the emails at once, should I need to… but that’s not what seemed to be the general response from all the other people on the list. Many were upset about getting all the emails and being put on the list without being asked. Others were just curious about the list, since they knew they had signed up to receive a Cr-48, yet had heard nothing at all from Google about it. Some people thought this was how Google was notifying them that they are going to receive a laptop. (In all actuality, none of the people who got laptops were ever notified about it before just finding it in their mail.)
After about a day’s worth of the mailing list bouncing emails between thousands of users, one of the list admins finally put a stop to it and sent out one final email that revealed a key piece of information which they probably decided was just best to not hide anymore. Here’s the email in full, sent from chrome-notebook-team at google dot com:
Earlier this morning, you may have received a large number of emails from chrome-notebook-pilot-users@googlegroups.com regarding the Chrome notebook Pilot program user forum. We apologize for this inconvenience, and you will not receive any more messages from this address. Instructions for deleting these messages are at the end of this email.
What happened? We planned to launch our Chrome Notebook Pilot forum next week to all users who had been selected for the Pilot program. Last night, around midnight Pacific time, a user discovered this forum and posted a message. Unfortunately, we had misconfigured this forum to email every post to every member. Thus, the first post started an avalanche of responses. Some messages were unsubscribe requests, others were thoughtful comments or questions, but all of them were emailed to every user. We have since deleted this group.
We’ve created a brand new user forum, which you can sign up for here:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/chrome-notebook-pilotRest assured: you will not be added to this forum unless you sign up using the link above.
The goal of the forum is to provide a centralized place for Pilot users to share their Chrome notebook experiences and tips. In addition, with a centralized forum, our team can more effectively respond to your questions and feedback.
If you are receiving this email and have not yet received a Cr-48, you should be hearing from us soon. Again, our apologies for the flood of emails, and we hope you will join us at the new forum.
Chrome Notebook Team
—-
How to delete previous messages:Gmail
1. In the Gmail search box, type “from:chrome-notebook-pilot-users” and press Enter.
2. Click the checkbox to the left of the Archive button to Select All.
3. At the top of the search results, click the link that says “Select all XX conversations in Search results.”
4. Click the Delete button. You should not receive any more messages from this address.Other email programs
1. Use the search function in your email program to find messages with the sender chrome-notebook-pilot-users@googlegroups.com.
2. Select all the messages in the search results.
3. Delete the messages. You should not receive any more messages from this address.—-
You are receiving this email message because you requested communication from Google when you applied for and were accepted into the Chrome Notebook Pilot Program.
Google Inc. | 1600 Amphitheatre Pky | Mountain View, CA 94043
I found one piece of text quite interesting in that email….
If you are receiving this email and have not yet received a Cr-48, you should be hearing from us soon.
I obviously don’t have an easy way of confirming this, except personally contacting the people who were sending confused emails in the list, but the way I interpret this statement and the email is that all users who were selected to receive the Cr-48 have been added to the list, whether they have received the laptop yet or not.
I would put my money on the fact that it’s safe to say, if you were put on that list and had no clue why, you should be getting your Cr-48 in the mail sometime soon.
So I wanted to import my bookmarks to my new Cr-48, but was having trouble finding an easy way of doing so. I realized that my bookmarks were being synced from my Google account, but I never really had anything in there, since I use Firefox at work, instead of Chrome. I would love to use Chrome, but I can not set a separate proxy in Chrome like I can in FF, so it basically renders it useless on my office computer.
While trying to think of a way to get my FF bookmarks into Chrome OS, I first looked into Firefox addons that would help me sync my FF data to my Google account, bookmarks specifically – no luck, though.
Next, I looked in the bookmark settings and found the Import and Export utilities in both Firefox and Chrome. I figured this would be my best bet, since importing my bookmarks into Chrome would put them in my Google account anyways; something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time.
When I exported my bookmarks from my office computer, I saved the file onto my USB drive, then plugged it into my Cr-48. I was half-expecting to see some type of notification that I had just inserted a USB key, but I didnt notice anything at all. When I went to use the bookmark import feature, it asked me to select the file I wanted to import…
Unfortunately, there was only one box, and it was blank. Apparently, Google didn’t put in the ability to open files from, or even VIEW a USB drive.
This got me wondering if USB drives were even supported at all.
I was thinking of the other possibilities of how I could get my bookmarks into the browser. I realized I could have just put the exported file onto a remote web server, then just browse to that via the Cr-48, then save that file to the disk, then import that file using the bookmark manager… but I wanted to try something first.
I flipped my switch under the battery to enable developer mode, then proceeded to boot into a command line.
Once in there, I went to see if my USB key was actually active and mounted; and it was! Perfect… now all I did was copy the exported file from my USB key and put it into my Download folder on my home directory. After I did that, I was able to run the bookmark import feature and select the file I had just copied.
Now all my bookmarks were listed in Chrome, and will soon be synced with my Google account 
So when I got the Cr-48, I knew it had wireless built into it, but what I wasn’t expecting was 3G wireless built in. When i found out that it did, it made me raise my eyebrow and say “that’s pretty cool”. I wondered how I could utilize that, if at all. I figured I would have to basically find a carrier that would support it, and then sign up for a new plan and everything. It was something I was thinking I could do later and stuff, but there was no way I was going to do that for a test unit laptop.
Imagine my surprise when I looked into the details a little more and found out that Google is actually giving me free 3G service with the laptop
Apparently, I get a small and simple plan from one of the big cell providers (The big V) that gives me 100 megabytes of data to use per month for the next 2 years. Sweet. Sure, 100 megabytes isn’t going to go far in this day and age of the internet, but its a good backup for those times I’m away from a wireless hotspot. Then again, 3 days in, and I’ve already used 20 of those 100 megabytes… and that was only doing light stuff. I wonder how long this will last.
Anyways, it was really smart to make this 3G enabled from the start… this type of standard in laptops could really make a difference in the way people use them.
