I finally received my much-awaited Acer Aspire One this week and have been enjoying it ever since. I ordered the 1 GB/120 GB HDD/Windows XP Home edition from DirectCanada.com last Friday (an online store that is most likely a front for NCIX.com, which I’ve also ordered from) and the package arrived on Monday - this was with the free shipping option!

I’m still forming my final opinion of the device but my initial impression was very positive - I don’t have any major complaints. The device is well-designed, stylish, easy-to-use and very snappy. The 1.6 GHz Intel Atom N270 that powers the laptop is more than enough for the things you’ll the Aspire One - and it supports hyper-threading and so shows up as “two” cores in Windows.

The Canadian Keyboard

The one downside to the Aspire One that is specific to the Canadian version is the inclusion of a “bilingual” keyboard layout. Apparently, it is required(?) that laptop vendors sell a version of the laptop with this layout in the Canadian market, so many laptop vendors are just switching completely over to this layout for their Canadian versions in order to simplify things and not have to deal with multiple models. This keyboard layout differs from a standard “US” keyboard layout in two ways:

• The left-shift is shortened to half-size and a pipe/backslash key is placed to the right of it, between the left-shift and the ‘Z’ key.
• The enter key is not on a single row, but is instead an inverted L-shape. Another pipe/backslash key is placed to the left of it, in between the enter key and the quote (”) key. Thus, the pipe/backslash key is moved down from the “QWERTY” row to the “ASDF” row.

This is an absurd layout and probably no one more than I hates it; it makes no sense that a “bilingual” layout would require such a ridiculous change. However, after typing on it for a bit, it becomes apparent that it’s not that horrible. The biggest problem is the poor positioning of the backslash key, which makes typing Windows-style pathnames difficult. The extra key near the left-shift can hopefully be remapped using the registry editor or some helpful utilities.

Photos

Expect a full review in the future. In the meantime, check out of some of the unboxing photos below or see the full set in my Zooomr photostream.

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Heat: Everyone knows that when there’s too much of it, things can get very uncomfortable, especially if there’s an accompanying high humidity. However, a high temperature is also something that needs to be considered if you are training under these conditions. Besides the general notions to drink plenty of fluids and stay hydrated, excessive temperatures can also adversely affect your performance, so any benchmarks or goals you set for yourself need to be adjusted depending on the conditions.

Take, for example, the route that I have been running for the past several weeks. During that time, I’ve kept records of my run times along with the conditions that day. (Specifically, the temperature, dew point and relative humidity)

On days where the temperature was above 25C my run times were averaging between 45-46 minutes. On days where the temperature was 20C or lower, average times decreased to around 43 minutes. That’s roughly a 4-6% decrease in time when going from 25C to 20C, or conversely, a 4-7% increase in times when going from 20C or below to 25C or higher.

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I’ve talked about the Google Maps encoded polyline format before. While there’s some nice utilities for encoding polylines that take the work out of implementing it yourself, I couldn’t find many polyline decoders.

This made it somewhat tedious to decode them, as the only way to get the original list of points was to create a GPolyline and then pull out the points from that object. This is not ideal since the work must always be done on the client side with JavaScript and using Google Maps.

To solve this, I quickly ported the algorithm over to PHP from the JavaScript source. Please feel free to download/modify/use this script.

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