A Bit Disconnected: The Nook Color as Liberator

Did I envy my friends their expensive iPads when they oozed onto the market last year? Not really. It’s not my style. I thought they were cool in the same way I dig Ferraris–expensive, stylish toys. Now this should no way be construed as sour grapes. I have finite resources which needed to be allocated elsewhere. If I really wanted an expensive toy, I could get one (well, not the Ferrari) without ruining my universe too horribly. I’d just have to choose one thing over another.

At the end of the day, I tend to be practical and pragmatic and ask myself one question, “Does this thing (whatever this thing may be) add some value to my life in some way?” Now, the value add doesn’t mean it has to slice potatoes and make potato chips, but I hate getting something I think I need and never use it. Then it’s ultimately a waste of money. Then it’s me simply burning dinero. I don’t know about you, but when I burn money, I like to at least enjoy the bonfire.

This brings me to the Nook Color and I suppose I could couch this as Nook Review Part II, I’m not quite ready to write that particular chapter of this wonderful device which is as much workhorse as plaything. Case in point: I have to do a lot of reading when I’m going through my team’s various projects and I have evolved or progressed over the years in my approach. Once upon a time, I enjoyed using the laptop and then migrated to printouts and then back to laptops and then finally to desktop units, but the Nook Color hits the sweet spot in helping me out with the day to day. I can take the brilliant little beast, log in to my server, and BOOM! goes the dynamite. I download the files I need to review onto my NC and I can read on the couch, the stationary bike, wherever. For the first time, I am not shackled to a computer. I don’t have the whirring fans or becoming the human heat sink like I’ve experienced with laptops. I don’t have to wrestle with a lot of weight. I have this thing I can easily carry about with one hand and access pretty much wherever I happen to be. I can read on it. I can listen to music on it. I can watch Youtube. I can surf the web. I can put my catalog of books on there. And I can read manuscripts in process.

I am delighted to have the Nook Color. It’s quite liberating and with the liberation comes a whole weird sense of disconnectedness coupled with a freedom hard to articulate, but I’ll try. In some sense, sense the NC is so strongly associated with fun in my mind, when I flip on the splendid, little beast and read a dev document, it doesn’t really feel like work. I can kick back, and lose myself in the project in a way I haven’t done in a long time. Translation: productivity should remain high. Repeat. Productivity should remain high. :D

Until next time, I bid you, dear reader, adieu!