That Time of Year

It is once again that time of year when I do too much traveling and not enough blogging. After C's there was the Shapiro Writing Festival and now the AP Review Commission. School ends next week so after projects have been graded I will once again feel a bit more human (I hope!).

I have been knitting a bunch of fun stuff just for the hell of it and Meredith is bugging me to open an Etsy shop, but I think that is just because she covets my mad knitting skills and wants all of the cool stuff that I knit.

I haven't been gaming nearly enough! I am currently playing Legend of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass on the DS and Bioshock on the XBox 360. Bioshock has me really wanting to re-read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged which I haven't read for over 20 years and I have no memory of, but the game is supposed to be based on the novel so I want to see for myself! Since it isn't available for the Kindle yet I may actually have to take that monstrosity on the plane with me to ATL.

Oh yeah, I got an Amazon Kindle about a week or so ago and can I just say that I love it?? I haven't been able to get home delivery of the NYT since I moved out to the sticks 2 years ago and now it gets delivered to me every morning again (straight to the Kindle) so that I can read it with my coffee. This electronic paper technology is pretty friggin' sweet and surprisingly easy on the eyes. The books are fairly inexpensive ($9.99 or less for most fiction) and I don't have to find somewhere to store the damned things when I am done reading them.

Now for the downside...the copylefter in me hates DRM. When I am done reading the book I can't just give it to someone else and the Kindle format (but it does also read pdfs and mobi files) is most definitely proprietary. There is also the question of the actual placement of the buttons on the machine. There are 2 next page, 1 previous page, and one back button and they are all awkwardly placed. They are impossible not to hit by accident at least once when you are holding the thing. And then there is the ambiguous naming of "Back" and "Previous Page". They are a bit confusing. While PP literally takes you to the previous page in the document and not the previous page that you were looking at and Back takes you back to the last storefront or "library" page that you were looking at. There had to be a better word or phrase to use for that button, but at least it is tiny compared to the other button. All things considered, I have definitely consumed the Kindle Kool-Aid and you'd have to fight me for and then pry it out of my cold dead hands and I just don't think you are that bad.

Gotta go teach now, I'll come back add links later.