Google Notebook: first impressions.

I’m typing this on my shiny new Google Notebook, which I found sitting on my front steps when I got back from a weekend in the mountains with my family. I filled out the form with Google on December 7th, and to be honest I’d kind of forgotten about doing it. So when I brought the box inside I checked it for leaking fluids or ticking noises. It had neither, but when I opened the outer box I was confronted with this:

(note: I tried to rotate this image using the image editor in WordPress, but for some reason the rotate button wasn’t working in Chrome)
I took some pictures of the box and the documentation, and I tried to get a picture of the screen as it booted up. To do this, I opened and closed the laptop a few times. Big mistake, because pretty soon I saw this:

So, before I’d even logged in, I had a bricked Google Notebook. Bummer. But, fortunately the recovery process was pretty painless. One 4GB thumb drive (and some tedious command line shennanigans) later, and I’m now working in the cloud.