I am an avid reader of technical books although I often struggle in that my interests outstrip my time to read.  Now I am finding my interests outstrip my storage space so I am tempted by the concept of a Kindle.  I keep holding back for the following reasons:

• I can often get a heck of a deal on used books so the Kindle sales price is very expensive in comparison.   Seems like electronic books change the dynamic here in favor of the publishers rather than the consumer.  For example, you can’t buy an electronic book second hand but if you could there would be no degradation in quality so if reselling was allowed it seems like you could get full price for it.  As reselling is not allowed, you should get the electronic book at a steeper discount in my mind. 
• I really want Amazon to give me electronic versions of all the books I have purchased through them.  While not the reason I am holding back, it would be a HUGE incentive for me to move forward.
• Some of the reviews of the kindle seem poor. 
• In the end, my killer app is not an electronic device that helps me read books but one that lets me read pdf, word docs, etc.  The bulk of my reading is currently work related and not just book reading.  Thus pdfs are the most important electronic content and not a secondary one.  This extends from displaying pdfs too getting content onto the device in the first place.

One product that may meet my desires is www.plasticlogic.com.   It is a bit early to tell as I really need info on the software performance rather than just the size, form-factor but what I see looks promising.  It is due out in 2010. 

My other idea for serving this need is to get some sort of tablet pc netbook but here the problem is long boot times.  To pick up a book to read, you don’t want to wait 45 seconds for boot up.  Here again, I encouraged by some work by intel on a device with a 2 second boot time.  A PC like device should be able to handle pdfs no problem and with a big enough battery I could get the reading time I want.  We will see…

At CES they leaked lots of information for it and as far as I can tell, none of it was true e.g. No GPS, no mention of multi-touch mouse, no digital TV support, no built-in wireless broadband, etc.  On top of that, the buzz on the net is that it is limited to 1GB not expandable memory which is just crazy given most users will want to do what ever they can to boost performance.  I hear more version are coming but cannot help but think the phased roll-out is more for marketing reasons than anything else.  

So in my case, I held off purchasing the mini 9 for the mini 10, the mini 10 is not as good as they hinted so I will now not buy either.  Great way to attract customers!!! 

For the longest time I listened to the radio going to and from work and have been more a less resigned to nothing on.  I listen to AM 1410, AM 750 and 91.5 FM.  Generally, I am looking for news but frustratingly I often end up listening to Talk Radio.

I have managed to break from this and have ventured into generating my own programming by downloading podcasts to my blackberry.   With a 2 GB mini-SD card I can load quite a bit of content all at once and listen to it for several days before searching for more.  While, at some point, I will start looking for something quality news sources, I am starting off with tech topics.  Here are the current podcasts I am looking at:

• Software Engineering Radio – This is great and my current favorite.  So far I have listened to several pods and have learned something each time.  Probably the most interesting ones I have listened so is there second post on concurrency and Model Driven Software development. 
• Hanselminutes – My second favorite.  Scott tackles a diverse set of topics from the perspective of a developer questing for more.  Very diverse, from Mocking to Hiring.

I really enjoy the heroes TV show and look forward to it every Monday night.  First season was great and unique but I have enjoyed it since then aswell.  What surprises me is the microscope it is under.  It seems to me like their early success has given them too high of expectations to live up to.  In some ways it reminds me of a public company just looking at the next quarter rather than thinking long-term.  Yes, it would be nice to have small plots and resolutions on a given TV season, but they should be targeting for a longer horizon as that is what will allow them to make it long term.  All shows eventually spiral into predictable patterns and run out of plots, lets take it slow.

Still waiting for details on the dell mini 10 netbook.  Seems like a good form factor, a gps, a multi-touch pad, broadband, 2 GB, etc.  Saw on one blog that it will be released Feb 27 but you would think more details would be out if this was so. 

From one perspective you can break down website/GUI development into two aspects, the technical and the artistic.

Both require education and practice to be good at but beyond that both require a fair bit of aptitude.  I checked out my friends website from high school and was very impressed by the logos he created.  He always had a lot of aptitude back in high school so it is great to see what 20 years of nurturing ones talent can do. 

Then again, he bridges both worlds as computers have pretty much been one of his tools for a long time.

Me, I was a good artist in grade four and pretty much am stuck there …

WARNING PERSONAL OPINION AND POLITICS

I listen to the radio to and from work and try to listen mainly to news…unfortunately…news is hard to find.  What I do hear concerns me a fair bit.

Spin

What bothers me is people who believe that Talk Radio is news or that Talk Radio gives the straight news.  The “No Spin” zone, had a lot of spin.  For full disclosure, I consider myself center left but certainly also like the concept of fiscal discipline.  Such a thing is possible, or at least, I hope it to be so.

In particular, these days I am concerned about extreme spin.  It seems like words like communist, comparisons to Hitler and Stalin, etc are very much in vogue.  Two of the biggest culprits in this are Glen Beck and Michael Savage.

Today I heard Glen Beck go off on a comment made in speech to a group of gifted 12 year olds.  I am guessing the speaker was Al Gore from Glen’s comments but can’t be sure.  Apparently, the speaker said something like: “You know things that your parents don’t know”, and Glen responded by drawing analogies to the Hitler youth movement and that our kids are being taught to disregard their parents.  He even played part of the speech to illustrate his point.  I was decidedly unimpressed, Kids do know things that there parents don’t or have forgotten

• Optimism
• Hope
• openness

I would guess my nephews certainly know more about MySpace, twitter, and some other topics that I know very little of.  More-over, I think the speaker was coming from a good place and think that Glen took the comment in a very extreme direction.

Savage does the same thing all the time.  Most recently I had him go off against a politician who was trying to put controls on Talk Radio.  I buy his argument that she was being partisan and do think she was guilty of some level of spin in hiding her intent behind the concept of standards (which I would agree too, how about a rule that prohibited from opinion shows calling themselves news show, probably would not work but is intriguing).  However, he went extreme in his response and certainly set a low bar by calling her the “Beast from Michigan”.  That is just not appropriate.

Bailout

I am not a big fan of the bailout.  I understand how difficult it is to not do anything, especially to the people who just lost their jobs but I am not optimistic that we can spend our way out.  Certainly there has been no fiscal discipline for the last 8 years, so I am not adverse to some stimulus plan but have some major concerns:

• The Tarp was huge at ~700 billion.  Unfortunately, anything less than this appears to be considered chump change. 
• The concept with aligning the Presidents agenda with the need to do stimulus is a good one, but it falls apart if taken to the point where every democratic program is now a stimulus.  Obama should be very aggressive in keeping the stimulus as lean and as targeted as possible.  I am getting the impression this is not happening.
• Nancy Pelosi appears to be extremely partisan.  Perhaps this makes her a good match against her republican counterparts but not the type of person I wish was in power.  To me she comes across as business as usual and I wish there was a way for voters to send her a message that this is not what they want.
• What is the success criteria, or more importantly, how long do we wait before further action is deemed necessary.  My fear is that we will just continue doing more and more stimulus which will create more and more debt…

My wife loves the Bachelor and thus I have been watching it too.  At first, there were too many people to keep track of but after a while you get favorites and unfavorites (contestants that just annoy you) so it draws you in.  One thing that surprised me was that both PSU and OSU had advertisements on the Bachelor last night.  What target market were they driving for?  What drove them to suddenly advertize on TV and why this show?  

They say leading engineers is like herding cats, I would not be surprised if this is a general truth of leadership, and the greater the size of organization, the tougher the job of leadership is.  Watching Obama is a great schooling on leadership.  In particular, his stimulus plan appears to consist of the things he wanted to do anyway but now they are aligned with the need to do a some sort of stimulus package.  This concept of alignment is a powerful one.   Books on selling your ideas tend to focus on the importance of executive time (the time of executives and management) and how quickly you need to make your pitch.  Thus a powerful key is to understand their goals and the goals of the organization and to align your ideas with it.  The stronger the alignment, the easier it should be to sell your idea.

I am really eyeing those netbooks.  I was a skeptic but they are getting good reviews and the price seems pretty nice.  Plus, the in-laws talk about a computer for simple tasks so it sounds perfect for them although I could not recommend it without trying one.

I looked at the Dell Mini 9 but it seems hard to commit too knowing the mini 10 is on the way.  I like the idea of playing with multi-touch on the touch pad and an integrated GPS sounds like a great way to replace two gadgets with one ( I currently do not have a GPS but am tempted …).

Too bad it is not out yet…on the other hand…waiting for the next shiny new thing is a great way to save money as long as there is always something shinier on the way…

Looks like the website is up and running…

The home page needs more work and certainly could be prettier.  I will probably spend some time understanding DasBlog and then try to blend it in better with the look and feel of the DasBlog portion of the site.

I still really like the concept of pointers to my scattered web identity.  I could see it get even more interesting as that identity continues to expand.  For example, I did check out Googles document, blogging and sharing tools along with Microsoft's.  Neither of them was particularly compelling. 

Just getting things going here.  I’ve switched from the linux option to the windows option and then went to DasBlog based on Scott Hanselman’s use of it.  The goal is to have:

• a home page that provides links to my web-presence on LinkedIn, Facebook, Amazon, etc
• a blog site based on DasBlog
• a gallery for sharing photos with people that don’t want to join facebook

So stay tuned…

PS, I am using Windows Live Writer to try this post…lets see how that works…