Score a win for my netbook

I gave a talk at the Berkeley Institute of Design seminar yesterday. Since I was taking public transit (light rail – bus – BART, oh my!), I decided to use my netbook to give the talk rather than lugging up one of my laptops. Overall I have to say it was a win for the netbook; noticeably easier to tote to and from the light rail station (around a 20 minute walk), and it handled projecting my slides just fine.  The one area for improvement would be that the netbook doesn’t handle projecting slides and showing them on the built-in display well; it opts for a lower resolution than projecting alone would provide.  So I ended up just showing my slides on the projector, which has the drawback that I have to look at the screen to see what slide I’m on.  An annoyance, but not a showstopper.

And I have to say, Berkeley students much less wired into the Silicon Valley technology craze than Stanford students. Every time I talk to the latter they’re up on start ups and new application/service ideas that I haven’t even heard of yet. The Berkeley students, by contrast, hadn’t heard of some services I was using regularly and could muster a bare handful of students with cutting edge mobile devices (note to Berkeley profs: get your students better equipment).