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.

I like to read books.

I have about 10 of them stacked up on my nightstand, and probably half a dozen in the bathroom (yeah, I’m gross like that. whatever.)

I probably have a hundred or so in boxes in the basement and garage.

Anyways, it’s just too much. I don’t want to have to buy another bookcase to keep them all in, and they are heavy and awkward to move around in boxes.

So, there’s e-books. I have a palm hand held, and over the years since I got it, I’ve bought and read probably 20 e-books from ereader.com, and I’ve downloaded a bazillion from manybooks.net.

E-books are great, in theory. You can put a thousand books into a device that weighs 8 onces and fits in the palm of your hand. You always have your entire library with you on airplanes and for boring meetings at work.

The problem is that the screen on a palm pilot is just too small, and too hard on the eyes. EReader.com doesn’t have a very good selection, because Palm isn’t a big enough company to put any pressure on the book industry to make electronic versions of all of their books.

So, I kind of gave up on Ebooks, and now my house is overrun with paper books again.

Last November Amazon came out with an Ebook reader called the Kindle.

Many wankers in the tech industry panned it.

I don’t think that the tech-industry wankers are bookworms, and their Apple-worshiping user-interface nonsense is really not all that relevant to the needs of people who just want to read books.

The Kindle appears to improve upon every complaint I had with the Palm / eReader.com system.

1. Selection - This is amazon.com, Fer Crissakes! They can put some pressure on the publishers and get a good selection. There are currently 136,107 books available from Amazon. eReader.com has about 36,000.
2. Screen is twice as big — about the size of a page in a paperback book.
3. Screen is some new hot-shit, gee-whiz electronic-paper technology that is supposed to not make your eyes bleed.
4. Kindle books are $10. Not $30 like real hardcover books are.
5. Manybooks.net offers everything in a Kindle format. FOR FREE! Including the much ballyhooed Everyman’s Library
6. It runs Linux

So, today, I decided to spend half of my ‘economic stimulus’ check on a Kindle. It will be here tomorrow.

I really, really hope it doesn’t suck. My faith in the whole dot-com technology Star Trek utopia is beginning to wear thin.

If this thing sucks, I may renounce technological civilization, and join the Amish.

I was in Washington DC for a business trip a few weeks ago. I don’t have HBO at home, but they had it in my hotel room.

While flipping through the channels, I caught a bits and pieces of the HBO mini series John Adams.

My hotel had a replica of the Declaration of Independence hanging in the lobby, and I had a picture of Thomas Jefferson in my room.

And there I sat watching the revolution on TV. It was all very patriotic…

When I got home, I ordered the DVD set. It was astoundingly good.

It was quite amusing to watch the founding fathers arguing at the continental congresses. Whenever someone in a modern political debate goes on about how the founding fathers would agree with his position, he is at least 33% full of shit, because it seems like the founding fathers could barely agree on anything, including breaking away from England.

_{Mr. Dickinson wouldn’t even sign the declaration!}

It’s not all just politics and war, though. The love story between John and Abigail Adams is probably the most believable I’ve seen in the movies.

I really can’t say enough nice things about this series. I was sad when the story ended, and I think I’m going to read the book.

I hope they make one about Jefferson next.

I enthusiastically give John Adams 5 Jihadis out of 5.

Last week, I got myself a neutral density filter for my camera, because I was tired of having so many overexposed pictures. It worked out pretty well last weekend. Everybody seemed to like my wheat picture.

So, today, I went into the woods, all overconfident in my new equipment. It was pretty much midday, which means shafts of white-hot sunlight stab into to the deep, dark shadows all over every picture I took. Basically, all my stuff is simultaneously overexposed and underexposed, all in the same shot. Maybe there is come combination of equipment and technique that can counteract this sort of thing, but I don’t know what it is.

Anyhow, here’s some pictures.

I think this deer escaped from the military base on the other side of the mountain, and is actually wearing some sort of top-secret military cloaking device. You might think I’m just a bad photographer, and that the picture is out of focus, but she was out of focus in real life, too.

Honest.

This little waterfall is the first picture I’ve ever taken with my camera set to fully manual mode where you can actually make out what it’s a picture of. I guess I should be thankful for small miracles.

Today: 25 miles
June: 25 miles
2008 Utility Miles: 182
2008 Total Miles: 297 miles