Kindle Arrived

My Kindle arrived today while I was watching Riley drive his electric Jeep around the cul-de-sac island. Since he refused to park his Jeep to go inside, I tore open the box right there in the driveway, and carried its contents up to the circle to get acquainted.

The Kindle is an electronic book. It has a paperback-sized screen with a small keyboard below, and large buttons on the sides. When the device is on, it reads just like any paperback book except that when you want to turn the page, you just press the button.

Several special features of the Kindle make it a pretty unique product. I admit that this device is going to be a problem for me because it's just too good....

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Mowing Clinton Kindle

Excuse me if this doesn't make any sense, I'm a bit endorphin high. I just got finished mowing the front lawn -- with an electric push-mower.

The lawn has been a battle. We discontinued last year's lawn service because they were doing things that we asked them not to do, resulting in large dirt patches in our lawn. So this year, with no service, our lawn has been growing uncontrolled, much to the chagrin of our mower-loving neighbors.

The riding mower that came with our house has a dead battery from the kids leaving the headlights on (why does the mower have these?) so I tried for a good bit this afternoon to get that working again, to no avail. And in the end, I bought a new corded electric push-mower from Home Depot. It's corded, because the battery on the last one went kaput. Speaking of going crazy while mowing the lawn, Bill Clinton called me today. Don't believe me?Bill! more

How to Choose a Good Web Host

Man, this week has been difficult. We've had a few server issues with work clients, and I've been playing around with my own servers, and it's just been a mess that I'm hoping will be in the past come next week. But I've learned some lessons, and I figure I might as well pass them on because people are apparently still buying hosting from really bad places.

What do I need? This is the most basic question you need to start asking yourself before you even hunt for hosts. Having some idea of your demands, both from a technical perspective and a logistical perspective can save you some pain in the future. Here are some really basic considerations:

Shared/VPS/Dedicated -- What level of hosting you choose will depend on the types of service you intend to run and the affordability of storage space. Shared hosting is for small, single, low-traffic installations, like a single blog or a low-traffic forum. VPS hosting allows you to interact with the server configuration directly, to host more complex applications and more of them. Dedicated hosting gives you full control over what runs on your system, plus often includes dedicated storage that is many times what you'd get from the other options. But there are more things to consider....

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Ear Force!

I bought 2 pair of new headphones from Amazon recently. They are Turtle Beach's model Ear Force X2 headsets.

The primary purpose of these headsets is to connect them to an XBox 360 controller as the microphone source. What happens is the headset's base station, while connected to the Xbox, transmits the game audio to the stereo headset, and the headset's microphone connects to the controller to send Live chat sound back to the game. It's a pretty nifty idea, but not why I bought them.

My purpose for buying the headset was that the 2.5mm plug on them would fit nicely into the jack on my office's cordless phone. My expectation was that I could hook the headset to the PC to listen to music, and then also take calls using the headset by connecting the dongle wire to my phone. Non-monaural audio playback for phone conversations would alleviate many of the problems I have in my office regarding ambient noise. But it seems that my plans have been squashed by poor (or cheap) forethought....

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Holiday Shopping?

It's crazy out here.

We've gone out for lunch and to pick up a few items for the house, specifically paint for Abby's room. All of our tasks are common - we'd be doing it anyway no matter what time of year it was. But everyone else out here is nuts.

The last time I saw the Wegmans parking lot so full was, well, last Thanksgiving. I guess people need groceries for their dinners, but why do they all go to the store at the same time on the same day? Wegmans is open 24 hours. You can show up at 10pm and see no other people....

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