Tag: Anti complaint

Eagerly awaiting the Kindle

Amazon is releasing the Kindle, their new ebook reader, today, according to just about everyone.  It sounds really cool.  The idea from Jeff Bezos, the guy in charge at Amazon, is that people should have access to every book ever written, all the time.  So this thing has some internet connection provided by Sprint, and you’re supposed to be able to buy a book from Amazon without using a computer in a few minutes.

Of course, the $9.99 lease payment for a new book is both a little high for something you don’t own and can’t resell, and a little low for Amazon to make any money, so I expect the pricing model to change at some point.  Artificially inflating the price of a non-scarce good doesn’t lend itself to an efficient market, but the people at Amazon have done pretty well selling things so far, so I expect they’ll figure something out.

First on my list would be real ownership of content.  If I buy an ebook, I should own it.  It should be mine.  I should be able to resell it or trade it or give it away.  I would also like to see libraries.

There are some major details missing from the news about this thing so far, such as integration with the computer.  I know you don’t need to use a computer to buy new books, but what about free ebooks released by their authors?  Can I just transfer those or download them directly to the Kindle?  A nice little library program on the computer would be cool, so I could organize my books onto SD cards or whatever this thing is using for removable storage.

Anyway, I’m very excited.  I’d love to see this thing revolutionize the book industry like the the iPod did for the music industry.  If I were a book publisher, I would be very nervous right now.  They may find themselves increasingly less relevant, just like the big music labels, if they can’t figure out how to adapt to new business models.

Thanks, Akismet

So, some time this afternoon, Akismet stopped the 10,000th spam comment here at Complaint Hub.  I think we should all take a moment and applaud Akismet’s efforts.  Way to go, Akismet!

levitra, from IP Address 202.105.182.15, decided to ask, “How add your to reds?”.  That was the comment.  The link to “levitra’s” blog or website was some Ukrainian top level domain name.  I’m sure the site is wonderful and informative.  I imagine they sell cheap pharmaceuticals.

I often wonder why they think that someone will take a comment like that seriously and click on “levitra’s” website to find out more.  And then, once there, do they really expect that people will think, “Oh, while I’m here, I should buy prescription medicine from a foreign country without the advice of my doctor!”

Seriously.  At least I didn’t have to censor the comment for language.

Nano update – Day 2

1817 words yesterday.  428 on the Metro this morning.  If I can knock out nearly half my daily word goal during my commute, that would be awesome.

The story is going well so far.  I love how characters kind of pop up out of nowhere.  I mean, sometimes I have a character in my head before I start, and I’m more or less waiting for the right moment for him or her to make an appearance.  But sometimes I’m writing, and someone pops up, and turns out to be important.  The campaign manager hoping her guy gets elected so she can get a better book deal is one of those.  The surly, hungover police officer might be another.  I’m not sure if he’s going to end up with a big role in the story.

Anyway, I’m happy so far.

No one can stay away

I went back to Starbucks this morning, despite my claims to the contrary.  I had gone the other day just to break a $20 and found that the grande coffee was back below $2.00.  This morning, I just couldn’t bear the thought of the awful office coffee (black, because the only thing worse than bad coffee is powdered creamer).  And they weren’t busy, so I asked the guy who served me about the price change.

He very nicely explained what happened, and it’s actually an interesting explanation.  Starbucks did, in fact, raise prices back in July.  That pushed the price over $2.  But then Virginia changed the tax laws.  They stopped taxing plain coffee.  They still tax the coffee-like milkshakes, and they tax the food that Starbucks serves.  According to the guy, they will even tax your coffee if you get it with a pastry or something.  I think the distinction is between “coffee” and “food”, and coffee is considered to be part of the “food” category if you drink it with something to eat.

Anyway, very interesting.

Its almost time.

Just over fifteen hours until Nano starts. I’m ready to go. I’ve got the beginning of the story rattling around in my head. I’m a little afraid that the beginning is ALL I have in my head, and the whole middle and end thing is going to be a struggle. But now is not the time for doubts.

I didn’t sleep well last night, and I’m not sure why, but it’s going to make it even harder to stay up until midnight tonight and start before I go to bed. I do that most years. It feels like a nice head start.

Anyway, I’m excited about the story.  I have a name for my main character.  Well, I have a first name.  She needs a last name.  I notice that none of you slackers responded to my request for character names.  That’s fine.  When I’m a rich and famous novelist, I’ll just forget all of you.

Go see a play

On Thursday, the wife and I took my mother-in-law to The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.  NB that I am not linking to the official website of the play because it has a stupid Flash intro.  You can Google it if you’re interested, and the Wikipedia entry probably has a link, too.

Anyway, it was very funny.  There’s one sad song that lasts way too long near the end that doesn’t seem to fit the play at all, but otherwise it’s all very good.  The whole play is, as the title suggests, a spelling bee.  They invite a few members of the audience up to spell along with the cast members.  It’s quite obvious that the audience is supposed to set up a few one-liners, and then go back to their seats.  One of the audience members actually spelled some word I had never heard of correctly, and they had to give him another really hard one to get him to go sit down.

I think my favorite part was when they defined “Mexicans” as “An American slang word for people from Guatemala, El Salvador . . .”  I think there was more, but I couldn’t hear over the laughter.

Anyway, I recommend the play to anyone with the opportunity to go.

Date Night – Half-Birthday Edition

On Monday, the wife took me to Perrys in Adams Morgan to celebrate my half-birthday.  Yes, neither Perrys nor Adams Morgan has an apostrophe, according to the web site.

Half-birthdays are a wonderful tradition that my mom did for us.  We got a little present and maybe a cupcake.  We being my brother and sister and I.  Anyway, because the wife is so great, she has continued this tradition for me.  In addition to dinner, she got me a t-shirt from Design by Humans and some bamboo boxer shorts from Shirts of Bamboo.

Anyway, Perrys.  We ate on the open-air roof overlooking the top of 18th Street.  It was great.  The weather was perfect for it.  And the food was great.  We started with some edamame, which had too much salt on it, but was otherwise good, and a bottle of French grenache-syrah, which was also good.  It was a screw cap bottle, which I’ve almost never seen outside of New Zealand wine.  But the screw caps are getting more popular, and I’ve heard from at least two people who should know that even a lot of wine snobs are okay with the screw caps.

Then we had assorted sushi, which was quite good.  The spicy tuna roll was great, and the fatty tuna nigiri just falls apart in your mouth.

Overall, it was a great restaurant experience, and I would definitely recommend it.

Gutsy first impressions

Overall, I’m really happy with Gutsy.  I find myself spinning the desktop cube just because I can.  But I haven’t done much yet.  Today I think I’m going to create a separate partition for my /home directory, and I’m going to pull the pictures I took yesterday off my camera and see about uploading them to Flickr.

I have some small issues.  First, the gnash free flash plugin doesn’t really work for Firefox on a 64 bit system.  The proprietary flash plugin is fine.

My panel icons are displaying at the center of the panel, not all the way on the right like they’re supposed to.  I haven’t really searched for a solution to this yet.

Other than that, this is a pretty slick OS.  Wireless has been perfect – the only setup I did was selecting my network and providing my WPA password once.  The frequent disconnects I got on Feisty have not happened at all.

Gutsy supports my Nvidia video card much better than Feisty.  I just had to choose a different driver in a drop down menu and then reset the screen resolution.

Anyway, if you’ve been thinking about trying out Ubuntu, now is the time.

Date night

Last night, we did the second of our new monthly date nights. We went to a restaurant that I run past fairly regularly, and for some reason it’s always seemed intriguing.

We went to Napoleon Bistro on Columbia Road (Warning: Their website is a horrific flash piece of crap). We were thinking about eating outside, but it was a little muggy. And, it turns out we made the right choice, as a group who went outside to eat just after we arrived came back in shortly after, complaining of bugs.

Anyway, inside the restaurant is nice. They have a rather large bar area, which suggests they get a bar crowd that wasn’t there on a Sunday evening.

The food was good. I had flank steak with a shallot demi glace, whatever that means, and french fries. The wife had a crepe filled with something green and a salad. Crepes, apparently, are their specialty. We split a nice cabernet that I’d never heard of.

Dessert was great, too.  We had the “Femme Fatale”, which was a crepe filled with caramelized bananas and topped with ice cream.  It tasted a little pumpkiny and delicious.

We would definitely go back. In fact, we might even go back later this week when we have a friend in town who would love the food there.

Back to the website, though. I find that, more often than not, a restaurant website is awful. They usually use a lot of Flash, which is rarely a good idea. When I go to a restaurant website, I’d just like to see a menu, maybe a phone number. I don’t need to experience the ambiance of the place through some crappy Flash interface. I’m also surprised at how often I Google a restaurant and they don’t seem to have a website at all. I know I spend more time online than most people do, but it seems that the benefits of even just an HTML version of the menu and phone number being online would outweigh all the maintenance and hosting costs.

Anyway, I would recommend Napoleon Bistro. Just not their website.