Road Trip Entertainment

Sunday of last week I found out one of my close friends was driving to South Carolina to help his son move. He had planned to drive his pickup truck and tow his trailer. Unfortunately the truck blew its turbo and he resorted to towing a smaller trailer with his Jeep Gladiator. When his wife told me the story I felt bad for my buddy and offered to catch a flight to Atlanta and drive home with him. I didn't expect him to take me up on the offer but he did. I cashed in enough frequent flyer miles for a round trip to Hawaii and used it for a one-way ticket east. Tuesday evening at 10pm, my buddy Brett picked me up and we started the 30-hour drive back to Salt Lake City.

Brett has always been a fan of satellite radio and so I knew it would be a feature in his 4-month-old Gladiator. In addition, he had two 8GB flash drives plugged into the vehicle's media center USB slots. Both filled with countless hours of music. We also had endless streaming possibilities as Brett has an unlimited data plan and he is not afraid to hot-spot his phone.

My wife's Jeep came with satellite radio and I have a few channels I like to listen to. Brett's satellite radio has an additional feature where it keeps the previous hour's broadcast of all his presets in memory. That means we could start listening to a channel and then rewind for an hour. When we came to a song we didn't like, we could jump over it. When we caught up to the current broadcast, we just had to switch channels to another preset and do the same thing. Talk about an important upgrade. It has me rethinking the relevance of satellite radio. It also turned out to be our preferred method of entertainment.

While we could have taken the quick trip home, we wanted to experience a different route than Brett took all the way to South Carolina. Instead of coming back on I-70, we opted to use I-40 through Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. Then I told Brett we could add 19 minutes to our route and drive through Wolf Creek Pass which was made famous by the C. W. McCall song of the same name. Brett thought that well worth the trip and so we made a slight detour through Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado. As we got to the beginning of the pass, we started listening to the entire album that contained the song as Brett had it on one of his flash drives. It didn't take long to get to the top of the pass and Brett turned on his phone's camera held tight in a cradle so we could stream the downhill portion to his Facebook account while listening to the song. The song only takes a third of the time as actually driving the pass so we listened to the song 3 times before getting to Pagosa Springs.

We had a great time on the trip and with all of the entertainment possibilities, the drive went really quickly. Of course 75 MPH speed limits helped move things along too. I don't know how we did road trips back in the 1980's with regular FM radio and tortoise-like speed limits.

Chromebook vs. Laptop

Yesterday I returned from a week-long trip to visit my son in Ohio. I still have not found a full-time job and so I am looking. As I don't have a laptop from my employer that I would normally use on such a trip, I took my Chromebook and used it instead. I have to say that I would have preferred a laptop but the Chromebook did well and met all of my needs.

I really had only two use cases for a computer on my trip: reading e-mail and applying to jobs. For reading e-mail, there is no real difference between a laptop and a Chromebook. I use a browser to access my e-mail and it works the same on both devices.

I wasn't sure I would be able to apply for jobs as easily on my Chromebook. Before leaving on my trip, I uploaded a copy of my resume to my Google Drive so I could access it on the road. I probably should have also uploaded a sample cover letter but forgot. My job search on the road consisted of going through new job postings that appeared in my e-mail and applying to the ones that I am qualified to fill and find  interesting.

Those that have had to search for a new job know that it is best to tailor your resume for each posting. I could modify the resume in Google Drive using Google Docs. Then when it came time to upload the job-specific resume, I told the job application website that I would upload it from a file. In ChromeOS, there is an option to use a Google Drive file just as if it is located on the device even though it isn't. I could also do the same with each cover letter. In my case, I had to create the first one from memory but could then reuse it for each successive company making sure to modify it accordingly.

While everything worked technically, the real proof of success is in the fact that I managed to get three different screening interviews during the trip, one of which is a direct result of submitting an application while traveling. That is equal to my results using my desktop computer at home. I have to say that the Chromebook worked well.

The only problem I had with the Chromebook during the trip is when I couldn't connect to the WiFi network at the Detroit airport. After trying for a few minutes, I turned my phone into a hotspot and connected to it. Then I could respond to e-mails for phone interviews. I only needed it for a few minutes and everything worked fine.

As I mentioned at the start, I would have preferred a true laptop computer. However the Chromebook is significantly less expensive and did everything I needed it to do on this trip. I just needed to plan ahead a bit. If my regular workflow was to habitually keep all of my documents on Google Drive, I would not have needed to do anything differently.