Living in Europe is a lot like living on Tantooine. All the fun stuff seems to be happening on the far side of the galaxy. When it comes to tech stuff that is. Macworld, CES, the OLPC project, Netflix, Renting movies on Itunes .. It are just a few things that are mentioned so many times on blogposts, websites podcasts and what have you. All fine and dandy if you live in the US, bummer if you are in Europe. Movies on Itunes (hire or download ? ) forget it. Ces ? No way to get there without blowing a lot of cash, Podcast expo ? only if you honeymoon to Vegas and get a chance to swing by.. But for the rest ? Some of these major tech meme's sound a lot like a loud party in the house next door. Fun .. but no way to get in. The only thing the net has done is peeked my desire to "get in" on all this. With the whole " Asus EEE Pc " it only got worse.

For those of you stuck under a rock , The Asus EEE (dubbed "Tripoli" by yours truly .. TRIPLE E = Tripoli) is a small lightweight linux based ultraportable. A little laptop with A 900 mhz processor, a 7 inch screen , a 4 gig solid state harddrive, 512 megs of ram, wifi and a webcam. It runs Linux (it can even run XP ) and is the Utopia when it comes to portability. There has been a lot of controversy about this little device. Most of it people complaining what it could NOT do. (Video editing, playing games, burning dvd's, getting Jenna Jameson to give you a blowjob) but that is not realy what it is designed for. This baby is built for sliding away in your geek-purse (yes there is such a thing) whipping it out whenever you have the chance and booting it up super fast to surf the web, read your email, pipe out a tweet or shoot a picture of your smelly socks with the built in webcam and sending it to the local dry cleaners. 

Looking at the combination of the price (400 $) and the ridiculous exchange rate dollar/euro I quickly calculated that this might be the cheapest 'porn surf enabled' device I could ever buy. So franticly surfing over to newegg and waving my Visa around .. I wanted to place my order. "Not available in the US" it read on the screen. Like poor old Luke Skywalker watching his friends Biggs fly our with the rogue squad while being left behind ..  I felt left behind too. Amazon ? Same shit different site. There was no way to get my hands on this baby.

So patiente is a virtue perhaps, but in hindsight (or should i say anticipation) I do think the "Tripoli" is a darn nice product. Forget the "macbook air" (snobbish peace of overpriced, underpowered anorexic excuse for a laptop) This is something you can really afford to forget on the train without knawing off your left arm in guilt. 400 bucks for an ultra portable ! What more do you want. Its like a PDA on Steroids.  Don't believe me ? Check out the video the guyz from It-idiots did on the Asus EEE pc.

Links : Asus EEE Pc    The IT - Idiots episode on the EEE-Pc