What is Big Steak Thursday? Keep reading below.

Familiar with Fat Tuesday and Ash Wednesday? If you are, you have to be familiar with Big Steak Thursday. It's a cornerstone of the whole [secular] aspect of the Catholic church.

I don't even know at this point, given all the folk lore and "personal rebellion" within the Catholic Church, if fasting is still required. I know it used to be no meat on any Friday, but that got changed during the reforms of Vatican II in the late 60's. I'm still pretty sure that, as a "proper" catholic, you are to eat no meat on Ash Wednesday and during the five Fridays of Lent. I think it's five... I'm not about to do the math because however long it is, it still feels like a year.

Anyway, most people will argue with you that the whole "non-meat thing" was started to help business, given that the apostles were fishermen. Or that it's strictly a secular bylaw. Or what should it matter, seeing as it's got no religious meaning. Any of these could be true I suppose, but what I do know is that Lent is about sacrifice and giving up meat is a sacrifice. For me it is. I used to give up fasting for Lent when I was younger because it was easier to do. My four major food groups are beef, chicken, pork, and cheese. That leaves me eating cheddar on Ritz crackers for six days out of the year, if I want to follow this. So it's about the effort of making a sacrifice, if I correctly remember my Catholic mumbo-jumbo from high school.

And that brings us to the calendar this week. Fat Tuesday was made popular by the decadent citizens of New Orleans: the idea was to party like mad the day before Lent started because you were expected to fast for the next 40 days. Remember that New Orleans was settled by the very [at the time] French in the days that required fasting for the entire 40 day term. The French were touchy, religious things in the 1700's. As the last minute of Fat Tuesday was spent, and Ash Wednesday started the Lenten period, the party stopped at once. In more modern times, two days after Ash Wednesday was the first non-meat-consuming Friday. What's in the middle? Big Steak Thursday.

Tomorrow is a carnivorous free-for-all, for exactly 24 hours. Camp out in a Outback and order the 64oz porterhouse. Descend upon a KFC, with an inch thick wad of bills in hand, and cause them nothing but a "we can't keep up with the demand" panic. Pull a Bobby Brady and go for the pork chops and apple sauce. Better yet, screw the apple sauce, and get extra chops and a side of beef. Consume as much meat as you can because once Big Steak Thursday is over, you'll be eating three meals of cheese and bread again for another 24 hours.

Time is limited so make the most of it. Go get a steak and enjoy it because more fasting is a comin'.

Looks like what was once just a meme on MSNBC has gotten some momentum (and thankfully have since dropped the "I'm a Tea Bagger" slogan.) Don't remember this thing? It was started by Republicans as a gimmicky "We're not going to take this - we'll rise up like we did in Boston!" during the Revolution and then quickly dropped out of sight. Now it's back, but it's not a Republican thing anymore... people that are now part of the "Tea Party" are pissed at both sides of the political game, Democrat and Republican alike. They want a smaller Federal government, something we haven't had since the days of FDR in the mid-1930's.

Simply put, our Federal government has never been as powerful as it's been for the last 70 years and while America has only ever had two powerful parties in government, we haven't always had the two we have now. The parties have ebbed and flowed over the years... these people are looking to return to a simpler time of smaller federal government (and likely more powerful state governments) and a change in political parties - which was the main cause of the US Civil War and one of the sticking points of the original Congressional Congress.

Should be interesting to watch where this goes. One thing is certain: these people are not part of the current party system and they are not going to stand for either current party aligning itself to them. Their goal is to hold true to the exact working of the Constitution, which makes no provision for bailout packages or even Social Security. The Constitution is truly a Capitalist Manifesto: if you can't hack it, that's your problem - very different than how our Federal government behaves today... After all, Thomas Jefferson believed that "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure." much in response to both American and French Revolutions; he was also a firm believer in a restrained central government, to the chagrin of Alexander Hamilton.

History repeating itself? It looks like it so far.

If you want an early preview of the Windows phone 7 Series [music/video] UX will likely feel like go get a Zune HD and play around with it.

Now that I think about it, I likely do have a Gmail account, but it's like the Hotmail/Yahoo! thing: I wanted access to a Google service at some point and they gave me a mailbox for free... the only time that I'd want a Gmail account is when I'd want some anonymity and even then, I'd question Gmail as a viable choice: it's a well documented "feature" that they scan your email for "targeted marketing reasons". I know people will tell me "They say they can be a business without being evil!" but call me careful... I'd rather not take the chance if I really wanted to re-invent my digital self.

Then Google Buzz hits. I thought "what the hell happened to Wave anyway?" and took a look. Oi... another social network to join? Not interested. Then the fallout started from people that "signed up" for it. Google opted-in everyone that has Gmail - and touted look at our numbers Facebook and Twitter! - and then went on to set the default privacy settings to be "show the world everything." Sounds harmless? It's not. It's caused some people a number of issues. Serious "real life" issues and all of it without their concent. When people are hit by viruses or phishing, I look at the user and say "You dumb ass! You downloaded what and thought it was OK? Get your porn on a DVD from now on!" because that required their active clicking... Buzz issues/problems? Were totally pushed to users in the dark. Totally silent.

This release plan was either completely stupid or completely diabolical, depending on how evil you think Google can be and today I'm very, very thankful I don't use Gmail.

And. I. Forgot.

*sob*

Really? What did he say that got him punted? Isn't it all about unicorns and rainbows when talking about Haiti these days?

"We did the same after Hurricane Katrina," he said. "We were quick to vilify humans who were too slow to respond to the needs of victims, forgetting that the victims had built and maintained a major city below sea level in a known target zone for hurricanes. Our response: Make the same mistake again. Rebuild a doomed city, putting aside logic as we did."

I see two sides to this problem. True, he's a public figure and if he proclaims his opinions in public, they can and will impact his "public figure related" job. This is a fact of blogging, tweeting, or Facebooking.

Freedom of Speech does not absolve you of taking responsibility for your Speech.

However, he does have a point. New Orleans and Katrina was a debacle in terms of Federal response, but it was a city that was warned of a coming hurricane and they did little-to-nothing to prepare for it. They are a city below sea level. They did have so many false alarms over the century that they became lazy in terms of heeding warnings of hurricanes. They need to take some responsibility for the aftermath of hurricane, the same way the government has to.

Haiti did not have the same warning. They got levelled within seconds. I can't even ask "why weren't more buildings earthquake safe?" because it's not normally at risk of quake; this was a surprise attack unlike life for cities on the west coast. However. This guy has a point. Haiti has been a mess for hundreds of years. They've had one political implosion after another. They've had dictators that have stripped the populous of human rights and one coup after another has devastated the nation. The world recognizes that Haiti has a higher AIDS infection rate in the population than any other nation and that helps tear apart the culture. Over half the population is under 18. They have no notion of birth control - aside from abstinence - and that's also helped to destroy their country. And while a number of people will point out that birth control isn't approved for Catholics - and the nation is mostly Catholic - I have to point out two things: the country has legally recognized Voodoo as a national religion, so there are options, but also, having sex outside of wedlock is a non-Catholic thing... you can't have that both ways: pick one part of a religion that flies in the face of another.

This reporter has another valid point: if he's going to donate money to the relief fund, he wants the effort to teach a man how to fish rather than just giving him fish. His article is corse, harsh, untimely, and extraordinarily pompous, but he still has a point: are our current relief efforts going to help rebuild Haiti in the long run?

One thing that stuck out was the bit about panhandlers: I don't give money to them either... for me, it comes from an episode where I saw a bunch of people hop out of a car in CT. Saw one guy finish up a Subway, walk to the corner, and put up a "Hungry - can you spare cash?" sign. I know, in this scenario, maybe he hadn't eaten for a week before, but it just left me feeling... wrong. Also, how many times do you see a panhandler smoking while asking for food money? Cigarettes are a luxury for people - they are flat out expensive... if a beggar asks you for money, how do you feel if they take it and buy drugs with it? Is your money helping the problem? People say you shouldn't loan friends money because you'll resent them, if they don't use the loaned cash in a way you agree with - panhandlers fall in the same group for me. I'd much rather donate to actual organizations that help people dig out of a hole and yes - I have donated in the past.

The problem with this "rebuilding Haiti," so that they are in a better world position, is that right now is not the time to work on that. When there's immediate pain, despair, need, and chaos, you have to fix that problem first before you can look longer term. Now is not the time to ding the mass populous for mistakes they or their leaders have made. They need help now no matter what they've done wrong in the past. If you saw a panhandler that had been stabbed and was bleeding in the street, you get them help now. You don't stand there and lecture them or attempt to educate them about how to make better decisions in the future... right now, Haiti is bleeding from an open wound and it needs that to heal before they can address longer term problems.

Bottom line, this is another example of how people aren't making their point correctly. His valid and thought provoking point is lost and negated by his tone and his lack of sympathy given the current situation. And while I respect that it's his legally protected choice to (or not to) donate money/time/goods to whichever cause he wants to, the same way it's his right to publicly proclaim his opinions... that right carries with it a responsibility which also needs to be recognized. And in this case, it has cost him his freelance job.

Ah well - ever forward.

How about that iPad?

On top of that, the Windows 7 64-bit installer simply doesn't work.

I put Windows 7 64-bit on my Boot Camp partition on my MacBook Air in December. I knew that the x64 Vista drivers would work from the 10.6 disc if I skipped the installer and went for the MSI directly. When the new drivers came out I said "Well, if they are officially supporting Windows 7 x64, I should uninstall all of the drivers" because that makes sense to me. I did that and ran the Boot Camp 3.1 installer: nothing happened.

After checking the forums, I saw that it's an upgrade thing. Fine. I put Boot Camp 3.0 back on the box and attempted to run the upgrader: nothing happened.

I cracked open the downloaded EXE, since it was a self-extracting RAR, and took a look: one EXE, one MSP, and one CAB... I try running the EXE: nothing happened.

So I went ahead and tried the MSP... got promped with a "Repair/Uninstall" option. Uwahhhh. That's something that happened. I said Repair. This went through an install process - while it was installing, I looked at the temp folder: it was installing Vista versions of the drivers. That makes some sense since I know it had installed Vista versions with Boot Camp 3.0. After it was done and a reboot, Boot Camp told me it was running 3.1. Whoo! A valid upgrade!

And then I did some looking... there were over 20 driver packages installed... most of them from 2007 and 2008. Uh... that's old. I tried looking for new features - nothing. I mean, I didn't expect all of my dream list to make it, but something - anything would have been good. Like auto-diming the screen on ambient light, diming the keyboard, three and four finger support for the Trackpad... anything would have been nice.

That made me wonder: maybe I got the older Vista drivers after all? Then I thought some more and said "what a damned minute!" Apple tells us that this update to Boot Camp will enable people to install Windows 7 x64. But you can't get a clean/stand alone install of Boot Camp 3.1 at anytime ...and you can't install Boot Camp 3.0 to Windows 7 x64. So how in the hell am I supposed to apply a patch to a piece of software that I can't install in the first place?

Yeah, right, it all Just Works. And before the Apple Fanboys start blathering on about "Just use OSX" or "This is Windows fault" let me end that right now: Apple advertises that this is supposed to work and it doesn't. They made the drivers - it's not Windows fault if they can't make a working product on another OS. If they want to support it they should ship working code and at a level that pleases their customers. I will not take "Just don't do that" or "Use this other thing instead" as a solution here. If I want to drive my MINI somewhere and it doesn't run right, taking a bus or a taxi doesn't fix the problem - it works around it.

Oh, and since when does silent failure make for a good user experience? I've noticed the iPhone started this trend of "Oh, if an application crashes, just return to the home screen as if nothing happened." It's not the iPhone's fault that the application crashed - much like it's not Windows fault that Apple's installer/driver support sucks - but I don't understand how the lack of an error message helps anyone in the food chain, be it clueless end user, savvy end user or developer...

My guess is that I'm annoyed with this enough that I'll just repave the damned box with Windows 7 x86 - maybe that'll help.

Any bets on what new hardware shows up after next week's announcements? *g*

Sad, really.

All this money is being collected already, state wide. Sure, the sales and restaurant taxes are higher in King and Pierce counties but that's the majority of the people in the state; I can live with that. Similar to the price of parking in Seattle versus Redmond: the ratio of cost always increases to your proximity to a city. I get that.

What I don't get is how we can have a 2.6 billion dollar budget gap and have the state ask us for more money. I get a budget gap; that's easy to understand. I mean, how we got here makes sense: you spent more than you took in and now you're screwed. What is galling to me is the ask for more money from the citizens.

We're already a fairly high taxed state. Sure we're one of of the ten states in the Union without an income tax but we're also in the top ten of most taxed states. So either way, we're paying out a large amount of cash no matter what it's called - if they are still getting the cash, does it matter how? Bottom line is that Business 101 says that if you want to spend more than you're making you either a) get more money or b) reduce what your spending.

Looking at option A, this is the logical and easiest option. The government has agreed on what they want to spend; now they just have to fund it. What they aren't getting is that we're already tapped out. We're already tax - if not overtaxed - on too many things. Additionally, they are actively not working on anything to hold onto the businesses that we have that could help us with taxes. Why did Boeing set up shop in South Carolina? First thought is because of the unions. The unions refused to agree to a strike free contract... uh, this is not 1979 and Norma Rae, guys - there's no children working in the factory and working conditions are mandated by OSHA. What has your union done for us lately, aside from collecting dues and demanding more money? You should have cut the deal with Boeing.

And when the unions didn't cut the deal, the government should have pushed pressure onto the unions. And when that failed the government should have been offering as many tax breaks as SC. No, instead the government said "we've got the expertise and supply lines in Everett - they won't leave." True comment: heard it on the news myself from a state representative. So why isn't option A a real option anymore? Because you've got jobs leaving because companies aren't getting any incentives to stay here. With the jobs going, so will the people if only because the cost of living won't get cheaper just because there's fewer jobs. WA is nice and all but there are other states with more jobs, lower taxes, lower cost of living, and better weather: I expect to see a population migration start to occur in October 2010, if we get more taxes dropped on us.

Option B, then, is the only other option: spend less. That's what really needs to happen in this state: smarter spending. Not even less spending, but smarter spending. I love the fact that there's so many people in WA that are politically aware, which is more than I can say for the East where they just go with the flow. The people here love Getting Involved. They may be so ignorant of things that they can only repeat what they've been told to repeat, but they are still aware of the political climate. How does that work? Look at the behavior of our national party system and how they have behaved the last 20 years: When Republicans lose majority, they blame the media for being pro-Democrat. When Democrats lose majority, they blame the Republicans for believing in something that Democrats don't - they say "How can you believe that?!" but can't come up with something better. You may not agree with Republicans, you may not like Republicans, and you may fight to your last breathe against all that they represent, but you have to admit: they know what they believe in. You ask a Republican why they buy into point A and they can back it up. True, it might be by quoting a Bible or some other mythical report, but they have a reason. Ask a modern day Democrat that's walking the streets of Seattle - usually with a petition in hand - why they support point A, and 75% of them can't tell you why and another 20% will point out that it's better than the Republican idea, which makes it better. If you press them, they collapse. The last 5% will have the hard facts as to why they formed their opinion, even if the facts may be as unbelievable as Republican bibles... at least they logically have a reason. Fact is that being Democrat is a trendy thing right now: it's very easy to follow and not know why you support it.

Why is that important? Because WA government is so Democrat-blue that it means that our populous is inclined to keep them in power because of the party without knowing the money that the government is already getting is going. Cynical people will instinctively think "bail out programs" or "salaries" but it's far worse than that... we have a spend happy government and our people simply thank them for it every election. The only glimmer of hope I have is that the Seattle Democrat party refused to support "bag happy" Mayor Nichols this past November. It gives me hope that maybe the people in the city are going to hold their mayor accountable, even if it did take a monster snow storm to prove the point.

Accountability is what we need. When I heard about the gap, my initial reaction was "cut stuff." Then I heard the uproar that Mount Si's trail may be closed more often due to lack of funds. Ya know what? That's not a bad thing. Save the money for the state and let the trails be supported by the enthusiast that use them most often; how often does anyone east of WA use the Mount Si trial? Road work is universally needed and we haven't seen much of that lately, given the daily state of SR520 and the still-sinking SR99. What we keep seeing is more and more programs and parks and worse than parks: park art work. How does that help our budget gap? How does this help anyone? Don't get me wrong - I love the big eraser down by the railroad tracks in Seattle and I like the sculpture park. But what did it cost us all then and how did that help our current budget now?

The high flying times of reckless spending has been over for years but I don't think anyone in WA's government got the memo... no, instead I see stuff like what's in the picture. I could see a committee meeting in Olympia or Seattle with this plan: "lets take an ugly private parking lot and make it into a park since we haven't had a new one in Capitol Hill for years!" So the government now has to buy the land from the owner. The owner that is making a fist full of money because the park is in a neighborhood with limited parking, so there's always a 1/4 lot full (and completely full on weekends,) so it's going to be an expensive purchase - land often is. Once you've got the land, you need to convert it into a park, which cannot be cheap. Especially when you'll have the EPA and hippies all over you to fix whatever is under the asphalt, before planting one seed of grass. After two or three years you get a park opening. A day later and you'll have to have police sweep the park to clear out the homeless that will crash there on opening night. One week after that you'll have graffiti all over the kid's toys.

Of course, by that time we'll also have a 5.0 billion budget gap, 11.5% sales tax, and a 4% income tax so there's likely to be even more people sleeping there that night... maybe they can help avert the graffiti problem.

"People want leadership, Mr. President, and in the absence of genuine leadership, they'll listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone. They want leadership. They're so thirsty for it they'll crawl through the desert toward a mirage, and when they discover there's no water, they'll drink the sand." "People don't drink the sand because they're thirsty. They drink the sand because they don't know the difference." [The American President 1995]

Basically, you create a new folder in Windows Explorer, you name it SomeFunName.{ShellFolderGUID-from-Registry} and that new folder will be a "shortcut" to whatever namespace you gave it. In the case of naming a folder GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} you end up with a folder named GodMode that opens to "all tasks" as is defined by that GUID. On my PC, I named the folder All Tasks.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} which named my folder "All Tasks". Windows 95 used this same technology with fonts in the form of Fonts.{93412589-74D4-4E4E-AD0E-E0CB621440FD}

What is nice about the All Tasks folder for me is that I'm able to make shortcuts to any of the tasks there; I could put "Add or remove programs" on my desktop now... what it's is either an Easter Egg or a newly hidden feature in Windows 7.

Nice thing about this is that I wanted to post the GUID so I don't have to go dig it up for new machines!

The collection of goodies included: an iPhone 3GS, a Nintendo DSi, Zune HD, and MacBook Air.

Nintendo DSi - no idea because I didn't use it. Anywhere. Not in the airport, not in flight, not landside. Of course, part of this could be because Jolene and I timed our arrival at Sea-Tac well enough that we didn't have to kill time and we had a total of 1.5 minutes to breathe at JFK... anyway, I've got no news to report on the DSi except to say that it's pretty lightweight to carry.

MacBook Air - one of the things that I've tried to do over the last few vacations is to unplug from work. True, I keep an eye on email, but mostly to clean out the crap; if I don't my mailbox will overflow and it will make the first day back to work that much more annoying. Of course, with the iPhone connected to work email, I can wipe that out throughout a day at my leisure and without digging out a laptop. And because of this, I can say that the Air didn't get much use either. The size and the weight made it amazingly portable; enough to say that I forgot I had it at the airports. I planned to use it a bit in the air - enough to have downloaded Alcohol 52% FE to mount ISO's off a flash drive, since the Air has no optical drive - but I never got around to using it. When I did need a laptop on the ground, the Air was totally fine. I never bothered to boot it to OSX; Windows 7 was more than fine for browsing and home email checks... could use an updated driver or two for battery life and heat, but other than that, it was all kinds of fine.

Zune HD - 32GB isn't as big as it sounds and I can honestly say that I miss having the 80GB of space that I used to have on my HDD based Zune. Now that that's out of the way, I have to say that I loved having this device with me on this trip. It's because of this device that I didn't take out any of the other three on the plane. I watched about 3.5 hours of video on each flight and both times I landed with 1/2 of my battery still remaining. My Zune 80 - which Jolene was using this trip - only lasted about 3 hours before completely dying. Whether the battery life has increased because of the solid-state storage or because of the OLED screen, I don't know but the device worked absolutely flawlessly on the trip. I cranked through multiple movies, had to scroll back a few times if I fell asleep, and I never dimmed the lighting for longer life - best device of the trip.

Of course now the question is: could the iPhone have done the same? Truth be told, I don't know. I'm sure an iPod touch may have better battery life than the iPhone because it has less crap to power, but I simply refuse to have an iPhone and iPod touch at the same time. Way too much overlap. Then if you use the iPhone, will you have no power left to make a call when you land? I know the iPhone has a number of peripherals that can extend battery life... one from Kensington even acts as a stand for when watching video. But then you're looking at an extra device anyway. For me, I don't need all of my devices to converge into one device. Not until I can get a device that can be used for a full 24 hours without dying. For this trip I would need something I could use in the departing airport, in the air, and then still make a call when I land. That's at least 10 hours for a trip like this... the iPhone's not up to it without the extra battery and while it has games, they aren't as good as the DSi...

For now, I'm glad to have the device diversity and props to Zune HD - it performed better than all of the other devices in the magic bag this trip.

Aside from that, I was thinking about coding up some stuff while out of WA. Oops. Didn't open a compiler once... and I'm not altogether unhappy about that. I also haven't looked at an RSS feed since I left work... feel out of touch, but again: I'm not altogether unhappy about that either. I think I needed the analog break. That said, I at least finally got through Modern Warfare 2's campaign mode... got Borderlands on the drive tray but haven't flipped on the power yet - watching Harry Potter 6 on Blu-Ray at the moment.

And Zeek seems to have survived the vacation, while we were gone... not even too pissed off, by the look of it. He has been a cling-on the first few days we were back - now he seems to be spending a little more time on his own, which is good... however, he's showing a little bit of white hair all over now - wonder if he's getting old. I know I can point to individual white hairs on my head and tell you which woman or product release cause them... I would have though it easier for a cat.

Decade++; FTW

Welcome to the troubling world of Windows Mobile.

It was this way with the Pocket PC Phone Edition, BREW, J2ME, Windows Mobile, and most recently the Windows Phone... and it looks like history will repeat itself again with Android.

Sad.

Say hello to the EU-required Web Browser "Choice Screen" of Windows.

Uh... weren't you always able to install any browser at any time? I have often had four on the same machine, when working on web projects... and with Windows 7 you can easily uninstall IE entirely. I know, because I've done that too. Oh, wait, here's another blurb from the very same article that has some more interesting insight:

The accord eliminates the possibility of Microsoft having to pay a large fine and means the company can increase focus on a shrinking market share in Europe. Mozilla Corp.'s Firefox overtook Internet Explorer as the most popular browser in Germany, according to a study by Fittkau and Maass this month. Microsoft was fined 1.68 billion euros ($2.46 billion) in previous EU antitrust probes.

So, let me see if I follow this... the EU sues claiming that there's no choice of browser and/or the browser is too tied to the OS. Meanwhile, OSX ships with Safari in the box, Google's coming Chrome OS is entirely based around a web browser, and without the "Choice Screen" active in the EU (seeing as it's going to be released in Q1 2010) there was an entire nation of people that chose to use a browser other than IE... that they opted to download their own browser and use that based off their own choice. Um... well then...

At least it sounds like this ends the pickpocketing of the EU from a US company, although I do have to wonder who has to pony up the case to build the "Choice Screen", localize it, and release it into the wild... can't see the EU going into their pocket for that bit.

Safe to say that I'm happier being an American than an EU citizen today.

Worth a long look, but I still didn't feel the urge to pull out a credit card.

After a brief wait, the manager returned with one and instantly three other people started circling the kiosk so they went to get another model. Tells me there's a lot of interest around the thing...

Hardware wise, it's nice. Really nice. The e-Ink screen is still capable of forcing me to drop my jaw. That's always been amazing to me. Jolene's take on it was a) there's no color, b) it's not a touchscreen?, c) it looks OK. And that sums up what I've heard most people say about eBook readers... the e-Ink screen is the same in all models right now; companies are simply packaging the screen in different ways... to that end, the nook does a nice job of it: the lower screen is a captive touchscreen and it's pretty easy to type on, when you have to. It's also color, which is nice when browsing book covers. But the bottom line is that people are so used to devices like the iPhone that they want the whole thing to be touchable. It's not a new vibe either - I recall saying the same thing with a RIM 957: had this [at the time] monster screen with large icons, but I could tap them like I could a [then new] Palm-size PC or Palm... I had to use the rolling wheel for navigation. Wasn't bad but it wasn't intuitive either.

Software wise, it's been said already: it's a little quirky and it's slow. The quirky is just getting used to the hardware thing above: if you can only touch 1/5th of the device, how to control the rest of the device from that one window. It's not bad, but it's a little weird at first. The slowness is more... well, you have to be very deliberate with the device. If you press a button, and you know you pressed it, and it's not responding, you just have to wait for it. Again, like the early days of PDA's, it's like writing with Graffiti on the Palm or trying to use a Handheld PC on a dial up modem. You know the commands are getting through to the device; you have to wait for the device to catch up.

Beyond that, there's a bunch of other questions that simply can't be answered by sales staff. What do PDF's look like on it? What libraries are supporting it? When will a web browser be included? Are you doing an XL version like Amazon's Kindle? Will the AT&T 3G service be free for life? For people buying books on a regular basis - typically me - this would be a good device... provided that there was a good story around buying books. B&N and Borders carry more weight with me - for books - than Amazon just because that's what they do. Amazon started with books and then branched out. Do I think they will shitcan their books? No, but I also think B&N will have more available over time. But the question there is price.

I watched the CD industry drive itself into the ground over price. In 1985, CD's were being sold for $16 [MSRP]. In 2005, CD's were being sold for $20 [MSRP]. Over the span of 20 years, it got cheaper to make blank media, cheaper to create album art, cheaper to make music, cheaper to master music, and cheaper to produce the entire CD package because of smaller cases/boxes/etc. Record makers will tell you it's because of piracy that this happened... they had to recover their costs. OK, fine, whatever, but when the digital versions of these CD's came out, they weren't priced at $20 either... the price dropped to $11-ish because it was obvious that it took less money to make an eCopy than a whole physical package. And the industry was quiet, once DRM [theoretically] reduced the threat of piracy... it tells me that at $11 they were making more - by selling more - than they were at $20 in stores. The problem with eBooks is that I don't see this happening. I see publishers saying "Well, the book was $24.95 in hardcover. It should be $24.95 in electronic format because it's the same material!" I don't see them "getting" that customers know that books have been expensive - up to now - because of materials... COGS for actual paper these days must be insane.

Never mind the fact that books are still "niche" compared to the usage that CD's and DVD's get... the following of people that buy hardcovers has got to be shrinking - why not grow the "must have, first day!" market by discounting the books? I fear they won't get it. Not to mention the problem that I'd face with my own library... I've got at least 150 books running around my house. I want to digitize them rather than rebuying them, especially because a number of them aren't in print anymore.

Add to that the fact that I can buy a book at Amazon or B&N and already read it on desktop, laptop, netbook, and phone... the e-Ink screen does make for the best electronic reading display I've seen but I don't know that it's that good... good enough to add another device to the "recharge before flight" list.

Will *I* get one? In spite of all of the above, I still don't know. As an aside, for all the press that Apple is getting for "thinking" about building a tablet device, I still wonder what the purpose of it is - I feel the same way about the nook. Tablets have come and gone many times over - I only ever see them in doctor offices. If Apple drops a Tablet tomorrow, it will likely be the same size as the nook and Kindle. It will have a full color, full touch display, with all the bells and whistles of an iPhone. But will it be a good book reader without the e-Ink screen? Likely not...

But man what I wouldn't give to have my entire book collection fit into such a small and portable package...