Photos by Chuang Tyng-Ruey.

Em. and I were in Taipei on Saturday. At the invitation of Chuang Tyng-Ruey of the Academia Sinica and Creative Commons Taiwan, I did my “Jamming with Machines” presentation at the OpenTechSummitTaiwan2008 and also did a small performance later with PigHeadSkin, the first musician to release a Creative Commons album here in Taiwan.

The venue was ASUS Headquarters, and being a huge fan of the EeePC, I felt a bit like a kid in a candy store. I’ve been looking at one of these mini-marvels  for a long time now as a super-portable replacement for the current Ben-Q laptop I’ve been doing my live performances on. Essentially, the EeePC will have to be able to run one instance of a combinator in Propellerhead’s Reason, whilst playing a .wmv with my backtrack and backround visuals.

Though the EeePC is not necessarily intended for doing heavy duty multi-media tasks, I somehow feel confident that it will be up to it. Especially since the new EeePC 900‘s processor is capable of running at full 900MHz capacity with no fixed underclocking as was the case with the EeePC 700 / 701. It didn’t want to do too much fishing about future versions of the EeePC and can’t confirm any of the rumours of an Intel Atom based version or 10″ version coming soon.

What I do know for a fact, though, is that there is a later version in the works (ie. later than the just released EeePC 900) and that this version will come bundled with a couple of my tracks. HOW EXCITING IS THAT!!!

Honestly, ASUS have gotten it so right with the EeePC that I’m over the moon to be associated with it even in the smallest way. Deservedly or not, there’s long been this idea (even amongst the locals) that Taiwan is best at making copies of things rather than being innovative. Hopefully the slew of EeePC competitors that have been announced since its release will go some ways towards putting that notion to rest.

On the Amarok blog Seb Ruiz posted this pic of the very cool Mona Lisa in the lobby of ASUS HQ – made entirely of motherboard components.