Zibblog

Let me start with a plug for the Newsgator service. Their idea is to have an integrated one login system with client software that works well on every major platform. I used NetNewsWire on my mac for a long time and then switched over to FeedDemon since my work machine and main home machine now run windows. All my news reading at work and home are completely integrated and I find I like using a client app better than a web app for some reason.

Anyway, after reading Scott’s post, I wondered how I should share links with people. With the last release, FeedDemon’s newsbin feature got online sync and feed urls. Therefore, I can now create a newsbin that people can subscribe to if they want.

Here’s the link if you want to read the random items that I thought people might find interesting: http://services.newsgator.com/ngws/svc/ClippingsRSS.aspx?uid=113427&fid=3421340

This was my day today

• I confirmed with my manager that I was quiting my job
• My surviving grandmother had a (mild) heart attack
• My mother had an unrelated heart procedure done
• My mother got scheduled for open heart surgery tomorrow
• I heard from a cousin that I hadn’t seen in years from a comment on this blog.

All in all, the day was definitely net negative. The first was probably the toughest decision to quit that I’ve ever made, the last was pretty cool, and the other three made me remember the kind of things that are important in life and remind me how much of a difference Leslie makes.

For those of you involved in some way in my finding, getting, or agonizing about the new job, thank you very much. For anyone else interested, the company is pretty stealth at the moment, but expect some kind of blog post in the next couple of months.

I meant to post this a long time ago but never quite got around to it. This will probably be a trend for the next few posts as I try and get out at least one a week.

In January of 2006, there were two products at CES that caught my eye. At the time, I was sure that the sony reader (wikipedia) would make it out before the series 3 tivo, but that was not the case and the tivo is now sitting happily in my entertainment center. After a couple of delays, the Sony Reader made it out in time for xmas and I’ve had one for a little less than a year now, during which there haven’t been any hardware updates other than the occasional firmware. If you want to stop reading here, the main takeaway is that I love it and think that it is one of the most useful gadgets since the ipod nano.

The Pros

• The screen is eInk and is really easy on the eyes. It looks like the output from a dot-matrix printer on plastic. You really have to see one in person to get a good idea of how it looks.
• Because the screen doesn’t need power to keep an image, the battery life on it is really nice. On a trip to mexico for a week, I read 3 books and used half a charge.
• Sony actually built a device that will also take SD cards. In a similar show of openness, RTF is really well supported as a document type and is what I use since it supports reflowing of the document as you change the font size.
• I can throw it in my bag and know that I always have at least one book with me that I want to read. I currently have something like the top 30 books that I want to read next on it.
• The sony ebook store is actually pretty good. There’s been some titles that I can’t find, but I usually have so many books that I could be reading that it isn’t an issue. For example, recently I bought and read Patriot Acts only a couple of weeks after it came out in hardcover.
• Since PDF doesn’t reflow, it’s hard to get PDF looking good on the device unless you are constructing the PDF yourself for the screen size. I had some programming books that I’d bought in PDF that were almost unreadable since they were formatted for letter size paper.

The Cons

• The screen could be a little bigger. Mostly, I like that the device is pretty small, but a little extra screen real estate could go a long way.
• You’re stuck with whatever books you can either find unDRMed (I recommend Baen’s online bookstore) or whatever you can find on the sony store since the hardware and software don’t support the same format that Amazon uses.
• The support software (the iTunes like app for ebooks) is pretty crappy. You have a lot of control over what gets onto the reader, but not a lot of ability to have it do things for you automatically (like transfer books after you import or buy them). There’s a lot of places where they should have just copied iTunes but either couldn’t or didn’t. The software on the reader is pretty straightforward. The only big issue is trying to categorize books if you want to throw a large library on a memory card.

It sounds like pretty soon Amazon will come out with something that will also be wifi enabled but if you travel and read a lot (or just don’t want to lug around a bunch of books), the reader is not too bad for $280.

About a week ago now, my parents were out visiting, so my dad and I were doing numerous home improvements. One of the home improvements was to fix my dripping shower head. Unfortunately, we got the knob about half off and weren’t quite sure how to finish disconnecting it all. After a little searching, I realized that there wasn’t any good way that I could think of to figure out what shower handles I have. At that point, I decided to try a different tactic. I found a plumbing web forum that had similar topics, posted the picture above and had an answer in about 8 hours. Sometimes, the web is nice.

Most people have their little collections. At some point, I realized that preordering comics online is a lot cheaper than buying in the stores. For example, Discount Comic Book Service has a minimum of 40% off of everything. Unfortunately, instead of spending less money, I still spend about $100/month and simply end up with more comics. Last month, I snapped this picture of what was my current backlog. Usually, much of the stack is mine, but the top third was on loan.