My Life

Stupid Electronic Book Readers

I’m still annoyed at the two main e-book readers: The Amazon Kindle and Sony eReader.

The Sony one is at least available in Canada (since April – almost 2 years after it was available in the States) and the Amazon one is not, and as far as I can tell has no plans to release a Canadian version any time soon (if ever).

Unfortunately, the Kindle book prices are way lower than the eReader prices. :p I looked up a random sampling of books I’d like to get, and they averaged about $6 through Amazon for the Kindle, and about $9 through Sony for the eReader. I picked a popular book, Twilight (ugh), to see the difference. $9.89 at Sony and $6.04 at Amazon. Seriously, WTF?

For that matter, WTF is up with eBook prices that high anyway? $10 for a file? I can buy a whole paperback book for $11. :p (the price of physical books in Canada vs books in the States is a rant for another day) . If they want me to spend three or four hundred dollars on an eReader (depending on the model), why make the book downloads for it be the same price as the physical books?
Yes, I get that it’s convenient to carry around several* books at a time, but it’s just as convenient to simply carry around one or two paperbacks that you’re currently reading. I don’t see that as being $300 worth of convenience.

And yet, I still want one. I just can’t get one, because it’s way too much money, and waiting for weeks for books to come in to my local library is free. :p

*= they can carry hundreds of files, but seriously how many books do you have on the go at the same time? If it’s more than 100, you probably have invented a better solution than a simple eReader.

Well Enough to go to Work… Damn.

I’m well enough to go to work today, it seems. My fever broke, the chills and disorientation are gone. All that’s left is the gross phlegm and cough, and hopefully the NeoCitrin will take care of that long enough for me to do my job and get back home. Woo?

I also need to reiterate how much I love XKCD:

Remember C-61 tonight when you vote, fellow Canucks!

Smart Car Meet + Stuff

I went to a small smart car meet-up tonight. A bunch of local Smarties go together at the Cambridge East Side Mario’s and had dinner and hung out. I took some photos but I haven’t pulled them off my camera yet. It was too cold and rainy to hang out for long after dinner, though.

This was a few days ago, but it made me laugh:
XKCD Comic

I’m also trying a new plugin in this post “Post Avatar”. Adds an avatar of my choice to the post, like on LJ. Unlike LJ, I can upload an unlimited number of images to my icons folder, so that’s handy. ^_^
EDIT: It seems to work quite well. Even gives a little preview of the icon when I go to select it from the list. Handy!

EDIT 2: Looks like my RSS is currently broken. Damn. Looks like it’s a plugin code bug, though, so we’re waiting on an update.

Bye-Bye Bailout Plan?

I like this article about the now-defeated $700 Billion Bailout in the US. I think it gives a slightly different perspective than I’d read yet, and it makes sense to me.

My personal opinion is that they’re going to get hit hard no matter what they do (though I’m hoping the rest of us will emerge rather unscathed…) so they may as well try to fix the system that led to this situation, rather than trying to prop it up so it can keep doing what it was doing.