4083 Dorian and the Dipshit

Monday, August 3, 2015

The first testicular guard, the "cup", was used in Hockey in 1874
and the first helmet was used in 1974.
That means it only took 100 years for men to realize that their brain is also important.

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Every once in a while I decide I have to read a classic I'd been avoiding.  I don't know why, I guess maybe I think it would be some kind of shame if I die without having read The House of the Seven Gables or something.  (I mention that particular book because I've started it at least five times, and I simply cannot get past the first two dozen pages.  It's mental anesthesia to me.  Brain death.)

So, a few days ago I came across a reference to Dorian Gray.  No one ever references "...Seven Gables", but people often mention Dorian's picture, and it happened to be one of those free downloads to my Kindle, and it's not so very long, so,....

I'd gotten only about 1/3 the way in when I realized I passionately hate Lord Henry.  I didn't want to read another observation from him.  He is the most supercilious asshole I've ever "met".  He judges everything and everyone, finds everything wanting even though he claims not to judge, purposely says exactly the opposite of what he thinks people expect him to say for no other reason than to disconcert people, claims to live only for beauty, but then sets out to destroy beauty wherever he finds it.  He is fascinated by the beauty and visible innocence of the young Dorian, so he sets out to debauch him, while claiming to adore him and teach him to live life fully.  I hate hate hate everything about Lord Henry.

Yeah, I know, this is supposed to be a philosophical novel, and ok, I could understand the philosophical aspects were they not espoused by one as odious as Lord Henry.  Wikipedia describes Lord Henry as an aesthete, a hedonist.  You know, he could have been a hedonistic aesthete without being an odious ... asshole.  Sorry, but that's the best I can do.  It fits.

So then Dorian develops an interest in precious and semi-precious stones, and we are treated to a bazillion pages of descriptions of stones.  Why?  In the pre-internet stone age, is Wilde trying to impress the reader with his knowledge?  That's the only reason I can think of for that.  If we were supposed to apply that to Dorian's state of mind, it could have been done much more directly and more interestingly.  We finally slog through all that, and Dorian discovers textiles and embroidery, and we get a bazillion pages of ....

I'm now no long reading, but just scanning pages.  I'm 65% of the way through and I'm determined to finish,

... although I don't have the faintest idea why.
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3569 Kindle Battery Fix.

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Don't wait. Patience isn't a virtue, it's a plague.

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There seems to be a common problem with Kindle batteries.  They die.

When I first started using my Kindle, the battery lasted a very long time, like for weeks, even if I didn't turn it off but just let it go to sleep between uses.  Over the past few months, it's been getting very bad.  Now I have to charge it morning and night, and it's useless to take it with me anywhere I'll be waiting, because it will likely die in the waiting room.

Worse, if the device decides there's not enough power for WiFi (which eats the battery, so I keep it off) it won't start WiFi when you want it, which means you can't download any new books.  Even while mine is ON THE CHARGER! the WiFi won't start.

I searched both online and the info book that came on the Kindle.  It seems to be a common complaint.  The cure is Home->Menu->Settings->Restart.

Surprise.  My Kindle doesn't have a Restart under Settings. I bought it new for like 1/3 the regular price when the next upgrade was coming out, so I guess it's pre-"Restart" button.

I finally found a brief mention somewhere of an alternate restart procedure.  Turn it on, then hold the on/off switch to the right for at least 20 seconds, just like when you turn it off, but a minimum of 20 seconds.  When you next start it, it'll reload, and POW!  No more battery problems.

Mine is now acting just like new.
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3541 Challenge

Monday, June 4, 2012

Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.

-- George Bernard Shaw --

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June!  Agh!  Already?

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The GPS says my city house is 29 feet above sea level.  Not enough, I think.  Next time I go to the country house, I'll have to check there.

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I went to a small hafla last Friday evening.  Some kids were selling raffle tickets at 20 cents each for some charity.  I bought five.  I won.  First time I've ever won a raffle.  Each of the vendors there had contributed something to the raffle, so I won a shopping bag containing a tiny glazed mirror exactly the right size for the sink in the half bath, a CD from the group who performed the music, a nice jingle hip scarf, a plush camel, two long sexy yarn hair doflinkies, an anklet, and a couple other things I can't remember now.  After I got home I found a card entitling me to a hula hoop - which annoyed me because I'd actually considered buying one from the vendor.  (After reflection, it has occurred to me that said vendor, knowing there was a coupon in the bag since the hoop wouldn't have fit, should have searched out the raffle winner.  Hey, there weren't that many people there.)

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Sumthin' else I don't understand:  Howcum if God tells you to do X, like join the priesthood, marry a particular person, or run for national office, then you can publicly claim God speaks to you and many people will believe you and consider you favored by God.

But if God tells you to do Y, like kill a particular person, set fire to yourself, or bomb a building for political reasons, then the courts and public opinion consider you insane if you claim God told you to do it.

Who are we to decide what God will or will not tell a person to do?  To whom He will or will not speak?  Who are we to ascribe motives to God?  If Man did not create God, then how can Man define God?   We can read God's mind?  We know what He's likely to say, and to whom He's likely to speak, and what His ulterior motive is for what He says to them?  If He says only things we want Him to say, then we have created God in our own image.

Read the Bible.  That God ain't necessarily nice, doesn't always play fair.

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I've been playing "Every Word" on the Kindle.  I'm not good at it, but I figure it's good for me.  They give you a bunch of letters, and you have to find all the words that can be created from those letters to rack up points, and at least one word that uses all the letters to proceed to the next level.

Yesterday I was given W S T O G H R  on level six (of ten).  I had to find 34 words of 4 letters or more, including one using all seven letters.  (The program, by the way, doesn't accept proper nouns or abbreviations (a lie!  It accepts things like "prof" and "ref") or a a lot of other perfectly good words.  There's this "list".  So if you find more than 34 total, some of them weren't on the "accepted" list.)

Anyway, try it.  

I worked at it forever, handed it to Daughter, and she got the seven-letter word almost instantly.

Um, no, I don't remember what it was.  Sorry.  Take a whack at it in the comments.  (I'll bet Becs gets it first.)
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3533 Old house, wagon, motherhood

Sunday, May 20, 2012

The best helping hand that you will ever receive is the one at the end of your own arm.

-- Fred Dehner --

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Back on 5/7 I said I had several days to catch up on, and then I didn't.  Let's test my memory.

Aborted trips

Week before last, 5/9, I went upriver to the old house with plans to bring some boxes and smaller furniture down.  Traffic was heavy because of roadwork and the trip took three hours.  I got there at 11 pm, desperate for the bathroom, and that's when I discovered I had forgotten to bring the house key.  It's countryside and small village.  Everything is closed by 9 PM.  The nearest public bathroom is 10 miles away across the river.

I shrugged and piddled on the driveway in the light of the van door.  I always wanted to do that....

Then I drove to the Wal-Mart and bought a toothbrush, toothpaste, and a nightgown, and got a room at a little motel near the Throughway.  It's the cheapest motel in the area, at $67 a night, but I had read very good reviews a few months ago.  It turned out to be simple, basic, in good repair, very clean, and remarkably quiet considering its proximity to the Throughway.  The next morning I drove back home.

That was depressing.  I now have a note on my front door listing all the things NOT to forget when I head upriver.

Last week, 5/15, I planned to try again.  Tuesday afternoon I took a load of cardboard and paper to the recycle center (yeah, we have twice a month pickup, but I'm rarely home on those days).  It began raining while I was unloading the van, and I noticed what looked like oil floating on the water running from under Fred.  He's now 10 years old, and he does sometimes spring leaks.  I planned to drive him upriver that evening.  It didn't seem like a good idea until I found out what was leaking, but ... I couldn't put the trip off because I had arranged to have the old house furnace serviced the next day, Wednesday.  Rescheduling (again!) is difficult.

So I drove the BMW north.  Hal, the one with the tiny leather back seat and the tiny trunk.   I wasn't able to bring back anything but one armload of clothes and two small boxes.

Another disappointing trip.

Since then I've had an amazing amount of energy.  I've assembled the Nugget's birthday wagon (steel Radio Flyer with all-terrain wheels and wood guard rails, whoop whoop!).  She loves riding in it, but it requires two adults, one to pull and one to walk alongside to make sure she doesn't try to climb out.   We've gone for a few walks with it.  I assembled a bunch of Ikea bookcases (they had a sale).  I cleaned, washed dishes (the dishwasher in the new house died on its 18-month birthday), sorted shoes, changed sheets, did some laundry, and pulled together a bunch of stuff to donate.  Today, when her mother wasn't looking, I taught the Nugget how to drink from a hose.

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More cheap books!

Amazon has a "Kindle Daily Deal", providing one heavily discounted book on a daily basis.  It's at http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=kin_post_os_08242011_DailyDeal?&docId=1000677541.  You can subscribe to daily notices on the right of that screen.  You may have to change your Amazon account email notices to accept Kindle subscriptions.

I seems to take about two days to kick in, but then you get an email every morning with the day's bargain. I've got only two notices so far, and neither were books I was interested in, so I can't comment on the quality of the offerings.

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Why polls are bullpoopy

This one was on the radio during my drive upriver last week.  Somebody polled random people in the Albany area about fracking.
Approve = 37%
Oppose = 36%
No opinion = 27%
Have heard about fracking = 66%

Do the math.  7% of the people had an opinion on a topic they admit they'd never heard of.  (I was surprised that the news reader didn't remark on the discrepancy.)

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Major dose of tender adoration

Orangutan mother with six-week-old infant.  Kisses and coochey-coos.

[http://youtu.be/nastRZIPRKM]
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3528 Free Books for Kindle

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

The American Way:  Privatize profits, socialize costs.

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(Note - "3528" is a post sequence number, not the number of books.)

You can get free books from Amazon for your Kindle, but plowing through the lists on Amazon is ... well ... like cleaning out the den closet at my old house.  There are hundreds of self-published and foreign language and badly translated books cluttering up the lists before you find the occasional classic or possibly decent read.

Go to http://ctrlq.org/amazon/ebooks/.  They list more reasonable choices.  Not exactly bestsellers, but reasonable possibilities.  Amazon updates free lists frequently, and ctrlq does, too, so check often.  Clicking on a book takes you directly to Amazon, where you can download it to your Kindle in seconds.

Hey!  FREE!

I downloaded In Deep VooDoo to check the process out.

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Right now I'm reading Madame Bovary, another free ebook from Amazon, and another classic I'd never read.  I'm only up to chapter 8, but so far it's pleasantly readable.  I might even finish this one (as opposed to my five attempts so far at those seven gables, and the sadly frustrating and depressing Dickens everything).
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3329 Ripoff

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Interviewee I-missed-the-name, Kingston Freeman: “If prayer is out of the public schools, it is simply because those in attendance have chosen not to pray. Individual freedom to pray is still intact. What is rightfully missing is the authority to force prayer on those who do not wish to participate.”

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I now have a Kindle. I decide to purchase a certain book. I go to Amazon.com. The paperback version of the book is $7.15. The Kindle version, taking up no warehouse space, needing no human packing, downloaded wirelessly, pure profit after the first x copies, is $9.99!

I don't understand.
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3271 nookindle

Monday, May 30, 2011

"Silence is one of the hardest arguments to refute."
-- Josh Billings --

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For a little while now I've wanted to buy one o' them newfangled e-reader thingies. Nook or Kindle, Kindle or Nook? I knew nothing about them, didn't know which was better, each have their adherents, and besides, they're always coming up with "improvements" and next generations, and maybe I should wait until the dust settles a bit. And the cost is significant. If I make the wrong choice and end up disliking it, I'd feel worse.

Well, last week, before getting the news of Hal's tires, back when I was feeling flush, I came across a deal I couldn't resist. Two different websites were having competing one-day sales of reconditioned e-readers, the most recent model (there are new models coming out now), one the Barnes & Noble Nook and the other the Amazon Kindle, each for about 1/4 the list price. I could get both for 1/2 the price of either one new.

It's been my experience that reconditioned is generally as good as new, pretty much the same rate of problems, especially since a large portion of "reconditioned" had nothing more wrong with them than buyer's remorse, so how could I not?

The Kindle arrived Thursday, and the Nook on Friday.

Instructions:

The Nook's instruction book is easier to read, understand, navigate, and apply. The Kindle's instructions are less well organized, it's difficult to skip over functions you know you won't use, there are just too many options and functions, and too many esoteric terms that I'm sure the writers understood well, but are Greek to us neophytes. Nook's technical writers win.

On the other hand, to do all the things *I* want to do with it, with the Kindle everything is pretty much intuitive. The way the onscreen menus work, I don't need more than one pass through the basic instructions. With the Nook, I often stare at the blank screen thinking, "Now how do I get to xxxx?", and I have to go to the instructions. Kindle's usability people win.

Keyboard:

Nook has a touchscreen keyboard, which is ok, except that it wants SKIN ONLY. You can't use a pencil eraser, or fingernail, or anything but skin. My fingernails are long. The squares for each letter are tiny. Using the side of any finger spills over to adjoining tiny letter squares. I finally resorted to folding my index finger and using the point of the knuckle, which hurts, and one out of four letters it spills over anyway. Not cool, Nook.

The Kindle has a permanent button keyboard. The key buttons are tiny, but at least I can press them with my fingernails, which is how I usually type. I think Nook's thinking is that most people won't use the keyboard that often, so why waste space on one.

Kindle wins usability of keyboard.

Navigation:

The Nook has a touch screen at the bottom where all the menus appear. That's similar I guess to a smart phone.

The Kindle has buttons instead. There are Home, Menu, and Back buttons, and a little toggle thingy that acts like a mouse and cursor. That's similar in operation to a browser and a mouse on a computer.

I guess which one prefers depends on one's familiarity, but I vastly prefer the Kindle arrangement.

Turning pages:

You can use Next and Previous buttons on the sides of both to turn pages in your book. One thing that's annoying about the Nook is that there are those little locator "pegs", tiny stick-up dots, on the page turn buttons. With the Kindle, the buttons are smooth, and you can locate them by the softer feel of them. I guess I'm like the princess and the pea. Those Nook locator dots HURT!

You can also turn pages on the Nook by swiping across the touchscreen at the bottom, but only when there's no menu displayed there, and it doesn't always work on the first swipe.

Kindle wins, even if it is "old" technology. Fancy isn't always better.

Downloading books:

They're both pretty much the same. You need an account on the (B&N/Amazon) bookstore website, register your device, provide a credit card, and you're ready to go. Both devices use wifi, and it's fast. I mean really fast. A 600-page book arrives in like a second or two. (Howcome I'm not getting that speed on my laptop?)

I was at first a little concerned because I have no wifi here. How will that work? Heh. Silly Silk. Apparently they use cell phone towers. It just works, period. And it's completely and totally free for books downloaded from the stores. On both devices people can send files (documents, photos) to your device's email address (name@kindle.com, for example), and that does cost, charged to your bookstore account credit card.

Both stores have the usual library of books. I haven't explored what's available on B&N yet, but I discovered a slew of free classics on Amazon. Free! No charge at all. I've already downloaded 37 books - some Twain, Poe, Austen, Flaubert, Eliot, Christie, Wilde, and so on.

I've also purchased one book from each store, and that was pretty easy.

So, assuming B&N has some free books too, they're pretty equal there.

[Flash! Later edit - I went looking for free books on B&N. There are a bunch, but they are all in other languages, or things like "The history of the village of Rothugh", by the committee to promote Rothugh, ya' know? The same classics that are free at Amazon are about $1.99 at B&N. However, keep in mind that I haven't checked out the transcription quality of the free Amazon stuff yet.

The B&N website is a bit awkward to navigate. Like, there's a few "free books" links, but one gets you a 1500+ list of untranslated titles that you can't sort and have to scroll through 100 at a time, a second gets a list of books in English, at least, but they're all cheap bodice-rippers or sound rather dirty, and a third gets books selling for $7-8 (Free?), and another gets what they call "samples" - which appears to be an excerpt.

So, so far, the Kindle is ahead here, too, in website usability and really free books worth having.]

Reading:

You can't read either of them in the dark, but you can't read paper books in the dark, either, so that doesn't bother me.

I've read both in the glider on the front porch in full sun, with no great difficulty. No glare.

Both allow you to change the print size and font. I'm fine with the defaults.

General:

There is one problem, and I consider it a big problem. We know I like bargains. I'm used to buying hardcovers in the remainder bins in bookstores, and at yard sales, and at library sales of donated books, or getting them free from friends who have read them and are passing them on.

Other than the free classics, there will be no bargains in e-books. (They do both have a "lend" function, but you can lend a particular book only once, and for a limited time.) You have to pay their price, and I doubt there will be any "stock reduction" sales. No need.

On the other hand, the writers will do better. They get paid full contractual price for (almost) every reader.

Conclusion:

Both devices are pretty much the same in any area I haven't mentioned. The Nook is a tad smaller in height and width, but it's thicker. Weight is about the same, as is screen size. Battery charges pretty quickly in both, and seems to last a satisfyingly long time.

Right now I prefer the Kindle. I find it more comfortable to use - with my long nails, tender thumb pads, and preference for buttons over touchpads.
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