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

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.”

Today: 10 miles
July: 12 miles
2008 Utility Miles: 184
2008 Total Miles: 309 miles

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.

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.

That means the same techniques that work for out-of-copyright maps work here, too.

So, just in time for your 4th-of-July festivities, here is Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell Center!

I’m also working on Valley Forge and the Gettysburg Battlefield.

_{Valley Forge National Historic Park}

_{Gettysburg National Military Park}

Let Freedom Ring!

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.

You can.

Today: 2 miles
July: 2 miles
2008 Utility Miles: 184
2008 Total Miles: 299 miles

I have now done all of the AT between Caledonia State Park and the Susquehanna River.