One of the best things I do on trips away is walk. It's a combination of things really; it's great for getting over jet lag, a fantastic way a seeing new places and if you do enough of it, a good workout too. I'll regularly walk 20+ kilometres when I've got a full day off in a nice spot, just seeing the sights, meeting up with random Twitter followers and taking some time out in nice spots to get a bit of work done. Which brings me to the Lenovo angle.
I've always been of the mindset that a serious laptop I can actually do stuff with must have serious grunt. Serious grunt, in turn dictates heft, as demonstrated by the P50 I wrote about almost a year ago. Xeon processor, 64GB of RAM, 15.6" screen, several disks and as a result, quite some number of KGs, not to mention a large form factor. I would have been perfectly happy continuing to buy machines like that and later, as Lenovo invited me into their Insiders program, perfectly happy for them to send them to me. And then they sent me the Yoga 900 which at first glance, I thought was, well, "cute". It's still an i7 with 16GB of RAM, but it's obviously a small form factor and super light, only half the weight of the P50.
Anyway, the point was not to harp on the machine itself, rather to observe that it's now the thing I've become very dependent on when I'm genuinely mobile. For example, I'm writing this blog post on it now here:
I took the jet ski over here to Tipplers cafe on South Stradbroke island and it has just large enough room to chuck a small backpack in the front that fits the Yoga. It's not all fun and games mind you, there's genuine native threats here I have to fend off:
But getting back to walking, whilst I was in San Fran last week I thought I'd do a bit of an epic one and ended up covering just over 51km. I took the Yoga in the backpack and just snapped off interesting pics as I went, stopping every few hours to grab a coffee and some food whilst getting some work done. Here's where I went and then all the bits I saw that I thought were interesting (at least to an Aussie tourist):
