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OK, I’ve been a solid user of the kindle for over a week now. The speed that I read the first book I bought for it appears to have been enthusiasm and an easy writing style - second book took me a solid week to read. Would I have bought one at regular price after a week of using it? Probably, though with the way its so easy to buy a book with the thing (it encourages the impulse buyer), I think Amazon could have sold them for less and done just as well.

No real disappointments, per se. A few books I’d hoped for aren’t available on the kindle, and it’d be super sweet if it had a backlight, because while it handles glare great, its hard to read in dim light. I know, it supposed to be like electric paper or whatnot, but it would still be a nice feature. Other than that, no real complaints, I’ve adapted to most of the idiosyncrasies, and I really love the way Amazon let’s you download a sample for every kindle book I’ve seen so far so you know whether its worth the money. Granted, it would be nice if there was some way to merge the sample with the bought book so that when you bought it, you didn’t have to hunt through pages to figure out where you left off, but that’s ok. It’s got free basic internet, after all Sure, it smells a lot like links2 with framebuffer support, ie usually better to stick to basic mode and ignore graphics if you can, but if you just need to check the weather or the news or wikipedia, it works pretty well.

And on the upside (cover your eyes Kim), I’m about 14% of the way to recouping what I paid for it, calculated by comparing the price of a kindle book with its paper version, and adding the difference.

Yeah, who am I kidding it, I love it.

I had some college friends that I knew were on facebook, and no way of getting in touch with them otherwise. So on a whim, I joined.

26 friends later, I’ve found most of the folks I hung out with in High School, as well as being most of the way to reuniting the Miles Hall of Justice.

Facebook is evil, my friends, and strangely addictive. Run. Now.

It took less than 48 hours for me to read “Farewell, My Subaru“. While the print edition is only 244 pages, I’m not sure if the speed with which I read it was because of the excitement of having a Kindle, the easy style with which Doug wrote the book, or some odd algorithm where its actually quicker to read something on digital paper without page flipping than the “old” way.

Let me start by saying it was a fun read. While I didn’t walk away from it with a greater understanding of how to get off the grid or live a green life, I enjoyed the anecdotes of someone else trying to do it. The author writes with an easy, conversational style that makes it an accidental page turner - you mean to stop, but you keep hitting that next page button

I think my only real complaint isn’t so much a complaint as a difference of opinion. Doug Fine’s approach to leading a greener life was to reduce his carbon footprint by cutting out as much of the petroleum based aspects of his life as he could (minus ice cream, which is probably why I love the guy so much in this book - we’ll be green, but we’ll have ice cream damn it!). However, he did it in what to me seems a wasteful tact - at least according to my reading of the book, he sought out to replace things with their local, non-petroleum equivalent. But Dough never mentions reusing, and rarely recycling.

Maybe the mantra was different when he was growing up (don’t think so, though - I think we’re in the same age brackets), but “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” has been the hallmark of “going green” for a while now. But I never got the sense in this book that there was much reusing going on. This is a shame to me, because in my mind reusing can be a significant force by reducing demand for the newer products by reusing older ones in new ways.

But that’s not really what the book was about. As you can guess, its hard to engage in an argument over an autobiographical piece when it comes to the ideology behind it - at that point its all opinion. The read was fun, though the more conservative side of my friends probably won’t appreciate it in the least. Dan and John, especially John - this one’s right up your alley.

I must say, the kindle, rocks. I finally was able to choose which book should go on it first, and I must say, it was apt. I went with Farewell My Subaru, one man’s tale of trying to go green and live off the grid (with a good dose of humor throughout), perfect for my paperless book reader (never mind the fossil fuels that went into producing it, I just saved a tree or two by getting the book over the ether!!). And now I must run off to deal with a six year old coming to grips with summer winding down and bedtime schedules being enforced. If you find yourself with the opportunity to obtain a kindle - and you are a big reader and buyer of books anyway - I highly recommend it.

As school let out this year (end of May), my wife and I set out on an experiment. We had observed that the girls were watching more and more TV, and the quality of what they were watching was quickly sliding down the scale. For ourselves, although the TV ended up being on at late hours for background noise, we weren’t actually watching too much of it. A handful of Discovery or SciFi channel shows for myself, a few shows for the wife, but that was about. In short, nothing we couldn’t live without, and being able to save $40 a month on our cable bill seemed worth it. So with us feeling righteous, I called the cable company and had our service demoted.

Alas, I couldn’t leave good enough alone. Something that had vexed me with our TV was the fact that although it had HD, I’d never gotten it tuned properly for HD channels. So I spent an afternoon mussing and musing, only to discover that the Westinghouse was cheap - what I’d missed previously is that I had stopped the channel scan after it had gotten all of the channels I’d expected it to find, when it needed to *complete* that scan in order to record them. Bah. So there I was, now, with a full suite of local channels in HD in addition to the basic ones we had demoted ourselves to. All was well with the world - until we discovered the local PBS kids channel, on 24X7 with repeats of “Sesame Street” and “Word World” and “Maya and Miguel,” along with every other kids show PBS shows. Non-stop.

In the end, we traded one set of channels the kids could be addicted to for another set, and the only ones who felt the restriction in what was available was my wife and I, who now had no other channels to watch other than local feeds. Don’t misunderstand me - I’d like to think that we’ve used the extra time in our lives for the better. Kim has been working on her business more, and I’ve accomplished things with the time I might otherwise have just wasted seeing what was on.

But as winter approaches, and there seems to be no real advantage to the self regulation other than self-righteousness, we will probably be reactivating cable. I’d always said I wanted to try life without the bustle of 60+ TV channels (even before the summer, we had stayed away from digital cable, so our selection wasn’t astronomical). Well, I’ve tried it. I actually wish I hadn’t ‘fixed’ the HD feed. Then we would have had a real test of life without TV. Bah. But with winter looming on the horizon, and the wife and I cuddling together on the couch more and more, we desperately need something more than reality TV and sitcoms (all the networks seem interested in showing these days).

Now, I’d like to point out that there have been some victories here. The girls have worked on more arts and crafts projects this summer than ever before. Katy has been writing short stories, and has started full chapter books, something she wasn’t quite ready for at the start of summer. Anna’s awareness and appreciation for the world around her - and her fear of insects, alas - has blossomed this summer. And little Tara is now counting and recognizing letters (ok, so not all of this PBS stuff was for the good).

Pundits will point out that we are the parents, that we control what the kids see and don’t see, and that’s true, to a point. But with me away at work for 13+ hours a day, and a line needing to be drawn between TV and getting things done in the house, I’d have to say there are some allowances that need to be made. There’s that delicate balance between doing the right thing, and doing what works best in your situation.

I think the next time round, we go hog wild and get digital, babe. Then at least we can watch some BBC America
[sidebar]
Tomorrow I will be picking up my kindle. I’ve already bookmarked a couple dozen (yeah, as if money were that free) SCI-FI and history books I’d like to read, so I don’t think my reading or quest for self betterment is going to be squashed by having some more TV options in our lives again. I’ll also be changing my schedule back to the early shift. It pains me to no end to do this. Working the later shift has meant that in the evenings, after the kids go to bed, Kim and I still get to spend some time together. Its not always filled with high brow talk - half the time its spent with Kim working on something while I read a book or work on cataloging the infinite chest of stamps I have to go through, but its still nice to spend quiet time in the company of your soul mate. And I’m going to miss that desperately. However, with school starting up in a few weeks, and with the chaos that is our lives, for our family it works better if I work the early shift so that I can be home in the late afternoon rather than later in the evening. It means I will be home and can take care of the kids not long after they get home from school, have dinner with the family, and help around the house again. Granted, it also means that I will be going to bed not longer after the kids and will be back to seeing Kim for any length of time only on the weekends, but that’s the price (and actually one of the motivating factors in relenting on the TV).