My Kindle

I've written before on this blog about the Kindle; now, I can write about my own Kindle. It came on Tuesday; so, I've had a few days with it.

First impressions:

The e-ink screen delivers a great and easy reading experience - outside in the sun or inside. It's small, but doesn't feel fragile.

Although elegant, I enjoy reading with it in the case; the case gives it a little more bulk.

I downloaded a couple book samples, about the first 20 pages; when I found a book I didn't want to stop reading, I was able to purchase the book. Reading a sample in the comfort of your own home is better than squatting on any available stool at the bookstore and living it constant fear of a snarky employee who might inform you that "the book you're reading is for sale."

Another great feature is the dictionary. If you don't know a word, simply put your cursor next to it and it shows a short 2 line definition at the bottom of the page. I'm surprised how often I use this feature.

I'm bad with book marks, and the Kindle saves my spot which is great.

Looking for a passage or random thought, you can search through all your notes and books.

Overall, if you travel often, like to read, or read several things at once the Kindle is a great product. You might miss books for a while, but you won't when you move and all you have to do is put your Kindle in your back backpack like usual.

Amazon is making a good move by engineering a great e-book reader and keeping people used to buying books.

Improving My Grammar

For many years, I've struggled with grammar. Over time, I've been working to improve it. Reading out loud and making a conscious effort have helped over the years. Also, I've come to depend on great resources like Elements of Style.

Another resource I particularly enjoy is the NYTimes blog, After Deadline. The blog examines grammar, usage, and style in NYTimes articles. It's a fun read. Really. They post some engaging quizzes and it's since to know the professionals miss mistakes too.

Recent Reads

Books purchased last month:

Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
Clockers by Richard Price
Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead

Short descriptions of what I read last month:

Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead: Love the 80's, beach towns, summer jobs, and BBQs. Whitehead's prose is a humorous delight that is sprinkled and brought to life with numerous cultural references. Fastest 272 pages ever. Read it.

Blood Meridian: Or the Evening of Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy: Classic. Blood Meridian, set in 1850 near the Texas-Mexico border, follows the story of a 14 year old Tennessean kid who gets entangled in a gang of Indian hunters. Not for the faint of heart. McCarthy, who also wrote No Country for Old Men and The Road, is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors. Read it.

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie: I've had this since he came to speak at Lawrence. Rushdie is a fantastic writer, but Midnight's Children took some time. A humorous and thoughtful journey intertwined with India's history. Read it if you have a need for an accomplishment.

Read two of four. Not bad. My Kindle should arrive soon.

Why I Ride

After some time in Maryland and DC on my steel horse, I passed by Revolution Cycles in Georgetown. I've been to Revolutions twice to pick up accessories; they're courteous helpful and an overall great bike shop; so, I tend to give a nod when I pass. Pinned up in the front window was a notice announcing the arrival of the new electronic shifting system from Shimano.

So now, bicycles may have electronic parts. Not trying to sound like Ray Bradbury here, but that's not cool with me. One of my favorite things bicycles is that they're powered, propelled, fueled by me. It's me, wheels, levers, pulleys, and cranks: a combination of simple machines.

Am I old? No. I just enjoy the elegant simplicity bicycles offer. On a day to day basis I'm hauled up gazing at a computer screen; it's nice to lose that attachment to electronics for a while.

Technology Doesn't Work

Technology doesn't work perfectly. Designers and developers know this; they've accepted this; they've named this phenomenon - bugs; they've come up with imperfect systems to deal with this.

Unfortunately, users don't accept this.

Any advice on how to get people on board?

Dear Seniors WATCH OUT! BUMPS IN THE ROAD

Seniors prepare yourself. After June you will be a twenty-something let loose into uncertainty. The first six months could be the most miserable time of your life; still against odds, your youth will be the envy of your older companions. You won't know why.

You will know navigating the working world is not strolling to class, sharing a dingy urban basement apartment with strangers is not lounging on the porch of your campus house, and spending half the week's grocery budget on dried pasta, a couple breasts of frozen chicken, and parmesean cheese is not piling your tray with french toast sticks, chicken O's, an omelet, a salad, and orange juice at Downer.

After an identity crises, pep talks with your parents, and a handful of interviews, you'll land a job. The job will be a drag - more like the Office than 30 Rock and you might be the Temp. Oh well, you'll get a Macbook with your graduation money. Your Macbook will be cool. Your friends will get a Macbook too. You will use Google video chat to catch up with Lawrentians from Vienna to Mumbai.

You'll make friends you don't have to video chat with. You'll have dinner parties and slurp wine with them, drag them to a Fleet Foxes show, and meet them at a dive bar to complain about work with them. In time, you won't have to preface every story with "He's the one I told you about that..." They'll do the same; you'll get to know the names and some of the faces of the people they work with.

You'll get a cookbook, something like How to Cook Everything; it is what you need, since you never quite figure out the method to the madness that dictates the hodgepodge of items that make it into your shopping basket. Your weekdays will fill up with impromptu dinners and drinks, and the book will gather dust. After the occasion where you chatted up the seafood counter and came away with scallops, you will dust off the book. The scallops will need more lemon. You'll remember that for next time, but for now you have to pack for your weekend trip to the Outer Banks.

One day you'll understand why people say "Oh, must be wonderful to be 23 again." Then the next class will graduate.

Cherry Blossom Run

On Sunday, I ran the Cherry Blossom Run with Maggie and Krys. We started and finished together. We finished without stopping.

Check out the heat of the race

Check out our champion pose

Current State of Everything

I've been away from the blog for a while now. Along with work, I've been dabbling on two side projects; they have consumed most of my time.

One project I'm not ready to share yet since I don't have a tangible result for it at the moment. So for now it's in stealth mode. Anyway it's more fun to share it when there will be evidence of it.

The other is training for the cherry blossom run. A combination of a 4 - 5 day a week exercise program and a revised diet has gotten me in pretty good shape. I'm feeling confident about completing the ten mile run. For environmental and health reasons I've cut back my meat consumption to one meal a day; to avoid the vending machine at work I keep around different variety of nuts or granola; for lunch at work instead of getting chips I buy a piece of fruit. So far I've lost 15 lbs and I've gone from 2 miles to run 7 miles in 61 minutes. Props to Mark Bitten and Food Matters.

Remixes I've been listening to:




Back to hacking.

Bicycling Physics

This article, How you steer a bicycle, is a very cool nontechnical explanation why you steer left to turn right.

The Idaho Stop

In Idaho, cyclists are allowed under law to treat stop signs like yields. Oregon is now considering the Idaho Stop. Cool right?

Well I posted this story, http://www.howwedrive.com/2009/02/10/when-is-a-stop-sign-not-a-stop-sign/, in my gchat status message. Most people replied back with "this crazy cyclist did this or that" or "this car ran me off the road" stories. I'm glad this article stirred reactions from both sides, because roads are a space for both cars and bicycles; unfortunately, they are not designed for both cars and bicycles; they are designed for cars.

The article's point is the following:

• Bicycles are supposed to be on the road.
• Roads are designed for cars.
  
• Not all rules of the road make sense for cyclists
• Example, stopping/accellerating for cars is easy, push the pedal. For cyclists it requires much more energy, push the pedal many times over. That's why they don't stop at stop signs. This discourages them from cycling in a predictable manner.
  
• In order to make roads safer for cyclists, you cannot continue to discount cyclists' concerns.
  

This is just one example, and a great one, of the fact that bicycles don't get special treatment; they're different. (Note: I don't feel the Idaho Stop is not the only solution to the problem at hand. Other options include timing of traffic lights for cyclists, called green waves, or adjusting the enforcment of laws.)

In the future, cyclists will continue to ride on the road. Our planning and laws need to account for them. The hope is that it's safer for cyclists and it encourages more people to ride. DC is taking a nice step towards multiuse roads with the redesign of U St/16 St/New Hampshire; they are installing a contraflow bike lane and bike only traffic signal.

For more coverage check out GreaterGreaterWashington, WashCycle, and StreetsBlogs.

Bicycle Style

I'm obsessed with bicycles. I've got two; I'm looking for a third. Part of it's about style.

Check out the style from Copenhagen or in every day clothes at Velocouture.

The RSS Clutter

There's a fair amount of news out there. I use Google Reader to capture it all; however, it still can't make sense of the noise.

News and events are viral; they disseminate quickly throughout the internet. Take for example what happened today. Google accidentally labeled the whole internet as malware. Below every search result there was a nice warning: "This site may harm your computer." Even Google.com was labeled harmful. Interesting mistake.

While the dust settled and Google fixed the glitch, everyone blogged about it. Everyone. No everyone. I looked at Google News and there are 407 articles from 89 sources about the story.

As I went through my Google Reader articles for the day I heard about it at least 5 times. Makes sense, I follow tech blogs. But we can do better. A nice feature for Google Reader would be analyzing the content of my unread items and showing the unread articles by story. A way for it to say, "this article about Google malware is similar to these four; look at all of them now." Or one step further, look at your unread item by category: iPhone, Kindle, Google, etc...

This is hard; language is complcated. The fortunate part is that we know much more about the articles then what they say. We know when they were published, what sites and press releases they link to, the main subject (the tags), and the source. These content clues along with learning from the users - allowing them to teach the computer and say "Yes they're similar." or "No they're not" - you could build a very good content grouping engine.

Google News does it on a larger scale with the "All news and articles" link below each result. Let's try and leverage that for Google Reader.

Back from Baltimore - Staying in.

Back from Baltimore. Went the Lexington Market, got crap cake, saw some fish, saw some dolphins, and headed back.

Stopped at Wagshal's Marktet on the way back. Got delmonico steak for tonight and the superbowl package - 24 wings, 2 lbs ground beef for chilli, 6 bratwurst, and 6 kielbasa - for tomorrow. The steak melted in my mouth, and I'm sure the superbowl package will come through tomorrow.

In the car on the way back, we rolled along an elevated 95 - above the warehouse and vacants of industrial Baltimore - and watched the sun fade behind the trees; Bruce Springsteen coming through the stereo was just right. Currently, this song makes the moment:

Ooh La La (LP Version) - Faces

Staying in tonight, just what I need.

In Baltimore

Twitter and Breaking News Search

TweetNews:

This is an old hat by now in the blogosphere, but using Yahoo! BOSS and Twitter an yahoo engineer was able to make an excellent breaking news search engine. The tweets on Twitter measure freshness and the Yahoo! BOSS leverages the relevant search results and articles, so what you get are articles about what people are talking about now. On his blog you can download the source and play around with it. Or try it out at TweetNews.

Google News RSS:

I spent sometime fiddling with GoogleNews to put together a decent search about bicycles. Then I was able to grab a RSS feed for the search (click the RSS link on the left side of the screen). Now get updates on bicycle news from across the country in my google reader. One disappointment was that I wasn't able to make it prioritize certain sites like WashCycle or Streetsblog, but maybe I should make a Yahoo! BOSS mashup for that.