Tag: kindle

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What It Is: 6/9/08

What I’m reading: Netherland, by Joseph O’Neill. Bought via Kindle while our plane was at the gate on Sunday. I still gotta get around to that Kindle writeup, but one of the big items in the “PRO” column is the ability to buy a book whenever/wherever I want. Sure, buying a novel (sorta) about 9/11 while sitting on a plane may not have been too wise, but hey.

What I’m listening to: Some of my Mad Mix playlists, but I haven’t listened to a lot of music this week.

What I’m watching: Still the third season of The Wire.

What I’m drinking: Coors Light, sadly enough. It was the drink of choice at the birthday party we attended in Louisiana this weekend.

Where I’m going: NYC on Tuesday to interview some people from Pfizer for a feature in my mag.

What I’m happy about: Rufus and his dogsitters got along just fine this weekend. (But one of them dropped his iPhone and cracked the screen.)

What I’m sad about: I got my ass handed to me by 3 women at Wii Bowling.

What I’m pondering: How one of the partygoers this weekend managed to get tanked on Coors Light.

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What It Is: 5/5/2008

What I’m reading: Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad, on my Kindle via Manybooks.net. And Lush Life, Richard Price’s new novel, via Amazon’s Kindle store.

What I’m listening to: Third, by Portishead. It sounds like them, but not like them in 1995. There’s one song on the album that annoys me a bunch, but I bet it’ll turn out like Ring Road from the new Underworld record, which got all resonant for me during my Belfast trip.

What I’m watching: Juno, which was cute. And we started the third season of the wire, at last!

What I’m drinking: More G’Vine G&Ts, plus Circus Boy by Magic Hat.

Where I’m going: Nowhere this week, but I’ll be working at home mid-week when the tree-removal guys show up to clear out a bunch of the more hazardous trees in the yard. I’ll take before-and-after pix.

What I’m happy about: That my trip into NYC yesterday to donate platelets at Sloan-Kettering went off without a hitch, despite the presence of the Five Boro Bike Tour, which would shut down the southbound FDR Drive later in the day. If I’d gotten caught in that traffic on the way into the city, I’d have been quite peeved. Good thing I’m an earlybird!

What I’m sad about: That a tick managed to evade the combined efforts of Frontline and my vigilant eye, leading to a nasty-looking bite on one of Rufus’ forelegs. Now I’ve gotta get him to the vet. Grr.

What I’m pondering: When I went to that pharma-event in Atlantic City last Monday, the keynote address was given by Linda Ellerbee. She didn’t have anything to say about clinical supplies and outsourcing, but she did give a funny and warm speech about her own history, women’s roles in the workplace, cheating husbands, breast cancer, and the messed-up-edness of the media. Some of it showed a real datedness, insofar as a lot of women under 35 simply don’t have the same limits that Linda butted up against when she was trailblazing. But that’s not what I’m pondering.

No, what I’m pondering is why, of all people she could quote throughout history to illustrate the need to change one’s own ways, she went with Anwar Sadat. Now, I can understand why his words — “He who cannot change the very fabric of his thought will never be able to change reality, and will never, therefore, make any progress.” — were relevant to her speech.

I just think that maybe she could’ve looked for someone whose change of thought — in this case, visiting Israel and working for peace — didn’t lead to his being assassinated by his own army.

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Kin and Kindle

Once upon a time, Robin Williams said, “Cocaine is God’s way of telling you that you have too much money.” This week I bought a Kindle. It costs $399 (but I had $150 in gift-credit, so I pretended it only cost $250), can download books wirelessly from Amazon, is perfectly readable in daylight, can take a 2gb SD card to store a couple bazillion books, has some neat internet functions, is a butt-ugly monstrosity of design, and is almost certainly God’s way of telling me that I’m earning too much.

(And it’s proof that I’m a tremendous geek, but it’s not like we needed more of that.)

Click on the image for pictures from the unboxening:

That’s an excerpt from Chelsea Handler’s new book, Are You There, Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea. She is an awfully funny writer.

Anyway, I’ll play around with this thing for a while and report back. If it manages to become a book-version of the iPod, I’ll be a happy man. This will be predicated on how comfortable I get with reading off an e-ink screen like this, and how insecure I get at not having “the actual book” in my hands.

(Man, it sure is an awful piece of design. Makes you realize how amazing Apple is with this sorta thing.)