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It’s been fascinating to see how The 4 Hour Body has provoked arguments and disparaging comments in virtually every online fitness community. Typically it looks something like this:

  • Original poster: Hey, I am trying Tim Ferriss’s fat loss program in The 4 Hour Body, and I am losing a lot of weight. It’s great. What has been other people’s experiences?
  • Response #1: weight loss is a simple matter of calories-in, calories-out. If you want to lose weight, you take in less calories, or put out more calories. I don’t need to spend $14 to learn that.
  • Response #2: Who are you to be posting in our community? I’ve never seen you post here before.
  • Response #3: What is it with all these people posting about The 4 Hour Body? I think Tim Ferriss must be paying people to go around posting.
I’ve seen it in Reddit Fitness, and at least a half dozen other communities. As someone who understands online communities, and as someone who is new to fitness via The 4 Hour Body, I think it’s an interesting issue to observe.
Someone who had not been into fitness, perhaps because they haven’t had success with diets or exercise programs before, tries The 4 Hour Body, has success, and is excited and wants to share their experiences. The established community sees a bunch of newcomers spouting off about some counter-intuitive fitness information, may have heard some controversy about Tim Ferriss or the 4 Hour Body, and so rejects the new community members summarily.
I want to address just one part of the conflict, because it’s typically the first issue raised: the established community says something to the effect of: “Weight loss is simple, you either reduce calories in, or you increase calories-out.” That’s what they say, but what I think they mean is closer to: “You either eat less, or you exercise more.”
There’s two reasons why this statement is in conflict with the principles of The 4 Hour Body:
  1. The 4 Hour Body fat loss program doesn’t require restricting food intake. In fact, Tim says, “If you’re hungry, eat more.”
  2. The 4 Hour Body fat loss program doesn’t require people to spend time exercising, although you can do 2 to 3 minutes of exercises before each meal for more rapid results. But 2 to 3 minutes of exercises does not equal 60 minutes on a stationary bike, or 30 minutes running.
Here are just a few of the differences:
  • The 4HB fat loss section emphasizes eating more protein, and no grains, sugars, or fruits. Protein itself has less available calories (3.2/gram) than is normally listed as (4.0/gram), and so it’s already a win over carbohydrates.
  • On top of that, the body directly excretes up to 1/3 of excess protein that can’t be used, whereas the equivalent in carbs would be more efficiently converted to fat.
  • By ensuring that people eat higher quality foods (protein, legumes, vegetables), they have more energy, and can more easily cut the snacking cycle. This may indeed reduce calories-in greatly, but it’s vastly different than just telling people to “eat less”.
  • The use of a high protein diet stimulates metabolism, increasing calories-out without the use of exercise.
  • Similarly, cold therapy stimulates metabolism and increases calories-out without the use of exercise.
  • GLUT-4 exercises (2-3 minutes of fast paced exercises) redirects incoming calories to muscle development rather than being stored away as fat, a term that Tim calls body recomposition. It is far easier to do and to sustain 2-3 minutes of exercise before a meal compared to taking 60-90 minutes out of your day to “go exercise”, and so most people wouldn’t consider this as exercise per say.

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I started reading the 4-Hour Body by Tim Ferris on Christmas day, and by Monday the 27th, I had started the fat loss program.

If you haven’t read the book, then I’ll try to sum up Tim’s main themes. Calories in and calories out is not the whole equation, he would claim. The kinds of food you eat make a big difference, and there are various hacks you can used to enhance the amount of fat you lose. (Check out my one page cheat sheet if you want to get an idea of what a day looks like.)

Tim says you can lose 20 pounds of fat in 28 days, while gaining 5 pounds of muscle for a net loss of 15 pounds of weight. So 28 days has passed. How did I do?

I lost 13.6 pounds in 28 days, going from 205 to 191.4. I lost 5.5 total inches (sum of circumference of biceps, thighs, hips, and navel). I’m using a bioimpedence scale to measure bodyfat, which is not the most accurate tool, but I did follow Tim’s suggestion of having two glasses of cold water on waking, and measuring 20 minutes later. I only obtained the scale two weeks in. I saw my bodyfat drop 0.8% in two weeks. In sum, I would consider this a good success.

For 4 straight days in week three, due to work stress and other events, I cheated on the diet, and saw myself gain back 2.5 pounds. Had I stuck with it through those days, I believe I would have easily hit the 15-pounds that Tim said would be possible.

Those are the numbers. Now let me give you the experiential perspective:

Week 1:

  • I start the fat loss program. The key elements are that I’m not allowed to have any grains or sugars, except on one cheat day per week. (There are other restrictions, such as no dairy, that don’t affect me because I didn’t eat dairy.) Meals consist of a protein source, a legume, and vegetables. I enjoy the food very much (I love beans), but I’m shocked by how much protein I have to eat. It takes about 3 days before I’m eating enough protein for breakfast (target: 30 grams of net protein.) Meals can be as big as I want, and I eat enough to make sure I won’t be hungry before the next meal.
  • I find that I really miss my snacks. I find myself in the kitchen at least once every 30 minutes looking for a snack even though I don’t feel hungry.
  • It’s hard to stick it out. I concede and allow myself 4 nuts in the afternoon and 4 nuts in the evening as a pure “snack” food. I continue this practice for all 28 days.
  • I also continue my practice of having a drink every evening, even though this is not strictly part of the diet.
  • I notice that sinus congestion, a chronic condition I am used to dealing with, goes away almost completely, probably due to removing grains from my diet.
  • Favorite meal of the week: salmon salad on whole romaine lettuce leaves.
  • I go from 205 to a low of 197, then enjoy my cheat day. I pig out, eating an entire tray of honey cookies that could normally feed about 8 people, 2 bowls of ice cream, 4 bowls of potato chips, 3 bowls of pretzels, 2 bowls of nuts, and a large number of chocolate candies.
Week 2: 
  • I am actually relieved to get back to the diet after making myself slightly sick on cheat day.
  • Cravings for snacks continue, although the number of times per day I find myself in the kitchen goes down slightly.
  • I am back at work in my office, and find it’s very boring to go through a whole day of work without snacks. I relish in the fact that coffee is still allowed, and even encouraged as it helps fat loss.
  • I start GLUT-4 exercises, and enjoy using the Thera-band Latex Exercise Bands.It feels good to be doing something other than just sitting in front of the computer.
  • I start using the supplements that Tim recommends.
  • I start cold showers this week, another tactic that Tim encourages to help the body burn fat, and start noticing a correlation between high weight loss days and the cold showers.
  • I start this week at 200 (I make it a policy not to weigh myself on the day after cheat day), and hit a low of 195.6, a loss of 1.4 pounds over my previous week low.
Week 3: 
  • Cravings for snacks diminishes this week, and yet strangely this is my hardest week yet. I end up cheating on the diet on 4 consecutive days. All of these behaviors I would attribute to stress. Only one of these is my official cheat day, and the other days I only have “small” snacks: a chocolate candy or a cookie.  Yet I see my weight loss completely stall on these days.
  • I start the week at 196.2 and hit a low of 193.8, a loss of 1.8 pounds over my previous week low.
Week 4:

  • Cravings for snacks is at it’s lowest. I stick to the diet for the whole week. When I have any intense stress related cravings, I get myself a cup of no-calorie chocolate tea, which smells great and is oddly satisfying.
  • I start kettlebell exercises.
  • I start the week at 196.8 and hit a low of 191.4, a loss of 2.4 pounds of my previous week low. I’ve gone from 205 to 191.4 in 25 days.
Summary
 
I feel like this is something I can easily stick with as long as necessary. I don’t feel hungry, I don’t have to count calories, and I have an allocated day to being able to eat anything I can. Compliance is easy, and it’s clearly effective as I’m losing weight steadily.
On the other hand, when I started four weeks ago, people said things like “oh, that was just water weight you lost.” I’ll be curious to see if I continue to lose weight as the same rate or not, so you can expect a follow up post in another 28 days.

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Amazon.com is an amazing online retailer that sells far more than just the books and CDs it was once famous for. Now you can shop for anything you could imagine, from computers to food, clothing to furniture.

But there are certain tricks that experienced Amazon shoppers use to find the highest quality items, the best prices, and get free shipping. Without further ado, here they are.

  1. Sign up for Amazon Prime. Amazon Prime is Amazon’s free shipping program that gives you unlimited free two-day shipping. If you order from Amazon more than six times in a year, this can pay for itself in avoided shipping fees. And once you’re a Prime member, you’ll realize it’s cheaper and more convenient to order from Amazon than make a trip to the corner drugstore, even for routine items like band-aids and shampoo. You’ll save even more money on these every day items, and save the time and gas associated with trips to the store. Not everything sold on Amazon qualifies, because some stuff is sold by third parties. But in general, if it ships from an Amazon warehouse, it’ll ship for free. Prime costs $79/year.
  2. If you are a parent, check out Amazon Mom. This program gives you the same benefits as Amazon Prime, plus gives you 30% off diapers, all for no up-front charge.
  3. Choose quality products. With many thousands of products in each department, you want to find the best products within your price range. Thanks to product reviews by other shoppers, you can do this better on Amazon than in a store (are you going to believe a salesperson? or what it says on the box?). Here’s the process to use to find the highest quality items on Amazon.

    1. Do a search or choose a shopping category to get started. For example, I recently was looking for a “CD radio”
    2. If you did a search, choose a department from the left hand column to enable sorting.
    3. Usually you want the department with the highest volume of matches, or the ones most relevant to your search. The search results themselves show you how many matches exist in a given department. Note the “Electronics: See all 5,442 items” in the photo below.
    4. Once you’re in the right department, choose “Eligible for Amazon Prime” in the left hand column, or eligible for free super-saver shipping, if not a Prime member. 
    5. Also in the left hand column, choose Avg Customer Review of 4 Stars or more, the top line. With thousands of matching products, there’s no reason to look at items with less than a 4-star rating. Many products will have dozens or hundreds of reviews. To achieve a 3 star or lower rating, a product has to be pretty bad.
    6. Now begin looking at the search results. You should have limited those results to high quality, free shipping items. It’s time to find the product that best matches the features you’re looking for. You shouldn’t pay for more product than you need. For example, I was looking for a CD player for my kid’s bedroom. I didn’t want to spent $75 or even $200 for a five year old’s radio. You can use the price limiters to set the price range you are willing to consider.
    7. Then look at the individual products, keeping three things in mind: 
      1. A five star rating is meaningless if it is based on 1 or 2 reviews. Look at other products, and get an idea of how many reviews products in that category seem to have. If they have 50 or more reviews, then a product with only 1 or 2 reviews is suspect, even if those reviews are glowing. (Perhaps they are from the manufacturer themselves?) 
      2. Look at the individual reviews to see what customers are saying, both positive and negative about the product. For example, I ended up a choosing a NAXA CD Radio. It was rated 4 stars, but virtually all of the negative reviews complained that the radio didn’t get loud enough. And that was pretty much the only complaint. Well, since I was choosing this for my kids room, and since I didn’t want them blasting their radio, that “negative” was actually a positive for me. It took a 4 star product and made it a 5 star product for me.
      3. If you can find something with 50 or more reviews and a 4.5 star or higher rating, you can be pretty confident that it is a great quality product you’ll be happy with.
  4. Buy groceries in bulk online: Amazon’s grocery store is like an online Costco, where you can get foods for about 10-20% less than you’d find them in the grocery store. This is great for items you eat on a regular basis, like cereal, bread, canned goods, and more. They have over 5,000 gluten-free items, more than 22,000 organic items.
  5. Use the Subscribe and Save program to save an additional 15% on items you use all the time, like coffee, toilet paper, diapers, and so on. Plus, because the delivery of the items can be scheduled, you won’t run short and need to make a last minute run to the grocery store. Between the discounted prices and the Subscribe and Save program, you could be saving 25% or more on the items you use most often.
  6. Use the Amazon Credit Card, and get 3% back on anything you buy from Amazon, 2% back at gas stations, restaurants, and drug stores, and 1% back on anything from any other retailer.
  7. If you don’t have Amazon Prime, and you need to spend just a little more money to qualify for free super-saver shipping, use filleritem to find inexpensive items to add to your shopping cart.
     
  8. Use the mobile apps, Amazon iPhone app or Amazon iPhone app to check out products when shopping at local retailers. You can use Amazon’s product reviews to see what other customers thought, and check to see if the price is cheaper online. And if you’re undecided on whether to buy it, you can put it in your Amazon shopping cart, and do more research later. Too often I’ve made impulse buys at local stores only to regret it later, thinking “if only I had researched it on Amazon first.” Now you can research products on the fly.
  9. Learn to Return: It’s very easy to return products to Amazon. If an item doesn’t work, isn’t compatible, or isn’t what you ordered, Amazon will pay for return shipping. For anything else, you pay for shipping, but Amazon makes it easy by printing the shipping label for you, and just deducting the shipping costs from your credit. And “compatible” can be broadly interpreted. For example, I received a pan that didn’t fit in my dishwasher. To me, that meant it wasn’t compatible with my kitchen. So Amazon picked up the return shipping charge. I think it’s much easier to return something with Amazon than with a typical store. There’s no need to confront a manager, or wait in line at a return counter. Just go online, and 5 minutes later you’re done. Then drop off the package at any shipment location.  

That’s it for the basic tips. You should be:

  • Saving 3% across the board from the credit card.
  • Saving 5-10% in free and reduced shipping charges.
  • Saving 10-25% on groceries.
  • Getting better quality products that last longer and give you more satisfaction.
  • Saving time and money on items that become more convenient to purchase from Amazon than making a trip to chain drugstores and malls.

Advanced Tips: 
Ready to go beyond the basic tips?

  1. Search for discounted products: You can search a given department to find only discount products. For example, if you wanted to look up discounted LCD TVs, you would go first to the LCD TV department. Then go to the url bar in your browser, and add the text &pct-off=50-  Hit return, and the page will refresh to show you only the TVs that are 50% off. You can replace 50 with whatever percent off you’d like to look for.
  2. Amazon Movers and Shakers is an Amazon page that lists those products that are rapidly rising in sales rank. Frequently these are new products that are just starting to be sold on Amazon, but sometimes they can be products that have a deeply discounted price.
Happy, productive shopping!

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Other 4-Hour Body posts:

If you’ve been reading the 4-Hour Body, then you probably know that one of the techniques that can help you lose fat faster is to take cold showers. Cold showers burn fat in several ways:

  • They stimulate your brown fat cells, helping the ones you have reproduce, work harder
  • They cause your body to compensate for the loss of body heat through shivering and a higher metabolic rate.
But cold showers have many other benefits as well:
  • They can help reduce or avoid depression.
  • Improves circulation, which is good for overall cardiac health.
  • Strengthens your immune system
  • Increases testosterone and fertility.
But how do you take a cold shower? If you just jump into cold water, you’ll be miserable. There’s a good technique that minimize the unpleasantness and actually maximizes the benefit you’ll get, because you’ll be able to stick with it better.
  1. Start with a normal, hot shower.
  2. Shampoo your hair and rinse normally.
  3. Soap up in the hot water.
  4. Then, turn the temperature to a low luke-warm. Nothing that you’d identify as cold, just neither cold nor warm.
  5. Rinse off in this low luke-warm water. This gives your body time to adjust to the temperature.
  6. Now, turn your back to the water.
  7. Turn the temperature down slightly, just a few degrees cooler.
  8. Wait about 30-40 seconds. You can count off one-one thousand, two-one thousand, or you can sing the ABCs.
  9. Repeat 7 and 8, as many times as you can. I can now go about 6 cycles of gradually reducing the temperature.
  10. I usually stop the cycle after my teeth start chattering while singing the ABCs.
The reason this process works is:
  • You still get to enjoy a hot shower to start.
  • You gradually reduce the temperature so that it is never an unpleasant shock.
  • By the time the water temperature is getting really cold, your upper back and neck are already somewhat numb, so you hardly notice the temperature change.
  • Using this method, you should easily be able to spend 5-6 minutes in an increasingly cold shower.
You’ll finish feeling invigorated and refreshed. Give it a try!

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Buy the Book!
The 4-Hour Body cheat sheet, meal plans and other tips on this blog are now available in Slow Carb Fat Loss, a handy companion guide to make the most of the slow carb fat loss plan. It contains two full weeks of meal plans, complete with recipes and tear-out meal plans and cheat sheets. Tear-outs only in print version, of course. Buy a copy today.

Other 4-Hour Body posts:

When getting started with the The 4-Hour Body fat loss program, which uses the slow-carb diet, you may be wondering what exactly to cook. Tim Ferris gives some great examples of single meals in the book, but they still may leave you wondering what a week of cooking would look like.

Here’s an example meal plan, based on what I ate for a week while doing the fat loss section of the 4 Hour Body. It’s just an example, based on what I like, but I think it holds true to the principles that Tim describes:

4 Hour Body
Slow Carb Example Meal Plan
  • Keep it simple, repeat meals over and over.
  • Protein, legumes, and vegetables with every meal.
  • At least 30 grams of protein at breakfast, and 20 grams at lunch and dinner.
Here’s the example meal plan by format:

Here are related resources I put together on the 4 Hour Body:

  • Slow Carb Fat Loss is a handy companion guide to make the most of the slow carb fat loss plan. It contains two full weeks of meal plans, complete with recipes and tear-out meal plans and cheat sheets.
  • The 4 Hour Body Fat Loss Shopping List: all the supplements, exercise equipment, and measuring equipment Tim describes in the fat loss section, including where to buy a kettlebell.
  • The 4 Hour Body Cheat Sheet: all the things that Tim describes in the fat loss section on a one page cheat sheet.
  • How to do the kettlebell swing described in 4 Hour Body. Demonstrated by Tim Ferris.
p.s. If you’re wondering why Tim Ferris has so many fans, it’s probably because of his previous book, the The 4-Hour Workweek, which is also quite excellent.

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Other 4-Hour Body posts:

If you’ve been wondering how to do the kettlebell swing that Tim Ferris describes in the 4 Hour Body, in the section entitled “Perfect Posterior”, here is a video of Tim Ferris explaining exactly how to do it.

Tim recommends a 20kb/44lb or 24kg/53lb kettlebell for men to start, and a 16kg/35lb or 20kb/44lb kettlebell for women to start. I was pretty out of shape, and I started with a mere 20lb kettlebell. (You can find kettlebells on Amazon.)

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Other 4-Hour Body posts:

If you’re reading the The 4-Hour Body by Tim Ferriss, you’re probably making a list of all the things you want to buy. I went through that over the last two weeks, so I put together a consolidated shopping list.

I’m partial to shopping at Amazon for pretty much everything, so links are to the products or closest equivalents that Tim recommends in Four Hour Body on Amazon. Prices were accurate at the time posted.

    • Thera-band Latex Exercise Bands ($~4.22, free shipping. These are the elastic bands that Tim uses for chest-pulls, the GLUT-4 releasing exercise. Strength varies by color. Small enough to carry in pants pocket.)
    • First Place Kettlebells ($60-150. There are many, many kettlebell manufacturers and sellers. This is one 5-star rated kettlebell that is available in a variety of weights. Tim recommends a 20kb/44lb or 24kg/53lb kettlebell for men to start, and a 16kg/35lb or 20kb/44lb kettlebell for women to start. Here’s a second link if you need a wide range of weights: First Place Vinyl Kettlebells.
    • Update 1/23/2011: I like these no-frills 4.5 star rated Kettlebells that ship free from Amazon: Body-Solid Kettlebells

Also, check out my post on the fat loss cheat sheet, if you’d like to have a simple daily schedule. If you like the cheat sheet, you may also enjoy Slow Carb Fat Loss, a companion book that puts together the cheat sheet, a meal plan, and helpful tips to the Slow Carb diet.

A reminder: none of this stuff makes sense unless you are buying and following the 4-Hour Body. It’s a great book, well researched and entertaining.

P.S. One other item people have been having a hard time finding is the vitamin rich butter, fermented cod liver oil combination recommended by Tim Ferriss. It’s not in the fat loss section, but I thought I’d list it here since so many people are looking for it. Blue Ice Royal Butter Oil / Fermented Cod Liver Oil Blend – Capsules is rich in Vitamin K and Vitamin D. Green Pastures is the only supplier of it. They are a family owned farm.

(Note: Like most blogs, I use affiliate links to Amazon. That means if you make a purchase from Amazon, I get a tiny (and I mean TINY) percentage back in revenue.)

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Buy the Book!
The 4-Hour Body cheat sheet, meal plans and other tips on this blog are now available in Slow Carb Fat Loss, a handy companion guide to make the most of the slow carb fat loss plan. Buy a copy today.

Other 4-Hour Body posts:

Please check out the updated version of the cheat sheet available here.

If you have been reading The 4-Hour Body by Tim Ferris, you’re probably pretty excited to get started. Although the basic eating plan is simple enough, if you add in the GLUT-4 exercises, supplements, and other activities, it can get confusing to plan your day.

I did my best to capture the eating plan, GLUT-4 exercises, supplements, and cold therapy in one cheat sheet for my own use, which provides a daily schedule for the 4-Hour Body fat loss plan.

It is not a replacement for the book itself. The 4-Hour Body is an excellent resource, well researched and carefully documented. The cheat sheet is just a helpful way to capture the most important information on a single page for people who have read the book.

4-Hour Body Cheat Sheet

4HB Fat Loss Cheat Sheet Download by format:

If you find the cheat sheet helpful, please check out the 4-Hour Body Fat Loss Shopping List, which puts together the supplements, exercise equipment, and measuring tools from the 4-Hour Body in one place.

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I was recently asked “What is the process for pitching an idea to a publisher?”

Although I am far from an expert, I am going through the process now of submitting my manuscript to publishers and agents, and so this was my reply:

It depends on the type of book. For fiction, most publishers want a finished manuscript, not an idea. For business books and the like, some publishers will consider something in the idea phase, but usually only from established authors.
Having an agent is a bonus, not a prerequisite (as some other people have suggested). If you have a finished manuscript you can be submitting query letters to agents at the same time that you are submitting to publishers.
Duotrope Digest (http://www.duotrope.com/) is an excellent resource to find publishers. You pick the genre of your book, the length, and you get back a list of publishers who are open to submissions. In addition, I highly recommend Preditors & Editors (http://pred-ed.com/), another website that allows you to review publishers, and get recommendations on which ones are good, and which are to be avoided (because of bad contracts, conflicts of interest, negligent on payments, etc.)
When you do have a genre, length, and finished manuscript, by using the two resources mentioned above, you should be able to make a list of 10 to 15 publishers that are a good match for your work. (Perhaps less if you have a novella length work, for which there are few publishers.) Start with the most reputable and well known publisher, and work your way down the list. You don’t want to sell yourself short by starting at the bottom of the list.
The best known and most reputable publishers will have the widest distribution, best sales and editors, and will do the best job of getting your book out there. However, just getting a first book published by any publisher (not a vanity press or self-publisher) will enhance the opportunity to get future books published, so it is perfectly reasonable to go with a smaller publisher too, if you are not accepted by the biggest/best.
It’s helpful to have a blog or twitter, and establish a following, because that feeds into the publishers consideration: if you will be able to help promote the book, then you will increase sales. On the other hand, publishers don’t like if you self-publish. (The merits of self-publishing is another whole topic – but if you want to be published by a regular publisher, they are biased against people who self-publish.)
Perseverence is key. Many published authors submitted their manuscripts dozens of times, likely spanning several years, before having it accepted. Authors talk about keeping the pipeline full: one you have one work making the rounds of publishers, get started on the second work, and then get the second making the rounds. Then the third, and so on.

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I’ve had my Google CR-48, the reference implementation notebook for Chrome OS, for a week and a half now. You can read my earlier reviews here and here.

The pilot program asked that you use your CR-48 as your primary computer. Although my employer’s privacy rules would restrict me from doing that for my day job, it was my full intention to do so for all other use, which includes personal computer use as well as writing fiction.
It turns out that the browser has some shortcomings as the primary user interface, and the CR-48 has some hiccups. As I mentioned in my last post, two issues include the lack of a taskbar/dock/start menu, which makes quickly launched desired apps and getting notifications awkward, and the lack of fixed menu/buttons in web applications, which makes every invocation of functionality a cognitive task, rather than a muscle memory task. (On most web pages, menus and buttons float with the content, rather than remaining in a fixed location.)
Add to that two other issues: The CR-48 is slow. Slow enough that even when I plan to do a browser based task, if it’s a big enough task, I find myself thinking that maybe I’ll just run downstairs and use my MacBook Pro. It also does very poorly on YouTube. (Hello, last I checked, YouTube was a Google property, yes?) And Pandora. And sometimes the simplest page refresh takes an awkward amount of time – as much as 20 or 30 seconds.
The other, lesser, issue is that resume is slow. Sure, the screen is on, but the notebook is still negotiating the wireless connection for another 10 or 15 seconds. By that time, I’m already engaged with the keyboard trying to get to whatever app I want, only to get an error message because the Internet isn’t available yet.
On the plus side, it’s still extremely portable, and has a stunning battery life. I went about four days over the holidays without plugging it in. Granted, I wasn’t using it that much, but in that time, even just standby mode on my MacBook Pro or a Windows PC would drain the battery. That portability and battery life makes it very convenient and tempting, so I do reach for it first – even over my smartphone when around the house. But the slow speed is a barrier to any serious use.
During the Chrome OS presentation two weeks ago, they said the Chrome OS development team had been using these as their exclusive computers for months. I can’t imagine how. Am I just missing something? (And how would you do software development in a browser?)
On the topic of the trackpad, I have figured out by trial and error that by seperating my fingers by at least a quarter of an inch, I can reliably right-click and scroll. However, I still haven’t figured out how to reliably click-and-drag, an operation that is terrifically easy with a mouse, possible with a Mac trackpad, and seemingly impossible with Chrome OS. 
Despite the negative aspects of this, I am still hopeful that some of the performance issues can be addressed with software updates. And hopefully by the time Chrome OS comes to market, it comes with a higher powered CPU than an Atom processor.
In the meantime, it makes a great second notebook, and fulfills the classic role of a netbook. But I’d like it to be viable as a primary computer, which is what is needs to be in order for it to have strategic value to Google.