Kindle Killer?

New "kindle killer" e-reader on the horizon, but I confess I am skeptical. How is an 8 1/2 x 11 plastic sheet easy to carry around and pack and stuff? Sure, it has a bigger screen, but is it electronic ink? Nope. Can you slip it into your purse? Not so much. It has wi-fi, but is that service free, in the same way as Amazon's whispernet? We don't know.

I'm not being defensive of Kindle, I am just skeptical that this new model is any "better". It's different, and I'm sure people who love to use their e-reader to read the morning paper will love having a larger screen, a touch screen. But me? I use Kindle to read books, to take my library with me everywhere, to read friend's manuscripts and my own in electronic format easily and conveniently. The ability to read office docs without conversion is, I grant, pretty damn cool. But I can convert a Word doc in about thirty seconds all by myself with Mobicreator, so I don't pine about this feature for Kindle much.

Kindle killer? I don't think so yet. And I wonder what Amazon's Kindle 2.0 will end up looking like sometime in 2009.

Adventures in Corsetry, continued

I finished putting my sister's corset together last night, as far as I can until I've fit it to her tomorrow.

( Pics behind the cut )

And that's it for today's sewing pr0n. I'll post more pics as I move forward after the fitting.

Note to Buffy fans:

The score is so very worth owning. Also, did you know Angel has one out, too? Damn, wish I'd seen that when I ordered Buffy.

That's the gov't for you...

In a stunning error of accounting, and also somehow due to the fact that this fiscal year has 16 extra work hours in it than most, I suddenly have 48 hours of vacation/leave I have to take between now and October 31st.

I don't know how this happened, exactly. It's all very complicated math which they've e-mailed us with from back East, which my boss and I spent several hours today checking and rechecking. I'm a writer and an English major - remember all of my whining complaining about the science part of writing an SF novel? Yeah, math gives me a freaking headache.

But the numbers do appear to be accurate. Instead of being completely out of leave, with four hours I have to work overtime to make up, suddenly I have 6 days to use in the next seven weeks.

Just last week, I was complaining to my friend L about how nice it would be if I only had a day of leave left to use just for staying home and sewing. For once, the universe answered my request in an embarrassingly generous manner. Thank you, universe.

I'm taking off Halloween, for sure. That's the day of the masquerade, and I'm quite sure I'm going to need it. In the meantime, I may just be decadent and take off a couple of hours early this afternoon...

!!!

Dune is FINALLY available as an e-book - well, for Kindle, anyway. I have looked everywhere for an ebook version since getting Kindle, and sure, they have other books in the series, but not THE book that started it all.

Despite a very strong dislike for some of the later books, Dune remains one of my favorite books of all time. I'm pretty cynical about a lot of books and their supposed layers of meaning and depth - the college English track pretty much burnt me on a lot of that. Not that books aren't layered and deep, but come on, how many times can a person read Heart of Darkness?? (blech!)

Dune, however, is one of those books that impresses the hell out of me every time I read it. It's literary genius, and I don't care who wants to argue the point. That's my opinion, and I'm sticking to it! Anytime someone talks about "genre" books as somehow lesser, it pisses me off - duh, i'm a genre writer. All of my favorite books are genre books. But I often tell them to read Dune - which is taught in several college literary courses throughout the country, snap! (I have no idea if I just used that properly, but it felt right at the time.)

Anyway. Dune. On my Kindle. Available to me to read, whenever the hell I get the urge to crack it open. Reason #47 to love my Kindle. :)