3647 Protect your rights

Saturday, October 20, 2012

Countering someone's negativity with your positivity doesn't work

because it's argumentative.

People don't like to be emotionally contradicted and if you try

to convince them that they shouldn't feel something,

they'll only feel it more stubbornly.

--  Peter Bregman --

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Well, about a week ago I saw the first neighborhood house and yard decorated for Christmas, multicolored lights strung up all over everything.  I guess I can understand why they'd want to do it now, rather than wait for freezing temperatures and snow, but the distaste and sinking feeling I had upon seeing them surprised me.

I hate hate hate those gaudy displays. It ruins the whole Christmas thing for me.

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I've got a bunch of eBooks on my Kindle and a few more on the Nook.  I'll bet lots of people have huge music collections on iPods or whatever.  Did you know that if you die, you may not be able to leave those collections, unlike vinyl, CDs, DVDs, and real paper books, to your heirs?

You paid a small fortune for those collections, and it all goes poof when you are no longer around.

It appears that you don't legally own the bits and bytes you paid for.  Your account purchased the right to read, watch, or listen to them.  When you die, your account is terminated, and that terminates any right to the materials.  Story at http://articles.marketwatch.com/2012-08-23/finance/33336852_1_digital-content-digital-files-apple-and-amazon.

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Something else to watch out for if you have a PayPal or an eBay account.  The user agreement says that if you have an argument with the companies, you abdicate all rights to sue them and can't join a class action suit.  You have to go to binding arbitration.

Now this is bad.

• That leaves you out in the cold paying your own legal bills, going up against a corporation with an in-house legal department.
• They might do the same nasty thing to hundreds of thousands of people, but very few will take it to arbitration.
• This means that even if they lose every single one of those arbitration rulings (and arbitration rarely goes against the corporation, since the arbiters are not required to rule according to laws), it costs them relatively little, and therefore there's no incentive to change their practices.

Corporations LOVE arbitration!

Yeah, class action suits enrich the lawyers and rarely result in any real money for the damaged parties, and that's why people hate class action attorneys, BUT they DO make the offending companies change their practices.  It hurts them financially, but even more from bad publicity.  You can't do that all by yourself, and definitely not in arbitration.

Oddly enough, PayPal and eBay will allow you to opt out of that clause, but you must meet the deadline to do it.  You have to write each of them a letter in a particular format, to be received by early November for eBay, and the end of November for PayPal (exact dates are at the link).

Go to http://consumerist.com/2012/10/15/here-is-a-downloadable-template-for-opting-out-of-paypal-arbitration-clause/ for details.

Pass this around.

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Now, I'm a little confused, because when I took a class in commercial law about 16 years ago, it was pointed out to us that you cannot be forced to give up the right to sue.  Even if you sign a contract that specifies arbitration, you still have the absolute and irrevocable right to request redress from the courts.

Did something change?
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3593 The Physician, the novel

Sunday, August 12, 2012

“Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one.”

--  Voltaire  --

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The book has been absorbing.  I highly recommend it.   It has sent me to the internet many times for history, geography, Persian words, names of plants, pharmacopeia, anatomy, social customs, and more.  Man, life was hard in the eleventh century.  Author Noah Gordon's research was admirable.

There were a few things that left me wondering.  In the first few pages Gordon  describes a healthy child who we are told is 18 months old, but seems from his description to be more like 6 months old at most.  I think this may have been an error.  I suspect that a few pages later he decided that the mother of the child should die in childbirth, so he changed the infant's age from 6 months to 18 to fit the timing, without changing the description.

At another point Gordon seems to realize that there's a sticky problem, so he solves it with a convenient horse bite.  I found it very difficult to accept that bite.  I couldn't imagine how it could have happened, and when Rob mentioned it to a friend, I couldn't imagine the friend not asking how.  Like, the child would have to have been lying naked in a manger or something.  (Huh?  Perhaps in this case appropriate.)  Also, it's impossible that no one had noticed the suspicious "scar" prior to that point in the story, and, having noticed, impossible that they would not have asked about it.

Later in the book there is a footrace in Persia.  The race is so long and in such heat that few runners finish, so the winner of the handsome prize is he who is last moving.  The Shah has also offered a further huge prize to whomever can continue to run a bit further after finishing the first race to a total of 126 Roman miles, completed within 12 hours.  One of the characters accepts the Shah's challenge and wins the prize.

I wondered how far 126 Roman miles was in English miles.  I hit the internet again.  According to several sources, a Roman mile was equivalent to approximately 1,620 modern yards.  Multiply, divide, and 126 Roman miles is 116 modern miles.  Wow.  But it gets more unbelievable.  To run 116 miles in 12 hours (let alone less) requires an average speed of 9.7 mph.  That's an average of  a hair over 6 minutes per mile, sustained for 12 hours!  In intense heat.

Sorry.  I don't buy it.

The author's notes at the end, dated May 3, 2012, describe his research and mention that there's a movie in the works.

I don't know whether this is good or bad.  A movie?  Impossible!  A PBS mini-series, maybe.  But if the movie is less than 6 hours long (I'd like to say 10), it just won't do the book justice.  I am disgusted that people will watch a 90-minute Hollywood synopsis, and then think they know the book.

Snarl.
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3590 A physician in the 11th century

Thursday, August 9, 2012

Mart Gross, biologist, on what behaviors get noted or discounted:

"Theory determines what you see."

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If cheerleading is a sport, and romping on a mat waving ribbons on a stick is a sport, how is ballet not a sport?  I don't understand.

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I am now reading The Physician, by Noah Gordon, on the Kindle.  His novel Shaman,  based in the American west, in the 19th century, won the first James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fiction in 1993.  The Physician is also full of historical detail.  I have copied one of the reader reviews, as a description: 

This engrossing book traces the life of 11th century Englishman, Robert Cole. Cole begins as a normal child, is quickly orphaned, and is then apprenticed to a barber-surgeon. As he travels throughout England with his master, the reader is introduced to all aspects of English peasant life. Family life, morality, religion, sexuality, medicine, xenophobia and history are all presented in an interesting, subtle, and easily read writing style. When Cole grows up and decides to be a physician, he comes in contact with Jewish doctors who explain to him that the best universities are in Moslem-ruled Persia, where no Christian may go. Determined to learn, Cole overcomes this obstacle by pretending to be a Jew. As he travels and studies in Persia, the same questions of lifestyle are addressed, only this time within the Jewish and Moslem communities. This is a great read for anyone who likes adventurous stories about growing up, or who is interested in sociology, religion, medicine, or history.

Hard to tell on the Kindle, but it's apparently a big book, judging by the price for tree-based (new price/lowest used price).  Um, why is the paperback more expensive than the hardcover?

	Kindle Edition $9.99   -- -- Expand Hardcover --   $79.99 $13.53 Expand Paperback --   $107.48 $4.65 Mass Market Paperback --   $88.92 $3.94

Yeouch!  I got it for $1.99 on one of those 24-hour sales.  It's so well written I'm running out of clean dishes and laundry.
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3585 Reading

Monday, July 30, 2012

Most people can work with any insanity, as long as it is consistent and predictable insanity.

--  Silk  --

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In the past few months I have read (not listed in order):

1. The Five People You Meet in Heaven - Mitch Alborn
2. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Tales of the Jazz Age - F. Scott Fitzgerald
3. What Your Childhood Memories Say About You ... and What You Can Do About It - Kevin Leman
4. How To Raise Emotionally Healthy Children:  Meeting the Five Critical Needs of Children - Gerald Newmark
5. Madame Bovary - Gustav Flaubert
6. Monday Mornings: A Novel - Sanjay Gupta
7. Sisters - Kathleen Thompson Norris
8. Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know - ?
9. A few other books I started and not only didn't finish, they were so bad I deleted them from the Kindle.

I am now reading God is an Englishman, R. Delderfield.

All were either free or $.99 to $1.99 for the Kindle.

I have accepted that as a warning for the future.  Sometimes a deal too good to pass up should be passed up.

An advantage of paper books is that you can leaf through and scan here and there to get some idea as to whether it's worth reading.  Can't really do that with an electronic book.  Well, you can, but it's a pain and you have to commit to acquiring it first.

#1 was good as a story of a man and his life.  I don't understand what all the fuss was about when it first came out, though.  I see no real lesson to be learned, as some people had described it.  I can't believe some people, after reading it, went about trying to identify the five they'd be likely to encounter.  I mean, if there was any lesson at all, it was exactly that you CAN'T anticipate that.

#2 leaves me wondering why Fitzgerald was so celebrated.  What a pile of dross.

#3 and #4 are typical of those books that could have said everything they had to say in 20 paragraphs, but proceed to take 200 pages to say it.  I didn't get more than halfway through either before I tired of the repetition.

#5 was not at all what I expected, but would have been a fairly good read *IF* I had not started out with much higher expectations.  Frankly, it looks to me like it was written as a romance novel for the women of the time specifically to teach a lesson - that women must avoid romantic fantasies and accept their lot in life, or suffer the consequences.  Hmmm.

#6 was more like an outline.  The author may have had some good tales to tell, but character development and situations were skimpy.  It seems like it was actually just an idea for a television series, which might have been a pretty good show, and this was a demo piece.

#7 was depressing.  I wanted to wade into the novel and slap them all upside the head.

#8 a waste.  Not the stories I knew...

Again, I had high hopes for God Is an Englishman.  It starts out rip-snorting, but about 1/4 of the way through it's starting to bog down.  I find myself frowning a lot.

Yeah, gentlewomen of the time were sheltered, and not all that well educated, but not so much that they didn't see animals "doing it", and weren't so stupid that they couldn't figure it out.  Being taught that sex is unladylike and to be "endured" is not the same as being totally ignorant of what is involved.

And after his trip through the countryside, Adam knows he wants to run his carting business in those spaces not served by the railroads, I think it was the unsullied northeastern part of the isles (don't remember, didn't pay attention, and with the Kindle it's not all that easy to leaf through and find that part - one more way that paper is better than bytes) where he would cart materials from the producers to the nearest railroad - so why on earth has he set his headquarters in London, environs already fully served by rails?  Waggons (yeah, two "g"s), horses, and drivers all stabled in London, when their territory would be many many miles away?  Seems like he should have his stables in the centers of the territories he wants to serve, in multiple locations. But, maybe I'm getting ahead of him.

This book is making me look up a lot of stuff on the internet, like mentions of Chat Moss.  It turns out Chat Moss is a huge peat bog that presented a challenge to the railroad, ingeniously solved by "floating" the rail bed across it.  I also had to look up the movers and shakers of the time, Cleveland bay horses, skewbald, the well at Cawnpore, the Crimean war, various bits of military attire and accoutrements and a bunch of other things.  Leaves me wondering how much I used to miss or gloss over when reading books before the internet.

I'll probably finish "God Is...", but I doubt that I'll want to read the following two parts of the trilogy.

I have high hopes for several other books on the Kindle, and recently I have purchased on paper the latest Stephen King, and a non-fiction book by journalist Michael J. Totten, and a novel by Leonard Pitts that I'm sure will be good, and a few others.

Sheesh.  I've got to stop buying books.
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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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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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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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