I don't miss my CA commute. I don't miss the never ending attack of sugar ants in the kitchen. I don't miss housing prices. I don't even miss In-N-Out, THAT much. But I really miss the LA Times Festival of Books.

Imagine a super geeky, nerd fest of people who read. That still doesn't quite capture it. There's writers signing books, there's writers doing panels, there's used book tents, self publishing shops, you name it. My super favorite journal was purchased at the Festival in 05 I guess it was? Hand made leather bound, with parchment like pulp paper. Good stuff.

The line up changes, some years there's really no one I'd want an autograph from, some years there's a lot.

Aside of the Autograph whores who run home and put signed works up on ebay, I have to say, waiting in line with true fans of an author is great. Hearing them talk about the worlds the author has created, pretty neat. Most are freaks and I don't talk TO them, but I listen :)

One of these days, N and I will have to take a weekend trip out to LA for the Festival, but with Italy, then Japan in May, and Big Sur for a friends wedding, it's hard to find a project when you're never around so this year I will not be enjoying the Festival of books. :(

I saw Empire a while back as a hard cover and the dust jacket sounded incredible. When it made it to paperback, I grabbed it. I was underwhelmed.

The dust jacket/back cover make it out to be a really cool techno thriller (which it sorta was I guess) with high tech gear and some political intrigue and "oh my god that could be now" thrown in.

The political intrigue was there, the high tech gear was present, but almost completely as props on only a few pages. The "oh my god that could be now" was totally there.

With every page turned I kept thinking, "this isn't really that far fetched" sure the tech might be, but even then who knows, maybe not. Card did a good job in the believability department.

I think what let me down was the fact that part of the premise is that each side comes in with high tech gear that no one expects that that initially turns tables. While the bad guy's have that gear and that advantage, the good guy's stuff was mentioned in one paragraph as "oh yeah we've got stuff to break their stuff" (paraphrased) and that was it. From that point forward it was more or less just your average military fiction with some grisham type suspense thrown in.

It's a good read, but not at all was I hoping for.  Two Stars.

This made the rounds on the Developer blogosphere I'm a part of,thought I'd share it out a bit. this is a small (yeah, small) versionof the graphic, click on it to get the larger version. Here's a linkto the larger version, that I marked up with the books I've read. Notsure if it's good or bad that I more or less run the spread. Though Iplace zero value on standardized testing so, take it for what it'sworth.

<update> I realized, I didn't really explain the image. I saw it on O'Reilly Radar,  here's the explanation, "... He does this by cross referencing the 10 most popular books at everycollege, as given by Facebook, and the average SAT score. He thenpresents it all in this nifty little visualisation..."

</update>

I did find it strange the range of books, that made up the "list"

Kinda makes me sad that the likes of Dan Brown are even on it, and as much as I enjoyed "Five people..." really, it's on the list? Mitch sure has a formula, write a short, deep (matter of perspective I suppose) book, and it's a best seller, when others come out with truly monstrous tomes that never see the light of day, let alone the lights of Oprah's stage.

As soon as I finish Seeing Redd, I'll be diving into this, final chapter in the trilogy. i started it, but when I got Seeing Redd, I had to read it first, it's a faster read, and I'm dying to know how it turns out.

Kim Stanley Robinson doesn't let down, I'm not sure he's able. This trilogy is as good as the Mars trilogy (at least so far). I can't wait to see how the story ends, and see how Frank continues to Evolve, and what the final outcome for the Khembalis is. A much heavier read (and book for that matter) than Frank Beddor's stuff, but if you're at all into the environment, and some cool potential future present stories on what 'could be'. Check out the Climate Change series (my name for it) Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below, and the last, Sixty Days and Counting.

I gotta say, it's no War and Peace, but Frank Beddor does a great job with the Alice in Wonderland. I'm reading Seeing Redd and it's a really engrossing story. It makes ya think about all the fun Disney Classics and how they might be poorly told truths about other worlds.

It's Fantasy/Sci Fi, but not overly so. there's plenty of great tech and swords, but it's not remotely over done. Most is mentioned as if we knew exactly what it was, which is nice, since most is so understandable, you might know what it is.

If you happen across the first book, pick it up. It's YA, but it's a good read. I'm really enjoying it.

here's my GoodReads page for it, I'll be posting a review there when I finish, assuming I remember, LOL

So today was Kindle day.

I've read the coverage, read most of the Newsweek article, time for my thoughts.

First a quick run down of the spec, in case you missed them elsewhere.

- Has a keyboard
- 30 hour battery life
- 2 hour recharge time
- 10.3 ounces
- 5.3 inches x 7.5 inches x 0.7 inches, 800x600 pixel
- SD Slot for storage
- USB 2.0
- Uses E Ink technology
- Adjustable Font size
- Can hold over 200 books
- Can search books for phrase or name
- 3.5 stereo headphone jack

- No wifi
- EVDO connection - No monthly contract
- $9.99 for new releases and bestsellers
- 1st chapter of books available for free
- No computer required
- $.99/month for blog subscriptions
- Annotations, bookmarks
- Has a basic web browser: Gizmodo: somethingcalled "Basic Web" browsing is available in the "Experimental" sectionof the menu, along with "Play Music" and "Ask Kindle NowNow."
- Plays MP3s

So my thoughts.... Not yet. It's cool and in my Amazon wishlist, but i won't be buying it myself... For a few reasons.

• I don't know if I can abandon the paper book. I mean, I love them.  I have shelf upon shelf of the things. I re-read the ones I love the most, multiple times. What will the bookshelf of the future look like? Just a Kindle sitting there?
• Why is a full 1/3 of the device, not screen? What a waste. Clearly Amazon is thinking people will be typing things up (what I can't imagine) rather than reading books. I don't know (and suspect it's not possible) if Eink can have a touch screen, but why not a slide out keyboard? or even a on screen keyboard controlled by the scroll wheel? Anything but wasting 1/3 of the device with a feature i suspect will be hardly used.
  
• 400 bones huh? Taking a page out of the iPod playbook, as stated by many. I'm inclined to agree. Meaning, the next model will cost a bit less, and do more.
• black and white? That's really taking a play out of the iPod playbook, only years and years after apple moved to color screens. I'm assuming Eink can be in color, I could be wrong, but if you're gonna sell a feature as 'blogs and magazines' you better get to turner-izing your device, Amazon. Books, black and white. The rest of the print world, very very colorful.
• SD but not SDHC? Really in 2007.. 2008. How about CF card? or better yet a PCMCIA slot? I mean really. Come on Amazon, why hamstring the device?

I can't wait for Version 2.0!  I'm not thrilled at the idea of having to repurchase all my books, nor am I sure i can do it, such a betrayal of my beloved paper....  

Good on Cory Doctorow!

Like a dummy I packed my bookshelves, leaving myself one thing to read,I'm almost done with it and have likely two more weeks at the house. SoI headed over to the Tattered cover for some full priced book love. Irarely buy books at bookstores due to the pricing, but sometimes I liketo browse (like at airports) so i was wondering around and saw CoryDoctorow's Over Clocked. A collection of his short stories... all of which he read on his podcast, all over which I have in iTunes. I haven't sat and listened to his podcast in a while, but Anda's Game was great and it's in this compilation. So why buy the book, that I have in audio form? Because printed books rock and I'm not big into audio books. And because I know the stories are worth it.

So I'm hoping others are doing the same, Cory puts the stories, for free. When they're bound, it's worth buying so Cory can keep writing.

Great work!

I haven't decided to be honest. I want to, but with starting a new job (whatever I end up picking), planning two conferences, trying to buy a house, I really don't know if the bandwidth will be there...

I really hope I can make the time (I really hate the "I don't have time" excuse) to proudly display this

Somewhere on the side of my blog. We'll see, I've got a few days to figure it all out.

For charging to much, sure. But also for (at least me) finding books and authors I'd never otherwise find. I try to find new things at Amazon, but it just never works. There's never enough info, or reviews or whatever, i never want to take the chance.

That's not the case at airport bookstores. I walk the aisles, i pick up and carry books around, I read the back covers, I flip through them, I sit them back on their shelves and pick up a different one. I browse.

This past week I had a conference in Chicago, so I was hanging in DIA, and decided to kill some time in the book store. Not even an airport Borders like in SEATAC, but an over priced Hudson News.

I found two books that piqued my interest.

The first was "Looking Glass Wars" by Frank Beddor. I had never heard of him, and surely wouldn't have have found him on Amazon, there's just too many choices.

That said, I'm glad I found it. It was great. I picked it up Saturday afternoon, and had it finished by Tuesday. It's not a fatty, only 358 pages, but still, at a conference where I was networking, eating, and drinking all day/night. that's pretty impressive (to me at least).

The short of it is that it's the "true" story of Alyss Heart from Wonderland. The Cartoon we saw, and the book by Lewis Carroll, were not the way it really happenned. I didn't realize that it was part of a trilogy, but already I can't wait for the next installments.

The Second find, was by an other I enjoy reading, so I might have found it on Amazon, but probably not since I didn't know he had a new series and hadn't read his work in a while now. It's "Hidden Empire, the Saga of the Seven Suns"

I've just started it and it's a bit slower of a read than Frank's book, but so far so good. Kevin J Anderson is a great Sci Fi writer, his Star Wars stuff is still on the book shelf (high praise in my book shelf).

I'll be making an amazon order as soon as I hit "save" to pick up whatever is already in Paperback of the rest of the series. I highly recommend it, if you're a Sci Fi fan.

Reading books like these definitely rekindles the Writer Me, and makes him scream for release.

I was in SeaTac Saturday night, and decided that I should buy a few snacks, for my flight home. I'm not a magazine person, really, but Hudson news and it's selection, just lures me in like a moth to flame. I normally pick up a few mac magainzes, but Barack Obama smiling out at me from the cover of GQ caught my attention.

I've bought maybe 3 copies of GQ in my entire life, and I think this most recent one will be my last. Here's why.

• Size: 412 pages.
• ads, of the 412 pages, the first 134 pages (everything before "Letter from the editor" and the masthead, are ads. Ads for all sorts of trendy metrosexual things.
• the ads don't stop after page 136, oh no. They keep going and going and going. I won't be scientific and count them all, but after thumbing through all 412 pages during my flight, I'd guess at least 2/3 are ads.

I understand being ad supported and all, but this is a little retarded.

I enjoyed the article on candidate Obama immensely but the other 408 pages were lame and worthless, since I don't plan to buy Armani Suits any time soon.

Sorry GQ, you're not worth the price.

I dunno, but reading a massive tome on the light rail, sure does make me feel all intellectual and such. :) My current read is a big one, like kill a bug in the kitchen, 'big'.

I finished V, and started a book I picked up at The Attic, Micheal Crichton's State of Fear. I'm just about half way done, great book, as is typical of Crichton.

It started a bit slow, some of his do, but man now It's a page turner, as most of his are.

If you're looking for a good thought provoking read, this might be the book for you. If you're into the global warming phenomenon, this is probably also the book for you, it's the crux of the book.

I'm really enjoying it.