Jan 30, 2008

N81 - The Perfect Storm Companion

Today was the stormiest day I have seen in years (or in my entire life) here in Beirut. My hospital training was done at noon, and my 2:30 pm course was delayed to 4:30, so I had pretty much 4 hours to kill. Freakin Excitin! Being that my laptop wasn't with me, I went to the hospital library, the only place where you can get some free computers and a decent WiFi connection. I fired YouTube (that's what health specialists do in the hospital libraries :p). That's when I noticed something was wrong, the page didn't load fully and I got some sort of javascript and flash missing message (very hip computers).

That was it for me. 4 hours of emptiness I thought. Not really. I had the N81, the good loyal companion. Took it out of my pocket, took the Bose headphones out of my bag, connected and pressed play. There I was. Better. Much better. Then I fired OfficeSuite and used it to write down a post to be posted later on. That was one hour. 3 more to go.

With music still on, I fired up the gallery and saw the pictures I had taken of my patient's file for one of the case study reports I am due to finish this Friday. Using the N81's screen, it took me a while to zoom/browse through every picture, but it was still doable and I was able to skim through the patient's admission reason, his lab results, medications, medical history,... and the likes. While reading the case (ie browsing through the pictures), I had to check some medical facts, so I launched mobireader and used the Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine (a 9Mb ebook equivalent of a 2-3kg weighing book) as well as the A2Z drug facts and Taber's Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary, to get my information. Notice, I was in a hospital's library, full of medical books, yet the N81 did it for me: I stayed lazily on my chair and enjoyed the power in my hand.

Now that got me through another 80-90 minutes, so I had still an hour and a half to kill. Thinking what else I could do (with Europe - The Final Countdown playing on the Bose). I remembered there was WiFi around and decided to check my email, catch on some RSS and do some testing with emTube and MobiTubia. Being done with the first 2 in less than 20 minutes, I opened emTube and started looking for Jeff Dunham, he never fails to make me laugh. I stumbled upon Achmed's Jingle Bombss video, and that was a 10 minutes or replay, replay, replay, till I almost dropped on the floor from laughter. I decided to save the video, to later show it to my friend, another huge fan of Achmed.

That's when I noticed the 4 hours were done, and I hadn't felt bored for one second! Amazing! I packed my stuff and headed outside to see it was SNOWING! In Beirut! Snowing! And I didn't have an umbrella! Too bad the N81 didn't serve as an emergency umbrella... that's when you notice your do-it-all gadget still lacks some functionality... A friend of mine was nice enough to share hers with me, and dropped me next to my car.

You'd think it ended here? Well no! It was snowing in Beirut, and I had to take some pictures and videos. N81 to the rescue! Here are some quick snaps and a video I took while driving, 30 minutes after the storm stopped. You can still see some snow on the sides of the streets.


3 comments:

  1. I've had the strangest feeling that this will be the year I see a tornado. I've been waiting all my life.

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  2. ur lucky, I wish it snows in cairo :D

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  3. You're more than welcome to live in Chicago with 10 inches of snow this past week.

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