I know for myself at least, upgrading to newer hardware is mostly a big distraction from work or whatever it is I probably should be spending time on. That said, I had a mini9 for a few weeks and typing on that tiny keyboard was pretty painful, so props to Joey for sticking with it.
If Joey is reading this... It sounds like you are living in a remote place. It'd be cool to see a more detailed blog post with pictures. Also as someone who has lived with a flaky dialup connection for a long time recently, I can highly recommend mosh. Setup irssi+bitlbee on a server running under tmux. Then connect with mosh and attach to tmux. This way you get reliable chat and irssi should set the important flag for the window, giving you notifications of new messages too. You can also configure irssi to mark you as away when you disconnect.
If Joey is reading this... It sounds like you are living in a remote place. It'd be cool to see a more detailed blog post with pictures. Also as someone who has lived with a flaky dialup connection for a long time recently, I can highly recommend mosh. Setup irssi+bitlbee on a server running under tmux. Then connect with mosh and attach to tmux. This way you get reliable chat and irssi should set the important flag for the window, giving you notifications of new messages too. You can also configure irssi to mark you as away when you disconnect.