Catching up, am I the only one who thinks Vortex should send her assistant to set up her mom's network?

Hah! Brenda is eeeeevil, and funny.

Stephanie, I wasn't sure what sort of thing you like to read! I mean, I devour lots of things from the library, but I read...anything I can get my hands on, really. Scifi, fantasy, trashy romances, etc. But if I have to PAY for it, I get more picky. So I'm not sure what to recommend you PAY for...:)

Curious: how would Kindle work for reading long works? How is screen resolution/eye strain compared to printed pages?

I've given up reading stories of cruel things being done to cats, as they just upset me.

The cat appears to be fine, don't worry. The story is more funny than upsetting (though it was probably appropriate to bust the guy for it).

TB, I have no idea abotu the numbers behind but so far the screen seems very precise but soft somehow (in a good way)

Hey, All.

I've been trying to catch up and promising myself I'm gonna get back in the habit of talking instead of lurking more (made more difficult in the new "open format" office arrangement) for a good while now, but today I'm extra-motivated so I can request the patented ~ma.

A guy at work just had a motorcycle accident yesterday. Not his fault - an SUV in the right lane swung wide to make a right turn and cut right in front of him in the center lane. He went into the SUV's back end. He's got a fractured vertabra in his neck and is at that "everything is too swollen to tell whether he'll be permanently paralyzed" stage. He's only about 25 and such a nice guy. So, any ~ma that can be spared for Jesse and his spine would be greatly appreciated.

On a somewhat lighter note - let me Fourth(?) the rec for The Time-Traveller's Wife. It was really great. And have fun with the stuff that's public domain - I don't have a Kindle, but the first time I found downloadable ebooks I started going back and reading classics that I somehow never got around to...I remember Treasure Island and War of the Worlds specifically.

Today, the US Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces is having meetings here (they do this every year) and for the first time security (ie, the people in plainclothes with the earphone and telltale bulge under a jacket) is all over the place. I find it somewhat funny that all the people in uniform can't protect themselves.

Also, they reserved all the close parking spaces for them. So the pregnant lady had to walk and extra few steps. Harumpft.

However, I took my revenge when they were serving lunch in the atrium, I marched right out there, with my bulging belly, and grabbed some, just to see if anyone would say anything. They didn't, so I got a nice hot lunch for free. HAR! I'm going to do it tomorrow, too.

Thou shalt not blow pot smoke into the face of thy pets!

This does not mean that hot-boxing them is Bukowski-approved.

I have no idea about the numbers behind but so far the screen seems very precise but soft somehow (in a good way)

Yeah, formal numbers are easy to get. The subjective feel was more what I was going for, so I appreciate your answer.

Curious: how would Kindle work for reading long works? How is screen resolution/eye strain compared to printed pages?

The resolution isn't that high, technically, but the e-ink technology it uses is, basically, magic (and also why it's so expensive). It's nothing at all like an LCD display and kind of impossible to describe without actually seeing it. It feels, to me at least, almost exactly like reading ink on paper, albeit unbleached, slightly gray paper. It's not even backlit - just like a book, it requires a decent light source.

I read it for hours and hours with no eyestrain, or at least no more than I'd get from a paperback. Compared to reading on my Palm (on which I also read The Moonstone, interestingly enough), it was night and day.

If you want to see what the screen is like, a lot of Borders have displays with Sony e-book readers. I don't like them as much as the Kindle (worse store and no wireless), but the screen is exactly the same so you can look at that part at least.

(All of this is in past tense because my Kindle 1 got left in a Barnes & Noble late last year, idiotically. I can't afford a Kindle 2 quite yet, or I'd be caressing it lovingly right now.)

ETA: The screen is perfect for text, and kind of mediocre for images. At least the Kindle 1 was. They added some extra shades of gray, so the pictures in newspapers might look better now. But it's really focused on text.

I've read that the Kindle 2 screens are rather prone to scratching - anyone experienced this?