Well, I finally got an e-reader.
So, I finally got an e-reader today. After getting Janis a Nook Color for her birthday, I found it intriguing enough to take the plunge and get my own... still wasn't sure I would really be into it, but at this point I'll never really know without actually spending some time with one, so, wtf, went ahead and got one.

So far, so ... well, OK. Some things I really like, others annoy the hell out of me. The color touchscreen is WORLDS better, for me, than the "e-ink" more typically found in e-readers. The "PC application" is Windows-only... but it does run fine, so far, under WINE in Linux, so there's that. Battery life seems pretty sweet so far.

One thing that bothers me - the "lending" feature, which was something I heartily approved of, so far seems to require that you link the Nook to your Facebook account... /and/ give it permission to post on your wall. NOT COOL, B&N. I am really, really not okay with applications which can pretend to be you by posting things as though they were you, ever, from pretty much anybody. And to be honest - I am looking at you, Mark Zuckerberg - the fact that this is even an /option/ with Facebook apps drives me insane. There should /never/ be a legitimate case for an application making a post as a human being without that human's express consent, expressed beforehand, /for that particular post/. Anyway. Back to the actual device:

The feel of the device in my hands - which was a really big concern for me - is pretty nice so far. Part of how nice it is to hold is the leather "book" cover I got for it, which I am frankly kind of in love with - it's glossy, nice-smelling black leather, with reverse-embossed classical authors' names in big all caps serif text all over. I wasn't sure when I went into B&N today whether I would get the Nook or not - I was really leaning more towards a Samsung Galaxy android tablet. I'm still not sure if I would have actually taken the plunge, without that cover sitting there all seductive-like. Having seen it though... had to have it.

My biggest gripe so far is the interface of the shop. The Nook store is frankly fucking AWFUL - it's almost impossible to navigate effectively. If you just want to buy whatever is selling well, you're in luck, and you'll be very happy. If you have more specific tastes... prepare for some pain. You can search for author name or book title, which is great if you know EXACTLY what you want - and by "great" I mean "OK", because all you have is a single-level search. Better hope your favorite author has an unusual name, because you can't limit searches by genre; for example, searching for "David Drake" got me both the military sci-fi author and some young gay dude who wrote a tell-all book. Worse, there's no sorting even if you do get the author you wanted - not only are the books not grouped by series, they aren't grouped by date either. Expect to find a complete mish-mash of crap; in a series of novels you'll likely see #5 first, followed by three unrelated books, followed by #7, followed by more unrelateds, followed by #2... you get the idea.

You are also ridiculously likely to see the SAME book multiple times, with a different cover image. It's even worse in the "free books" section - some dude wrote his own Star Wars book and it's listed, I kid you not, AT LEAST ten different times. Which wouldn't be so bad if it was SORTED or grouped in any way, but... did I mention that you can't sort, or group, and your searches are single-level simple searches only?

Still, so far I'm enjoying the experience of actually *reading* on the device, and with any luck eventually B&N will sort out their godawful navigation issues on the store.
 

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so I brood on top of a roof for a while in my usual fashion

 

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I haz a son. I haz a son... I HAZ A SON!


Jacob Ruffin Salter, aka "Finn", was born at 0530 on 10/11/10, weighing in at a whopping 10lbs 9oz and 20.5" long. The two most frequent comments from hospital staff were "what a beautiful baby boy" and "wow, you guys gave birth to a toddler." I labeled the scale on the blueprint in cms, but clearly Janis built in inches!

Much like his big sister Jane (who was 9 lbs 9 oz at birth), he came out of the womb with eyes wide open, lifted his head up all on his own, knew immediately who his daddy was, and screamed bloody murder at anybody BUT daddy who touched him for the first hour and a half or so.



This incubator was in our Labor&Delivery room. We did not place Finn in it.
 
Current Mood: ecstatic

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99 problems

 

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Cheap Chinese netbooks: THE REVIEW
My friend Trey was looking for a netbook for his wife this Christmas. It needed to be as cheap as possible (her restriction, not his) - she actually wanted "a $150 netbook", which wasn't really possible. So, I ended up hitting eBay and discovering that it was FLOODED with interesting Chinese-manufacture no-name netbooks.

After pointing Trey at the most promising looking vendor (and promising to put a clean install of Ubuntu Netbook Remix on it once it arrived), he managed to score a "Tengjun Mini 1006" for $243 including shipping. (For reference, that's at least $100 less than a Dell Mini 10v - my personal favorite netbook - and $38 or so cheaper than Wal-Mart's price for an Acer netbook.) I was itching to get my hands on that thing to play with it! Today, it finally got here.



( screenshots and review details and INEXPLICABLE CHINESENESS insideCollapse )

All in all, at $243 this thing is neither a terrible buy nor a great buy. Wal-Mart is selling Acer netbooks for $280, so basically you're trading away a fanless heatsink setup and a legit copy of Windows (which only matters if you planned to run Windows in the first place) for $37 savings. That's if you're shopping the cheap end to begin with, of course; if you want the best then you're probably looking at a Dell Mini 10v with upgrade to SSD and - unfortunately - aftermarket upgrade from the Dell wLAN to an Intel 5300 half-height, for more like $450 by the time you're done.
 

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only two ways to stand out

Her: Did you see [particular person in crowded area]?
Me: Doesn't ring a bell.
Her: I'm talking about the one [add details].
Me: Sorry, don't think so.
Her: But they really [more details], almost like [exaggerated depiction].
Me: Honey, you pay a LOT more attention to individual people in crowded areas than I do. In general, if it doesn't look like it needs fighting or wants fucking, I probably didn't notice it.

I might be a Neanderthal, but at least I'm in touch with who I am, right?
 

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How does this even happen?
$customer has some of those god awful "control panel" servers... not Plesk, but the same concept. You get the idea. $vendor is forcing him to do a migration, because they no longer support FreeBSD, so they want him to move to CentOS. $customer contracts with $vendor to maintain these things... sorta, mostly, except he's still responsible for maintaining the actual servers. Confused yet? Me too.

( don't click if you don't know or care what SQL isCollapse )
 
Current Mood: boggled

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Jane pic du jour
Going back through the metric ton of Jane pics in my camera, this is one of my favorites. She was just under 4 months old when it was taken.



Clickable if you want to embiggenate it.
 
Current Mood: happy

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freak of culture like a white girl with cornrows
Last night I dreamed that I was a teenager again, and that I had an older brother. We were on some kind of screwy football team in high school, with a coach who kept advising us to bang all the (female) reporters who apparently wanted to interview us for the local papers. They were real sluts, and, apparently, wanted some kind of scoop badly enough to be perfectly willing to fuck their way through as many high school football players as necessary along the way.

Also, we were living with grandparents who turned out to be undead. They were feeding us human flesh to turn us into ghouls. And, apparently, the grandparents were going to kill us before the transformation was complete, and feed on us - only I ran away and turned myself "all the way" undead first. By RIPPING OFF ALL MY REMAINING LIVING FLESH. Ha ha, creepy undead grandparents, I win! I think.

I have got to find out what the hell the wife is putting in my drinks. And ask for more of it.

 
Current Mood: baffled
Current Music: Atmosphere - That's Not Beef, It's Pork

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a freak of culture, like a white girl with cornrows
So, the wife and I came home with another box of hand-me-down baby clothes, sized six months bigger than the last time.

Janis's role in this is to sift through the hand-me-downs and sort them into piles of "wrong size", "too stained", "nothing irrevocably wrong with these", and "hey I kinda like this one." My job is to look on, horrified, and advocate burning the entire lot of them.

One of the little 6-month size shirts this go-round had paired strawberries over the left breast, captioned "Berries" in large cursive text underneath them. Y'know, just in case some onlooker is simultaneously incapable of identifying a strawberry yet capable of reading English.

Wife: This one?
Me: Strawberry, strawberry was the neighborhood ho.
Wife: I don't know why they have to put writing on these.
Me: Yo E, she's a berry, let's run a train / Man, I wouldn't touch that bitch / Me neither, ho go home and wash out your beaver.
Wife: Well, I guess that's a "no" then.

I guess we can add "doesn't listen to NWA" to "has never seen the internet" when listing the qualities of people who make infant clothing.
 

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