Personal

I’ve had the Sony Reader now for about a week. In that time, I’ve taken it on a plane trip, read three full books, multiple days worth of the NY Times and I’m in the middle of two books right now. Observations so far: The electronic paper is very readable. On my plane trip, I must have read for several hours straight with no more eye strain than if I had been reading a paper book. The legibility is good regardless of font size. You might still want to increase the font size if your eyes are tired, but otherwise, there is no need. The menus and button layouts are pretty reasonable. You can page forward or back. There’s a up-down-left-right cursor that is used to move around on a page. Using the number buttons on the right, you can jump to an arbitrary page in the book. These buttons double as a quick jump to a menu item on the Reader’s standard menus. One gripe, you can only move to different links using up/down on the cursor, left/right don’t do anything. At GB, paideka mentioned that it would be interesting to see what Apple did with the layout and look and feel of a reader. Agreed Battery life appears to be as advertised: 7,500 page turns per charge. Keep in mind that a page on the reader contains only about half the content of a standard paper back (depending on page layout and font size). Still, around 3,500 pages of paper back text is still pretty good. Updating the screen is slow. It takes about .5 – .75 seconds to update the screen. A few ramifications: 1) this is almost un-noticeable while reading text; and 2) using the cursor keys is painful, you deal with the update time for each cursor pressed – where ever possible I use the numeric shortcuts. A third ramification of the slow update time is that the Reader, and almost certainly any other reader using this generation of e-paper, is unusable as a reference book. When I use a reference book, I flip around quite a bit. Forward to the index, back to the text, forward many pages to the next topic, etc. I suppose if the reference book had a really good index, it might be better, but for the most part, this is still not a good tool for referencing which is a real shame. The bookmarking system is good. Each book keeps your place in the book. The top level of the reader keeps up with the last book you’ve read and your place in that book. You can set any number of bookmarks in each book and then access the bookmarks on a global or a per book basis. It would be nice if the reader also kept a list of most recently read, rather than just the single most recently read book; but that’s a small issue. Typically, I’ll just set a bookmark when I pause in reading, then delete it when I pick the book back up. PDF conversion still leaves something to be desired. I’ve looked into this a bit. The converter I’m using converts PDF -> HTML -> LRF. The PDF -> HTML conversion uses pdftohtml (surprised?) which is good in some ways, but still leaves off certain things (like images!), at least as used by the reader’s converter. Part of this is due to conceptual differences between PDF and HTML. HTML marks up text, flagging paragraphs, noting images, etc. Ideally, all of this is passed to the browser which handles the layout. PDF will have none of that. PDF consists of a set of primitives that indicate what text (in which font and size) should go in which location on the page. There is no markup of paragraphs, instead, each line of text is described individually. There is no easy way to reconstruct paragraphs from a PDF file (as a research note, I wonder if you could use a partially observable markov decision process?). That said, minus the missing images, the LRF result is definitely readable. So overall, I’m pretty happy with the reader. The biggest issue is the refresh time on the electronic paper and I hope that will improve over the next couple of years. ...

About a year and a half ago (November 2006), the wildlife clinic K volunteers with transfered a water turtle (yellow bellied slider) to her. A cute little guy, just over 7 grams and about the size of a quarter. Yesterday, weighing in at 125 g and with a shell about 4 inches long, we released her into the nearby lake. It’s easy to fall for a lot of the animals K rehabs. Their cute and tiny or just plain helpless and on the mend, but the turtles are particularly hard because K keeps them for so long. The following are a handful of the pictures we’ve taken of the turtle: ...

Yesterday, I bought a Sony Reader – the electronic book reader that uses E Ink’s electronic paper. The electronic paper display on the reader is very nice. It uses encapsulated white and black pigments that can be brought to the surface of the page. The only power consumption involved happens when you make a change. Once the change is made, it requires no power to keep the image. The upshot is that you’ve got a very long battery life, a decent contrast ration and a display that can be read in any light – in fact, the more the better since it’s reflective (like paper) rather than backlit (like a monitor). Moreover, because it’s not backlit, it’s easier on the eyes when reading for a long time. I read for a couple of hours last night and it was no different than reading a paper book. ...

Thanks to Luis, I find out last week that Tracks 1.5 has been released. Tracks is the implementation of the “getting things done methodology which I prefer. 1.5 is pretty nice. In particular, I look forward to hiding actions until a particular date. In the past, I’ve wanted to track a todo some six months in the future. I put it on the list and had to watch it for 180+ days. ...

One advantage of being in IT is that you often at least hear of cool things before other people do. You may or may not choose to adopt them, but at least you’ve got a choice. Thanks to Mr. Icon, I got an early gmail account, firstname.lastname@gmail.com. Great, unfortunately, I don’t have an uncommon name. Starting about a year ago, I began receiving email for a moderately important newsman. Last week, for a pastor in Michigan. In both cases, people apparently know the person has a gmail account, but they can’t remember the permutation of the person’s name. I always let the sender know that they’ve got the wrong person, but now I’m starting to think that either: a) I need to create a disambiguation auto-response that goes out if I’ve never seen your email address before; or b) we should just give up and form our own knockoff of the Village People. We’ve got an engineer, a newsman and a minister. Now we just need a fireman and a cowboy. Any volunteers? ...

For as long as I can remember, any time I spent more than an hour or so walking (or hiking), my legs and feet have felt sore and tired. Never having been very athletic, I assumed that I was out of shape or needed to exercise more. But even with as much exercise as I’ve been getting recently, I’ve still have still had the same problem. I’ve tried various inserts and shoes for people who over pronate, but not much seemed to help. So finally, I went to see the podiatrist. ...

The roofers finally finished our new roof last week. They started on February 28th and finished on April 2nd – five weeks. I’m pretty certain they only expected it to take about three weeks, but between the rain and the level of detail on the roof, it didn’t quite work out that way. Everything seemed to take longer than expected. On the bright side, all of you in central North Carolina owe us for the rain. I’m convinced that March would not have been so rainy except for our roof. For example, the first major rains came right after they pulled off the old shingles; and the rains last Monday and Tuesday postponed the completion. Coincidence? I don’t think so. You might say I’m falling victim to the logical fallacy, post hoc, ergo propter hoc. I say, screw that, I’m still taking credit for the rain. ...

For the most part, the old roof has been ripped off and we’re looking to start laying down the new roofing on Thursday. Several lessons learned so far in getting the roof replaced: all contractors have different prices, shop around drought is bad for roofers (and for that matter gravel driveway repair folks) having your roof torn off is LOUD. Between the guys tearing shingles off to the dogs barking like crazy, I had a splitting headache when I stayed home metal ridge vent covers from 20 years ago suck the leak we had in the den actually had its own pool of standing water under the ridge vent cover Looks like it’s going to rain tonight. Hopefully we won’t be learning the lesson about the maximum wind speed that roofing underlayment can take before blowing off.

We moved into our current house a little over four years ago (already?!). Over the past few years, we’ve found that the people who built it made some interesting choices. Some things were done very nicely and they cheaped out on other things. One of the places they cheaped out was the roof. It wasn’t bad enough to force them to replace it when we moved in, but we did have to get them to do some minor work. Since then I’ve had to go up there a few times a year and add some roofing tar or replace a vent boot. We’ve known that we’ll have to replace it some day for a couple of years now. ...

When K and I got home today, we had not one, but two different offers from the local power company (Progress Energy) to enroll in their equal payment plan program. The first was a generic flier touting the benefits of having a consistent power bill. You sign up and based on your past two years of power consumption, they compute your monthly bill and that’s what you’ll pay all year long. They’ll recompute a new amount 12 months later. We had something like that with Duke Power in Durham. They computed your recent average. You paid that for 11 months and then settled up on the 12th month, paying less or more depending on actual use. ...