New bike!
It's a 2009 Kona Dew Plus (52 cm frame). I added Planet Bike Hardcore Hybrid fenders and a Specialized Women's BG Lithia Gel Saddle (143 mm).
I'm replacing a 2006 K2 T:Nine Ruby (which is a T:Nine Tailwind with different paint job... here's the 2007 version; the 2006 specs have disappeared forever). That bike has served me surprisingly well, all things considered, but it was time to get a better commuter... Pics later when I have more time.- Mood:
curious
I had a hard time sleeping last night. I think I might have gotten 4 or 5 hours of sleep, but it was in at least 3 chunks.
Since I tossed all of my food yesterday, I had breakfast at Excelsior Caffe; I really love their breakfast sets, and ¥380 for a ham & cheese toasty sandwich and a latte really can't be beat. I like Japanese food, but I am not fond of traditional Japanese breakfasts.
After breakfast, I finished off my packing. To my surprise, both suitcases were overweight, one by about a pound, the other by about 10. I'm not sure how that happened; I didn't buy that much stuff plus I sent back some things with Dan when he came last month. Fortunately I had enough time to pull out the duffel bag and shuffle things around so I had 3 heavy bags instead of 2. (Ha ha ha)
I turned in my keys around 10:30, caught a cab, and was at Tokyo Station in plenty of time to catch the 11:03 N'EX. That put me at the airport just after noon. For my 17:40 flight. Whee!
The United checkin was not open yet, so I stood around with the other 20 or so early birds. After checking in, I went through security quickly and poked around the duty free shops. The duty free stores in Narita are fairly decent. I usually end up picking up snacks for the office here, rather than trying to buy them beforehand. I took my time today - I new I had a lot of time, plus there are a couple of people that I really wanted to get "Japanese" Christmas presents for but hadn't yet. After I'd pretty much covered the entire spectrum of gifts available in the airport I decided I may as well get some lunch. It was about 13:30...
And that's why you (whoever you may be) get to hear my ramble on about waiting at Narita!
Apparently you can get wifi access for ¥500 for one day. (Using the public terminals costs ¥100 for 10 minutes.) So, if I DO get stuck here, I can still e-mail people! Hooray for modern technology!
Hmm. 16:00 now... still an hour to go...
- Mood:
sleepy
But I have taken bucketloads of photos. Check out pixelate.smugmug.com.
I leave Japan in just a little over 12 hours. I can't believe how quickly it's gone!
- Mood:
melancholy
visited 25 states (50%)
Create your own visited map of The United States or try another Douwe Osinga project
I've actually only added 1 state since the previous list... I missed off Connecticut for some reason. In any case, I obviously need to step up the US travel.
For kicks, here's the world version:
visited 10 states (4.44%)
Create your own visited map of The World or try another Douwe Osinga project
I've been in Tokyo for nearly a month now, and I've been "meaning to" post an apartment tour for at least 3 weeks. The full set of apartment pictures lives in my "Japanese Living" gallery on Picasa.
( click to see pics )- Mood:
contemplative
It feels a bit weird coming back to this journal, in some ways. I hadn't really posted in almost 2 years, and not really been active for about 3. Yikes. (Basically, almost nothing since moving to Seattle. Oy!)
I can't believe I'm coming up on three years in Seattle. :( I've done such a poor job of staying in touch with people. Hell, I haven't even met up with
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
squiddevil yet, and we live in the same city. Oops.Anyway.
So, I suppose it's not surprising coming back to LJ feels weird. It's more or less in stasis from how I was 3 years ago. I've changed up my layout, cleaned the friends list a bit. (Mostly removing communities, but I also dropped a couple of people; primarily those I don't know in RL and/or those who haven't posted in the last few years. If you're actually active, drop me a line and I'll add you back!) Next on the housekeeping list is finding some new icons.
You can expect to see more journaling about the Kindle for a while. It's my new toy, so it's on my mind a lot.
I have some tentatively planned work travel coming up very soon. Depending on how the details work out, I'll probably be posting here A LOT or disappear off the face of the earth again sometime next month.
I hope everyone's doing well. (Yes, everyone in the whole world.) I haven't really gotten back in the habit of reading my friends list yet, but I'm sure it won't be long...
- Mood:
calm
Gleaned from Kindle customer discussions here and here.
Well, aside from the rather obvious http://www.amazon.com/kindlestore, where can one find content for the Kindle?
Note: Site descriptions are generally based on quick look. Most of these sites offer eBooks in a variety of formats, and none of them are locked to the Kindle.
- Downloadable Books
- Boys Books - (FREE) a bunch of classic fiction, with a general slant towards adventure stories (e.g. Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson) available in several different formats
- Christian Classics Ethereal Library - (FREE)decent selection of Christian texts, with a defnite emphasis on older texts. The various formats are not well marked, and they don't provide mobi format directly.
- FeedBooks - (FREE) found some books here that I couldn't find elsewhere, most of their catalog consists of classic books. site has user generated lists, which include fun things like Banned Books and The Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction.
- FictionWise - (pay) eBook vendor with a wide selection. limited Kindle support, and there is probably a lot of overlap with existing Kindle titles. I didn't spot the free books, but source link says they exist
- ManyBooks or MnyBks (device friendly version) - (FREE) mostly classic books with some new material, a very wide variety of formats
- MobileRead - (FREE) more community/forums than anything else. has a small selection of user-uploaded books
- MobiPocket - (pay)/(FREE) owned by Amazon; not clear how the selection differs from the Kindle store. They have a selection of Gutenberg books in their free section.
- Munseys - (FREE) more free classic books, with some contemporary stuff.
- Project Gutenberg -(FREE) 25,000 free ebooks; primarily works no longer under copyright. Most seem to be in simple text format.
- WebScription - (pay)/(FREE) mostly scifi/fantasy published by Baen, Tor, etc.
- World Public Library - (SUBSCRIPTION) classics, modern, government, multiple languages. Requires $8.95 yearly subscription
- Wowio - (FREE) all PDF so may or may not translate well to Kindle; currently down in preparation for their "global" launch
- Almost but not quite...
- FictionPress - (FREE) generally items by what you would consider "unpublished" authors. The books themselves don't appear to be explicitly downloadable
Related is this blog about enabling .mobi books for use on a Kindle.
I have a fair amount of travel coming up in the next few months, and I long ago discovered that it's simply not possible for me to bring/purchase enough reading material to keep myself occupied unless I want a suitcase too heavy to lift. So, I decided I could "justify" the purchase. ;)
Disclaimer: This isn't strictly a first impression; I was involved in some pre-release testing of the Kindle, so I have used some of the features before.
So, the first thing was determining if the Kindle really was going to be usable during the kind of travel I do. One of the big selling points for the Kindle is that you don't need to hook it up to a computer - everything downloads automatically via "WhisperNet" (aka Sprint EVDO). Unfortunately, this doesn't do you a lot of good if you're outside this coverage range, as I typically am on these trips. It turns out that there are only three things you need the wireless connection for:
* For some reason, Amazon doesn't let you put any digital items on your wishlist. This could possibly be mitigated with the new Universal Wishlist Button, but I haven't tried that yet. Save for Later is the Kindle answer to this. While browsing the Amazon store from the Kindle, you can "Save for Later" just like you would "Add to Wishlist" (but without the notes field or the priority). It's super handy; I have about $100 of eBooks on my list already. Unfortunately, it's only available on the Kindle itself, and only when connected to the Amazon store.)The features that you can do either via the wireless connection, or through your internet connected compuer:
Things that you would always do via a computer & USB connections
So far, I really like it. I find the reflective e-Ink display really easy to read. It looks a lot like a regular book. (Which is good.) The Kindle itself is nice and light, and once you sit down to read something, it sort of "fades away". (What I mean is, I don't notice that I'm reading on a Kindle any more than I would notice I'm reading a book.) I like the "Try a Sample" feature. (Amazon sends you a portion of the book for free. It generally amounts to the first chapter or two, but depends on the length of the book.)
Wireless delivery is speedy. Everything I've purchased has come super fast.
Selection seems pretty good. I went through all of the books on my public and private wishlists. About 33-50% of the stuff is available in Kindle format. It's highly dependent on publisher. Tor, for example seems to have embraced the eBooks band wagon with great gusto. Most of the bestsellers are also available. For less fiction/novel sorts of books, my straw poll suggests that liberal books are more likely to be available via Kindle than conservative. Of course, I have a whole stack of right-leaning recommendations from my parents, and my left-leaning searches were mainly Obama's books. But I noticed more left-leaning books in my random browsing than right-leaning. This is not exactly scientific. :)
I was also happy to see that the selection of technical books seems to be growing. When the Kindle launched, there was basically nothing in this category. I did a search for some programming reference books (C++ and C#) earlier this week, and saw lots of options. Amazon recently announced that O'Reilly is starting to make its selection available on Kindle, as well.
The books still remain on the expensive side. However, there are, apparently loads of free/cheap eBooks out there. (See this discussion or this other discussion for some starting points.) There are also some other sites, particularly some publishers' sites, that sell eBooks directly. I haven't checked any of these to see if they're Kindle compatible.
(Remember when I was talking about liberal vs conservative books like 3 seconds ago? I found it amusing that both of Obama's books - Dreams From My Father and The Audacity of Hope are available as Kindle books, but neither John McCain's Faith of My Fathers nor his Why Courage Matters are. (To be fair, they are available at RandomHouse.com in an unspecified eBook format here and here.)
Areas for improvement:
I think this has been long and rambly enough. If anyone has any questions about the Kindle, let me know, and I'll try to answer. I plan to post some more thoughts once I've played with it a bit more.
- Mood:
content
For those of you that were wondering, this is what the other end of the soda box looked like ;)
I ordered some t-shirts from Threadless (link to benefit
mikelietz, since he was my source ;). The cats quite liked my shirts. The one at the top is Ambition Killed the Cat, and the one Mithril is using as a bed is 99 Luftballons. The top one is the one I wanted the first time Mike linked to Threadless, but they were out of stock then. They reprinted it, and from the looks of things are just about out of stock on it again!I still kind of want Time Fades, but they're completely out of stock on the women's shirts. But that's ok... my wardrobe has swung a bit too far towards casual lately, so it's probably for the best!
Anyway, we're headed to GenCon on Wednesday. Every year becomes more of a production. At first it was a < 2hr drive, then a 4 hr drive, now a cross-country flight...
Oh well, hopefully it will be fun!
- Mood: curious
Pros:
GORGEOUS (even in the rain)
Job is A+++
Cons:
West-facing apartment with no A/C
I have no social life.
I've gotten "hooked" on crochet again. (Pun intended, sorry.) Anyway, as my reintroduction, I made an amigurumi doll. It's a kitty! (Surprise surprise)
I'm not quite done with its face yet...
I have "big plans" to make a few more of these stuffed animals for my nieces & MMZ's kids; I'm just not sure if I'll actually follow through ;) This one didn't take very long. I finished it (well, except for the face obviously) in a week, mostly working on it during my bus ride to & from work.
Watching the cats try to maneuver once it had really kicked in was both incredibly funny, and incredibly sad. You coud tell that they wanted to go about their normal activities, but just couldn't.
Narya stayed calm and sleepy. We put her in her carrier with no fuss, and she sat there (obviously bored) but not complainy. The rest of the day she just slept on the bed.
Mithril, on the other hand, got upset more easily. (I guess she's an angry drunk.) It took less than normal to get her agitated. Picking her up resulted in growling and biting pretty quickly. We got her into her carrier with on a little bit of fuss, but she started going crazy after about 1 minute (scratching and clawing at it to get out). This is much worse than her normal behavior in the carrier. =/
The effects lasted 7-8 hours. (It's hard to say for sure, since they got half of the dose an hour after the first part of the dose.) They stayed kind of groggy all day. And they still slept at night.
So, I'm hoping to get a chance to talk to the vet today to figure out what to do about Mithril. The sedative was not really an improvement.
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