Reading Is Reading, Whether Ebook Or Paper Book
July 3rd, 2011 § Leave a Comment
USA Today had a good piece today on the popularity of ebooks and ebook readers such as the Kindle. I thought this bit was good:
At the same time, some things won’t change. Reading is still a quiet, solitary engagement between you and the text, whether that text is printed on dead trees or in e-ink on a screen. The experience of getting sucked into a great story doesn’t differ, according to e-reader owners.
If anything, the growing popularity of ebooks shows that readers are still willing to pay for good writing, despite the profusion of free content available online. In that sense, it’s a reaffirmation of the old publishing business model.
I read a whole lot more now that I have my Kindle. There are a bunch of the classics that I have always wanted to read and nearly all of them are free from the Amazon Kindle store. Right now I am on a Tolstoy kick. I am enjoying him so much I think I am going to tackle his epic War And Peace. There is a reason that the classics are just that, classics. They are phenomenal books.
I’m Gonna See Rush!
April 25th, 2011 § 1 Comment
Yeah baby! My tickets to see Rush in Austin in June came in the mail today.
This is going to be good.
Filming The Hobbit
April 15th, 2011 § 1 Comment
I can’t wait to see this.
I love all of Tolkien’s stories of Middle Earth.
A Kindle’s For Reading, An iPad’s For Playing
December 28th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Wired.com’s Epicenter blog has a story about the success of the Amazon Kindle ebook reader this holiday season. In the article they quote Amazon chief Jeff Bezos about how many folks that own Apple iPads, also use Kindles for reading.
“Customers report using their LCD tablets for games, movies, and web browsing and their Kindles for reading sessions,” Bezos said in a statement. “They report preferring Kindle for reading because it weighs less, eliminates battery anxiety with its month-long battery life, and has the advanced paper-like Pearl e-ink display that reduces eye-strain, doesn’t interfere with sleep patterns at bedtime, and works outside in direct sunlight, an important consideration especially for vacation reading.”
I have a 1st generation Kindle and an iPad. I recently upgraded my wife’s 1st gen Kindle with a Kindle 3. It’s all I can do to keep from hitting the “Add To Cart” button on a Kindle 3 for myself.
I do have to agree with Bezos about the Kindle’s superior reading experience. Right now I am reading a P.G. Wodehouse book on the Apple iPad iBooks app, and a theology book on my Kindle. While the iBooks experience is prettier, the Kindle experience is much more book like.
Hey Santa, if you have have an leftover Kindle 3 in your sack, would you throw it my way, pretty please?
BJ’s Brewhouse Pumpkin Ale
November 6th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Today was my wife’s birthday. As is our normal custom, we let her pick the restaurant for her birthday dinner. Even though it was her birthday, I feel like I got the present because she picked one of my favorite restaurants, BJ’s Restaurant & Brewhouse. I always enjoy going there because it’s one of the few places locally that you can get a good craft or microbrewed beer on tap.
Today was no exception, as I had their Pumpkin Ale.
BJ’s classifies the style as a Spiced Beer. The best way I can describe this beer is to imagine if you combined beer with a pumpkin pie. It was sweet, slightly spicy and according to my wife it “smelled like fall”. In fact it’s sweetness means it would make a great desert beer. It was easy to drink and had a reasonable alcohol content.
It’s definitely worth having again sometime.
So I Changed My Mind
June 25th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
I know, I know.
I previously posted that I was not going to get an iPad. However, recently I broke down and ordered one. In fact, I got a 32gb. iPad 3G.
I have had it for a couple of weeks now. I have started to get it integrated into my normal workflow. I was a bit skeptical at first that it would only be a nice “toy”. However, now that I have had a chance to get used to it I can honestly say that it is proving to be a fabulously useful device.
I had an iPhone 3G for about two years. I really enjoyed the device but the real drawback of using it for any real work was it’s small size. The iPad with it’s much larger screen does not have those drawbacks.
For example, I like to look at my calendar in the whole month view. On the iPhone you saw a little dot in each day cell if there was a calendar item. You had to click on the day cell to see what was on the calendar for that day. The iPad’s month view actually shows the calendar entry and not just a dot.
For the most part the web browsing experience is not far from what you’d get with a laptop as long as the website you are trying to view doesn’t rely of Adobe’s Flash. For the most part, the sites I frequent are not heavily Flash dependent so this isn’t a real problem for me.
The on screen keyboard is actually a lot easier to type on than what you might expect in fact, if you are in portrait mode, I am just about as fast typing on it as I am on a real keyboard.
I’ve been using mine a work a lot lately. There are a few others in my line of work that have taken to them too. In fact, here’s a post from one of them about his experiences.
So far I have been suitably impressed by the whole thing. I think it will be very interesting to see how this platform evolves in the future.
Rube Goldberg Machine
March 2nd, 2010 § Leave a Comment
This is a cool video. There is also a great article over at Wired that talks about how it was produced. There are also some behind the scenes videos in the story.
No iPad For Me Thank You
January 31st, 2010 § 3 Comments
This past week saw the much heralded announcement of Apple’s new device, the iPad. Apple’s products are legendary for spawning a legion of devoted fans. As someone who has been using Apple computers since my Apple II+ in the 1980’s I am well aware of the wonderful innovations that Apple has been responsible for.
This time however, I just can’t justify this device. I have a couple of nice laptops, a MacBook and a 17” Dell Inspiron. I also have an iPhone, or as Andy Ihnatko is now calling it, the iPad Nano. Steve Jobs is hawking the iPad as the device that is supposed to fit between the laptop and the iPhone. For some reason though, I’m not feeling like there is a huge gap there that needs filling.
Maybe an ebook reader is a niche between laptop and iPhone, but I already have a Kindle. In fact I love my Kindle. One of the best features of the Kindle is the E-Ink display which is very easy on the eyes and is a very close approximation of reading paper and ink. Apple’s iPad has a backlit LCD display that while likely gorgeous, is probably not going to be as good a reading experience as the Kindle’s E-Ink.
Also, as the proud owner of several iterations of Apple Newtons, I can tell you that sometimes being an early adopter of groundbreaking Apple products isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. I’d caution anyone wanting an iPad to wait for v.2, or at least v1.2 of the product before taking the plunge. I don’t doubt that it’s going to be a huge, groundbreaking success but I don’t see it gaining momentum for a few years yet. Sort of like what happened with the iPhone.
Are You A Mac Or A PC?
December 12th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
I purchased a new computer recently. My MacBook was getting a bit long in the tooth. After four years and three hard drives, I figured it was about time to replace it.
As the concept of cloud computing is getting more practical, I have been migrating most of my workflow to the cloud. I do all my email via GMail, much of my writing is done using Google Docs, I keep my calendar on Google Calendar, my personal website is hosted on WordPress and my work related blog is on Blogger.
A few months ago, my MacBook hard drive failed for the third time. I was without my MacBook for a little over a week and ended up using my Dell Mini 9 netbook which runs Ubuntu Netbook Remix linux solely for that time. With the exception of iTunes, I barely noticed any changes in my workflow.
My wife gave me the go ahead to purchase a new laptop. Because of some writing and other projects I have been working on lately, I really have been wanting a laptop with a 17” screen. I looked at Apple’s 17” MacBook Pro. As I priced it, I found that I was looking at spending nearly $3,000 to get what I wanted.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized how much overkill this would be for what I usually do. If I can do nearly everything I need to on a $229 netbook (with the exception of screen real estate) $3,000 was just too much for me to spend. Instead I ended up purchasing a 17” Dell Inspiron for about $800.
TechCrunch had a good article on the difference in philosophy between Macs and PC’s. In it, they liken computers to cars. The PC would be a Toyota Camry and the Mac would be a Porsche.
That’s not to say the Camry sucks or that the Porsche is perfect. They’re just two different cars that cater to different markets. And they represent the two different goals that most Windows-based PCs have (market share) versus Apple’s Mac computers (high-end revenue share).
I was driving home from work the other day and someone in a Porsche convertible passed me. It was a really nice car and I am sure it’s a blast to drive. However, as I continued home in my Toyota Corolla, I thought about the fact that as nice as the Porsche was, I would likely never own one. I just don’t have that kind of money.
I guess that figured in to my decision to purchase the Dell over the Mac. It’s really nice, but I really can’t justify spending that kind of money for what I want to do. I know this is likely to disappoint some of you but so be it. If my geek cred gets too low I’ll install Ubuntu on it and set it up to dual boot Windows 7 and linux.
Only In Texas
December 7th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
If you’re from Texas and you like good beer, you’ll appreciate this.
Shiner has a near religious devotion here in Texas and for good reason. Their beer is really good. My favorite is their Hefeweizen but I can’t say that they have one that I don’t like.
The Spoetzl brewer was founded in 1909 and this year they celebrated their 100th anniversary.
