the glory, so thin
it chills at work... naked
and stands up
the back of the case
Review: Amazon Kindle
The good. The Kindle does what it’s supposed to do (and makes me a good little girl): allows you to read books while not getting distracted by things on the Internet, allows you to read while eating without having to hold the pages down, has a long battery life and simple design. I was pleasantly surprised about how beautiful the screen savers are, and I really liked the note-taking feature.
The bad. Some of the navigation / buttons are either redundant or not intuitive. Does anyone know why there need to be two symmetrical “next page” buttons but no symmetrical “previous page” buttons? Like what? More punctuation marks are also hard to get to, but I guess I don’t want an extra row of keyboard buttons; seriously, what am I going to do about my habit of excessively using semi-colons and parenthesis?
Of course when I get a shiny device, I try to steal take advantage of free digital content. I downloaded some books
The ugly. I went for a hot pink case from Vizu that stands up, but it doesn’t close and fit properly on one of the corners. Cheap - and I don’t want to deal with their customer service. In fact, the case came with a card that said if “you are not completely satisfied with your purchase… we kindly ask you to not leave a comment, whether it be negative or neutral.” Seriously? I’m totally leaving a bad review… just because they said that.
It was a practical purchase. I bought it to halt my voraciously growing physical library and make my life more mobile. There will definitely be a move to SF in the next four months, and there might be a move out of the state or country in the next year. Lugging around a ton of books that I’ve already read is just a pain. I’d probably end up selling them off, giving them to friends, or shiping them back to Texas. Yay for also being environmentally friendly and embracing the future!
Oh yeah, I called it “Mr. Flintstone” because it totally made my bed rock!
At least Hitler and I agree on something….
Why the iPad is a disappointment in its current state:
- No multi-task - can’t listen to Pandora and work at the same time
- No standard ports - need for an iTampon anytime you want to insert something; perhaps iCondom is a more fitting term for what the adapters actually do :)
- Closed app ecosystem - that’s ok as long as the app approval process sucked less… at least it keeps things easy and zippy
- No stylus compatibility - for note-taking in margins and diagram drawing
There is potential. I just hope I can upgrade to a MAX iPad.
location-based marketing for things that move around
Last night I had a craving for Girl Scout cookies: thin mint types, specifically. But I didn’t know where any of the Girl Scouts in Menlo Park were. I know what you’re thinking: if this is my biggest problem at 2AM (while I’m sick and have to get up at 7AM the next day), there’s probably something seriously wrong with me.
But in the greater context of things in life (because we must always extrapolate generalities from mundane details in life - I know, right? Wisdom!), it’s freaking hard to find things that move around: Girl Scouts, food carts, hippies that sell the pretty pretty earrings in Berkeley, hookers, drug dealers, etc. There are no permanent addresses you can search on Google Maps, and Craigslist is not very map/real-time friendly. There’s Twitter, but it’s hard for smaller merchants to acquire a lot of followers, and it’s kind of annoying to be following all these food carts all the time (too much noise, spam, not hungry all the freaking time - or rather, getting fat all the freaking time = not good, sort by location sucks).
I just want to search “Girl Scout cookies” and see a map where all the Girl Scouts are selling cookies rightfuckingnow. Or maybe also in an hour or so, marked in a different color, because I can probably wait an hour. Maybe. Perhaps they can even have profiles with ratings in case they are dirty, dirty liars. We can also be nice to them and share data around where people are looking for Girl Scout cookies… so the “providers” can come to you; that would make me even happier! All your cookies are belong to me. Screw no arbitrage – I’m going to ping the server a ton, hoard them all, and then sell them at a premium during off-season.
Casey thinks I’m seriously creepy for wanting a “Girl Scout Trackr” application on the iPhone (because everyone knows that all good things on the Internet are misspelled). In his words, “what would all the Asian mothers say when their daughters become ‘providers’” and exist to give people their ‘fix’? Objectify little girls less, right? Perhaps it can be called “The Source” and provide all the things that people crave / want that move around. I really don’t know why Foursquare, Loopt, etc. aren’t integrating this into their services.
Someone make it, please. I’ll proselytize. No seriously, I’ll find all the Girl Scouts and all the soccer moms that enable them (because they are the ones with the fancy iPhones - unless you’re in Menlo Park, I guess).
Or bring me some cookies :)
