i was close to one-clicking one tonight. pros – evdo (over sprint network) web browser buy books directly from the device books are cheaper (max 9.99, but not as cheap as used books) can display other file formats (txt, jpg, png, prc, doc, html) only 10oz (book i’m reading now weighs 1.6lbs) cons – drm - can’t borrow/lend books price (400$) price of books really the main thing stopping me, i think, is that i have a couple of books that i’ve yet to read. maybe after that i’ll buy it. or i just might end up buying it this weekend anyway.. ...

It had to happen eventually. I just didn’t think it would end the way that it did, with me watching from the sidelines as it came off an inch at a time til it was back where it started only 9 short months ago. I should have gone with plan B and took matters into my own hands but in the end it was a crime of opportunity and not of passion. Laziness won out above all else. ...

Since my last post on the subject I’ve finished reading On The Road, Blood Meridian (or the Evening Redness in the West) by Cormac McCarthy, The Prince by Nicolo Machiavelli, and begun Life at the Extremes: The Science of Survival by Frances Ashcroft. I’m not digging this last one too much. It’s non-fiction, which I rarely read, but more than that it’s the kind of thing that’s really very interesting until you try reading it on the subway at the end of a long day. Kinda like that Ruby on Rails book I’ve spotted Ed reading on the way to work. A book like that has it’s place — I’ll let you know if figure out what that is. ...

I’ve spent quite a bit of my time over the last 6 weeks or so commuting to and fro, most of which was spent reading. So far I’ve read, in order: Burning Chrome - William Gibson - hit and miss but a few great short stories in the mix The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain Slaughterhouse V - Kurt Vonnegut - a good read. Tough to follow at first, but it picks up after a while Monkey Business: Swinging Through the Wall Street Jungle - John Rolfe, Peter Troob - started off great but then got too deep into IB processes. Found myself wondering where all the funny anecdotes went Right now I’m reading “On The Road” by Jack Kerouac. Not sure what’s next but I have a feeling it’ll be just as frantic as the rest. ...

Fun day. A gas main broke on Austin st., just a block away from the office. I noticed when the lights started flickering and the UPS showed power fluctuations. It took more than an hour for ConEd to get on the scene and repair the damage so we took down the servers and sent everyone home early (6pm!). I’m hoping tomorrow will be uneventful..

Putting in some time at Dad’s office this week, now that I’m Stateside again. Among the many software related issues I’m dealing with, I’m finally upgrading to Firefox 2 (thanks to FrontMotion) and rolling out Thunderbird (thanks to ZettaServe) for the first time. Still not giving out IMAP access, but switching from Outlook or Outlook Express to Thunderbird is a huge step towards easily moving a user to a new machine and brining all their mail along for the ride. Now if I could just get some freaking ADMs so I could automagically configure their email accounts without going over to their machine… ...

I originally decided to hold off on getting a bike since winter was quickly approaching and I hate biking in the cold, but it’s been about as mild a winter here as anywhere else. Even the last few weeks, with a cold wave blowing across the US, it’s been a moderate 40-50F here, with maybe a few flurries mixed in. Now I realize I should have bought one, even though it would have cost me about US$150-200. There are no walmart style discount shops here, but $200 over 4 months isn’t bad at all. I could easily have gotten $50 of use a month out of it and probably much more than that. Especially on a day like today, when I’m working from home and don’t want to walk 20 minutes into town to get some real food. Not to mention saving money on my commute to the office. ...

Looks like Amol discovered Snap Previews. I just don’t see what purpose they serve. A screenshot of a page will never help me decide if the content is interesting. For one thing, fifty percent of the thumbnail is generally useless logos and menus that tell me nothing of value. The only thing worse than mouseover image popups are those horrendously annoying, double-underlined mouseover ad popups that so many sites are using now. ...

A large part of my job here at ICAR has been wrestling with various so-called content management systems (CMS). In an effort to build various applications I’ve been evaluating many popular opensource CMS projects and I’ve run into the same basic problem with just about all of them: I don’t want a blog, I want content management. They all claim to be flexible systems with all the latest doodads but in the end, they’re just glorified blogs. Case in point, almost every system sets itself up as a blog out of the box, and, in general, that’s the most complete part of the system. Other areas are sorely lacking.