The Blaſphemous Bicycler

I was resolved not to go to work today, but I couldn’t quite decide whether I wanted to spend my day riding my bicycle or reading my books, so I decided to do both.

I threw my Kindle in the Carradice along with some provisions, and set out on the LVRT.

The LVRT is liberally festooned with park benches. I rode from one bench to the next, stopping to read a few pages before puttering off the the next bench, passing up those that were not squarely in the shade, as the weather was a good bit warmer than I generally prefer.

Given the rural location of the trail, I was surprised to find that the wireless broadband worked out here. I downloaded a newspaper, so as to stay abreast of world events while on my adventure.

I’ve never been a fan of actual, physical newspapers. They are too big and unwieldy to handle comfortably, and I can never seem to fold them back up correctly. I like reading the newspaper on the Kindle, though.

After much bench-hopping, and a few chapters of my book, I came at last to the Colebrook Twin Kiss.

After stopping for some refreshment, I reversed my direction, and continued my bench-hopping routine, until I returned to my starting place.

Today: 20 miles
July: 32 miles
2008 Utility Miles: 184
2008 Total Miles: 329 miles

It’s been about 100° outside for the past few days, and I’ve been spending a lot of time in at work nursing a dead Microsoft Exchange cluster back to life, so I’ve not been riding my bike at all lately. Watching email databases defragment does not exactly demand one’s undivided attention, so I’ve had the opportunity to do some more reading.

An Essay on the Professional Life of Mira Lloyd Dock

I bought this book at the Wildwood lake Nature Center . It’s a short biography of Mrs. Dock, who got the Greenbelt started, cleaned up Harrisburg (did you know riverfront park used to be a garbage dump?), and was ultimately appointed to the new State Forestry Commission. She was the first woman ever appointed to a government post in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
You can read more about her on the Department of Environmental Protection Website.

The book is only about 50 pages, so you can read it in an hour or two. If you are interested in local history, especially the history of Harrisburg’s ONLY piece of cycling infrastructure (don’t get me started…), you might like this one.

I give it 4 Jihadis out of 5.

Once Upon a Time in the North

I am a huge fan of Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy. Once Upon a Time in the North is a prequel to that story. You get to learn about how Lee Scoresby got his balloon, and how he met Iorek, which is kind of fun, but this one is much more obviously a children’s book than the HDM books, and there’s really not a strong higher-level story for grown-ups that the Trilogy had.

I give it 3 Jihadis out of 5.

The World Without Us

The World Without Us is a really weird book. The premise is that every single human being on the planet is instantaneously removed (like we all get abducted by aliens or something). It then goes on to catalog how long it would take to various bits of the infrastructure human civilization to fall apart.

Houses fall down, bridges collapse, wildlife comes roaring back to fill niches humans have driven it from. Evidently the dead zone around the site of the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown, is teeming with bears, and the waters around the bikini islands (where all sorts of nuclear weapons testing went on) are full of (slightly mutated) fish, simply because humans aren’t there to mess things up anymore.

There are lots of things in this book that are very interesting. It seems to hold out hope that maybe humans haven’t totally fucked everything up, and that we could, at least theoretically fix up the environment.

On the other hand, it feels like the worst kind of diabolical environmentalist wish fulfillment fantasy, where it seems like the author genuinely thinks the world would be a better place if humans went extinct.

That’s kind of fucked up.

I give it 3 Jihadis out of 5.

John Adams relies heavily on the letters that Adams wrote and received from his wife, and from various people in congress.

I was really impressed by level of the everyone’s writing in the 18th century. Even in short, private letters to his wife, his prose is very elegant.

I shudder to think that if, by some unlikely turn of events, I were to become a famous historical figure, some future historian might use this horrid little blog to reconstruct my life. Maybe I should try to improve my writing skills, just in case I become president someday.

McCullough basically edited together these letters along with the diary entries of all the characters of the revolution, and made it into a novel. Though I am not an expert in novels, but the book seems to follow all the rules of character development, etc, which makes it much more pleasant to read than a list of dates and events.

There is perhaps a bit more detail than one would like in a regular novel. I was not always interested to know what Adams ate for dinner all the time. Nonetheless, it was interesting enough that I voluntarily read 750 pages of history. I suppose that fact recommends the book highly enough of itself.

I give John Adams 5 Jihadis out of 5

This is the first (and so far, only) book that I’ve read entirely on my new Kindle. I had no problems with eyestrain (or any problems at all, for that matter). I think that for massive, 750 page books, the Kindle is ideal. It’s just not fun to hold a big heavy book in your hands, especially when you are near the beginning or end, and the book get very unbalanced.

I spent a good bit of this past weekend on airplanes, and I was very glad to have my Kindle with me. With an 8GB SD card, my kindle will hold 8,200 books. I recently learned that Thomas Jefferson’s personal library of 6,487 books was the largest in North America during his lifetime, and I can hold more than that in the palm of my hand, crammed into my coach seat, as I hear over the intercom that we are “9th in line for takeoff.”

Over the long weekend, I’ve spent about 15 hours or so reading on my new Kindle. Overall I’m quite pleased with it. I was really afraid that I was going to feel like a big dufus at having spent so much money on a silly gadget, but I don’t feel that way at all. At least not yet.

I put a few books into it. I bought John Adams from Amazon, over the “whispernet” wireless service. Unfortunately, I don’t have reception at my house, but if I walk to the park or take the Kindle with me to the office, I can use it to buy books.

The wireless really isn’t all that necessary. You spend maybe 1% of your time buying books, and 99% reading them. And you can always transfer books over the USB cable, which is how I loaded a couple of books from manybooks.net

The reading experience is very nice. The placement of the “next page” and “previous page” buttons make it easy to work the device with one hand, so the other hand is free to hold a beverage, or pet the cat.

The electronic paper display is pretty remarkable. The photograph below is badly out of focus, particularly on the left hand side.

In real life, the letters are very crisp. The screen is probably 90% as good as real paper. There is a very slight glare under some lighting conditions, and the contrast could be a little better. These are only minor complaints though. I think the small size and weight of the kindle versus a real book more than make up for them.

To see what I mean, here is the Kindle side by side with the hardcover edition of 1776 (I’ve recently become a touch obsessed with the American Revolution).

It feels much nicer in my hand than a real book, and its center of balance doesn’t change as you flip pages the way a big hardcover does.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with my Kindle. I’m not thrilled with the Digital Restrictions Management in the Amazon Store, and I wish every book from every publisher were available for the Kindle, but I am hopeful that these things will work themselves out in the ebook market the same way they did for digital music downloads.

Ubuntu auto detects my Kindle with no problem.

Kindle shows up as a USB mass storage device. You just download .AMZ files from amazon or manybooks.net and drag them into the documents folder on the kindle.

I’ve been reading on the Kindle for a couple of hours, and so far, I’m extremely pleased with it.