First: I don't bother calling the media the Mainstream Media, because that seems kinda redundant; everything I've seen get accused of being the Mainstream Media has turned out to be the news, in contrast to some dickweed with a website and a conspiracy hunch.

Second: I kinda hate the media, since it itself is trying to become a conspiratarded website.

This isn't a new thing. In fact, I think it became the most obvious when no one on the planet but the media gave a damn at all about OctoMom. Remember that? Every damned channel became the OctoMom Network, some going so far as to lie to us directly: 'Well, you asked for it; here's more news on OctoMom!' No. We didn't. We don't care.

This time, it's about the damned mosque. Which should be better, since it's going kinda Fair&Balanced, in a weird, useless way. Here's what I've been seeing, up to and including a matter of minutes ago....

On one side, you've got the basic conspiratards. Sorta. Historically, I've caught the basic conspiratards being mostly democrats, so this is a bit of a switch. This time it's the republicans, and, if the news is to be believed [bad idea, apparently], every republican on the planet is outraged that they're building an islamic superdome in the footprint of the twintowers.

I shouldn't have to explain the idiocy in that assumption. But I suppose I could. Or, I could fold it into the other side, which is actually almost more perplexing, to me.

On the other side, you've got primarily the democrats, who get that the superdome is in point of fact something of an islamic YMCA being built into an abandoned Burlington Coat Factory farther away from GroundZero than the actual mosque which has been next door to the twintowers since 1970. And, if that were all they seemed to get, I'd be thrilled to agree with them. But then it gets weird.

For years, over in the chatroom, and in UseNet before that, I've seen relatively random accusations that atheists are merely antichristians, attacking christworshippers specifically and exclusively. That being a nonsequitur, I always denied it; I for one make no particular distinction between christworshippers and allahworshippers and goddess&hornyoneworshippers [whatever the wiccans are, apart from children trying to irk their christworshipping parents by pretending to worship something distasteful...ler] and whatever else might exist: they're all intellectually lazy lunatics...though, in some direct sense, the allahworshippers are more perfectly lunatics, Al'lah having been a lunar deity. But that's just etymological.

So, here's what's bugging me, as of 2010. A vast number—possibly a majority—of atheists I've seen talking about this, after getting that this whole outrage is essentially about a YMMA, defend it all to hell against the christworshipping right as something of a duty within the freedom of religion. Like, if this nadamosque isn't built, we as atheists lose because they as christworshippers win.

Seriously?

I don't disagree that, based on basic civics, the YMMA has as much right as a YMCA to exist; that's a given. Technically, an islamic superdome has the same right to exist as a christine megachurch. I'm not debating that at all, unless someone out there wants to disagree with that.

What I don't get is this atheistic muslim dicksucking, presumably to irk the christworshippers. Did we forget to learn from history that the enemy of our enemy is our enemy? That the christworshippers hate/lament/fear atheists and allahworshippers somewhat equally doesn't actually make the two of us equal. Okay? If the allahworshippers are going after one through five, and we're going for six through ten, that the christworshippers shooting at eleven through fifteen doesn't put the allahworshippers on our team; optimally, we sink five balls and they both lose; it's right there in the rules.

Sure: so long as the allahworshppers are delaying a christine theocracy, we kinda benefit. But, since all we're really doing is reminding people how this country works, at least on paper, maybe instead we could just point out that theocracies are prohibited with or without paratheistic activity centres.

I don't like muslims. I don't hate them. In a perfect world, I'd never even hear about them. That whatever percentage might want me dead for lacking a belief in their imaginary friend [the same reason, in a burst of irony, that they want the christworshippers dead] is...actually, it's mostly just amusing, to me; it's really just kinda adorable. True Story: A week or two ago, I was on the RazorScooter and I coasted past a couple kids—maybe eight years old; one of them had a tiny little pocketknife, and actually tried to scooterjack me—'Gi'me the scooter or I'll cut ya!' Just precious.

I've still got the Razor: I outsmarted it by smirking and outcoasting the little 'tard. Which to date has been approximately my strategy in preventing allahworshippers from killing me. These psychotic morons have to stop and pray to a rock five times a day; just keep ahead of them, and, eventually, they'll have to time out to faceplant. Not a big deal.

Whether that's just a scant percentage, or all allahworshippers, or, as Hitler was representative of TrueChristians^®, the allahworshippers working on your death are the ones correctly following the quran...who cares. Should all 1.3billion of them be nuked into extinction? No opinion. Honestly, I wouldn't particularly care if you nuked a couple billion atheists...particularly if I were one of them...unless, unaccountably, it turned out to be possible to care about something after being vapourised. Curiously, I've got some doubts.

Being not vapourised, I'm withholding permission to nuke me. It's a notdead thing.

I guess what bugs me the most...well, no; what bugs me the most is that it's September and yet this is still somehow in the damned news. But, second to that, what bugs me nearly the most is the hypocrisy. On both sides. The right hypocritically getting uppity about anything resembling a church being built in the US, where I strongly suspect that, if a YMCA were replacing the Burlington Coat Factory, we might hear about it at a ribboncutting [do churches have those; are there scissors in the bible?] once it was finished. And the left hypocritically championing for anything resembling a church being built in the US when pretty much every democrat I know is atheistic. So, I don't get it.

Or, sadly, I might. It might be true what the christards have been claiming all along: that, in the majority, selfproclaimed atheists are simply christbashers. I don't want that to be true but, being for example atheistic, I tend to follow the evidence well outside the realm of emotarded comfiness. And the evidence is kinda suggesting that most atheists are essentially just wiccans again, possibly with better clothes, striking out against christworship for its own sake. I suppose another hint is that they tend to use that goofy, meaningless god name, usually meaning Jehovah, though Al'lah is just Arabic and Zeus is just Greek for the same conceptual word.

Someone reminded me about that the other day. From seriously ancient Greek, Zeus was originally Zdeus. That split up into Zeus and Deus. Deus evolved into the Latin Dei and Zeus was appended with pater [like paternal], leading to the Roman Deital Dad, Zeupater, known today as Lucifer Jupiter.

I keep forgetting that Clarke didn't perfectly predict the events of 2010.

So, I dunno. Maybe I'm misunderstanding something. I hope I'm misunderstanding something. I don't think I'm misunderstanding the christards; they actually seem to think that a megamosque is replacing the twintowers and, since they can't read, I can't help them with that. But, on the other side, am I wrong in grokking that atheists, who by definition are without theism, are cheerleading for what's technically the largest single theistic sect on the planet? Knock out the cathollics, which every known protestant would like to do, and christworship has 300million less people than allahworship. So, atheists in the US are trying to help them? Why.

You know what: nevermind; don't tell me. Don't tell me anything. Just stop talking about this meaningless zoning issue. Both of you. Before OctoMom shows up with an opinion.

More later....

To clarify: this isn't strictly about Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences, which might on its own be valid; it's more about the abuse of concept that the smarter morons fall back on after being caught making no sense with 'IQ tests don't prove nuthun'.

I've covered that one before, in fact; it was in News of the Stupid. And it went like this:

<IQ>

Toldya I’d get back to this.
I’ve developed a new IQ test. It’s a simple pass/fail thing. It works like this. Anyone who says ‘iq tests dont prove nuthun’ automatically flunks.
In point of fact, IQ tests prove intelligence. Nothing more; nothing less. No: they don’t prove success, happiness, height, weight, or anything else, apart from intelligence. That’s why we call them Intelligence Quotient Tests. We thought about calling them Aardvark Quotient Tests; but then someone reminded us that they don’t prove aardvarks.
Now, whether stupidity is itself opprobrious is neither known nor important. I can tell you this: the species which have survived most successfully over time are brainless: sharks, crocodiles, amoebae, et cetera. If intelligence is actually an evolutionary advantage, I personally haven’t seen evidence of it yet. So, if you happen to be a moron, and someone’s reading this to you, feel free to gloat that you’re as likely to live for ever as any other insect.
What impresses me is how much people care about this shit. So, you got a measly ninety-one on your IQ test. So what? So you’re kinda stupid. If you’d like to keep that a secret: stop telling smart people that IQ tests don’t prove anything. That would be a good start.
Granting that I’m smarter than average, as proved by IQ tests, and also taller than average, as proved by rulers, I wonder whether there are midgets out there whimpering that rulers don’t prove anything. I actually suspect that there are; I suspect also that the midgets call themselves Little People.
If I were a midget, I’d be way more insulted by Little People than by midget. Midgets are great; they’re just like little people; gush.
But that’s extreme. More extreme than I am. I’m only around 6’5”. I’m not that tall. I’ve met people taller than I am. But who cares: rulers don’t prove anything.
I’m thinking more about people around, like, 5’6”. Subaverage in height. Inasmuch as average is 5’8” exactly. Are they compelled to pretend that rulers don’t prove anything? What about a guy who’s 5’10”? He’s above average. How haughty do you suppose he is? Comparing 5’10” to 5’8” is like comparing an IQ of 100 to 112 or so. Do people with IQs of 112 brag about it? Or do they just hop online and lie a lot, claiming to be ‘geniouses’? I think I can guess.
I could pull weight into this, but that’s variable. At my height, I’m 135lbs. I know people my height who are 450lbs. With the same skeletal frame. Various glandular disorders notwithstanding, I could be 450lbs, or they could be 135. In fact, a guy I know who’s 6’4” went from about 400lbs when I met him, to around 210 a year later, to around 450 now. So that’s immaterial.
What counts with height—and especially with intelligence—is that there’s nothing you can do about it. Are you a short moron? Hi. I’m a tall genius. And it’s always gonna be that way; ha, ha, ha.
What’s actually funny is that I know some truly dumb people. Like, way subaverage. IQs around room temperature. Know how I know that? I’ll give you a hint: it’s not a guess. I know because they told me. Matter-of-factly. ‘They said my IQ was seventy-eight; that’s why I don’t really read much: I can’t make sense of long words.’
Victory! I know people with IQs cooler than my office who actually get and admit that they’re Not Smart.
Are they likeable? Sure. If only for that reason. Are they short? They’re shorter than I am; but that’s literally normal. Are they aggressive? Or smelly? Or clumsy? Not especially. They’re pretty basic, apart from being dumber than average. They don’t bother me at all.
What bother me are these Utter Fucking Morons who tell me ‘Like, I tested at ninety-seven; how’s that for proof that IQ tests are bullshit; I’m way smarter than average!’
Uh...no: you’re pretty much the definition of average. Intellectually. You’re in that happy, normal range between 91 and 109. You’re not one of us freaks. Lucky you.
That’s another neat bit. Everyone wants to be normal—especially those of normal intelligence. Until it comes to intelligence. Then everyone wants to have an IQ above 200.
Hell: I wouldn’t much mind being shorter than this. Which is to say that, while I’m generally okay with being this tall, I’m not thrilled that half my NaziStrauss 501s are 28x36 and the other half are 32x38; I’m also not happy that you midgets keep appointing me Top Shelf Guy, like I live only to demonstrate my amazing ability to touch the damned ceiling.
Which in fact reminds me of something important. IQ tests, which measure intelligence, do not measure education. Totally separate thing. There is, for all I know, a genius out there which identifies itself as a genious. I’m smarter than average; I’m also more educated than average; that’s not to say that I know everything—it’s just to say that I’m closer to knowing one percent of it than you are.
Huh. Ever tried to think of an example of something you know nothing about, then realise that, knowing nothing about it, you don’t know what it is?
Got one. I know precisely dick about the social structure of viperfish. I can’t guess about mating, whether they abandon their young, or even whether they travel in schools. All I know about viperfish is that they’re the closest thing I’ve ever seen to evidence of the devil. Or evil goblins. Or whatever else might create really scary fish. Apart from HP Lovecraft.
Okay. So. There. If you happen to know everything there is to know about viperfish, including which demented creator thought they’d be a good idea: you’ve got one on me. Are you smarter than I am? No idea. Maybe. But your brain is officially polluted with more shit about viperfish than I’m personally comfy thinking about. Have a starsticker.

</IQ>

That was three years ago. So I've been thinking about this lately.

I've concluded a couple of different things. One's that the abuse of concept loosely supported by the Theory of Multiple Intelligences is really stupid; that's where you start hearing from morons that someone's a genius at basketball. What's that even mean—that he can plot out the differential calculus in realtime? Technically anyone able to make the shot is doing that. Can he show his work, or is he just doing it because the human animal has evolved a reasonably impressive ability to deduce spatial relations and application of force? Either way, I'm still not impressed: the ability to throw a basketball is relatively innate and average; the ability to explain how and why it works is the result of education, regardless the innate intelligence required to learn it.

For all that, I'm not even all that thrilled with Gardner's hypothesis. But it's not really what I'm thinking about in general.

What I'm thinking—what I'd propose—is that the actual multiplicity is more about the potential amalgamation of three basic and largely unrelated traits. One's intelligence, of course, which could help with the other two.

Second is education. Not that it's impossible to be highly educated with average or subaverage intelligence. It's just less likely, in application. Again: a guy with an IQ of seventy-eight can be a good guy, but I'd play the odds against him collecting PhDs.

Third is wisdom. And this to my knowledge is irrespective of the other two. I'd grant that wisdom can be [often is] developed through education, though education doesn't always produce wisdom. Trust me on that. I personally may be one of the smartest fools on the planet: intelligent nearly beyond precedent, educated well above average for my age, displaying the wisdom to spend six bucks if I've got five.

That being open to misinterpretation: I get the math; that's not too sticky. While 6>5, 5<6, 5-6=trouble. I just don't really care, for some reason.

Which actually leads me to a potential fourth attribute. What I'm trying to decide now is whether it's truly separate from wisdom. Apathy.

The story so far:

1) Intelligence is opposite Stupidity
2) Erudition is opposite Ignorance
3) Wisdom is opposite Foolishness
?) Fervour is opposite Apathy

Maybe it's an ethical or philosophical matter; maybe determining whether foolishness is the result of apathy, or fervour leads to education, or foolishness promotes antipathy, or intelligence leads to apathy...it may be too subjective to relate quantifiably into the paradigm; I dunno.

But I'm thinking about it. A little.

One strike against apathy as an attribute is that it's related necessarily to emotion, when none of the other three is; you can't really develop ardour or antipathy without emotions, and apathy is applicably something of an unemotional state. Computers can be smart, in that they can process information and develop a conclusion quickly; they can be educated in that they can contain vast amounts of data; they can arguably be wise in that they can have processed data and base future procedures on that understanding. They just kinda have to be apathetic, programming to have them report that they're happy notwithstanding, because, to date, they've got nothing resembling emotion.

So I'm still working on that.

While working on that, I'm kinda thinking about Multiple Idiocy, too. Which to date has got me thinking about the possible fifth attribute of psychosis.

Last year, since it had been precisely a decade since I'd written the first News of the St*pid book, I was thinking a little about writing a third. The problem at the time was that I had no reason to do it, apart from the date. But I did get as far as thinking up a title for it, which itself led to a general, like, plotline. It just didn't lead too far into that.

Now that I've had another nine months to think about it, off and on, I've got a rough idea for at least the chapter headings. Which by the way is vastly amusing, since everything I've been able to think of follows a certain linguistic theme.

That works like this....

I wanted to call the next book Stupidae [coincidentally already the Latin feminine plural nominative for, you know, stupid], turning the word stupid from an obligate adjective [and later a proper noun, which I still maintain is spelled as Stoopid] into a taxon: inasmuch as a velociraptor is a dromaeosaurid of the family Dromaeosauride, various genera of morons could each be a stupid under the Stupidae. See what I did there?

And, what kinda creeps me is that, so far, every genus I've been able to think of has credibly ended in -tard. Which probably isn't a secret by now: I call conspiracists conspiratards from conspirator, and creationists creatards from create...there's always a handy T somewhere in the word allowing for a portmanteau; the only exception, until or unless I can figure out a way to justify it, is the morpheme eco prepended to tard for ecotard; still, it kinda seems to work as a word, even without a basis. I'll work on that one, a little.

All that said, I'm still merely thinking about all this. I mean: I plan to do it and all; I just haven't actually started on it yet. With pretty much any book, and especially with a NotS book, I like to start, do, and finish all in something of a single action; getting slightly into it and then wandering off to do something else never really works for me.

What also fails to work, apparently, is admitting that I'm doing it, while I'm doing it. Once I've announced that I'm writing a given book, I end up thinking more about people expecting it to be finished than actually finishing it. So, optimally, the next thing anyone hears about this will be that it's done and available in whatever formats—probably including [and possibly starting with] the Kindle.

But, yeah: I'm pondering it. Mostly just playing videogames a lot, but pondering it.

More later....

Thank hell for free two-day shipping though

Amusingly enough though, the thing's already in the system:

This makes my second 2nd Kindle

I'm not sure what I'm gonna change the Kindle3's name to once it's here and that seems safer to do. Gremlin's WiFied Kindle, maybe. I dunno.

So, there's that. I guess they're gonna EMail me when they've got a better ETA than this:

If I'd done this yesterday, it woulda got here by the tenth

And, that's kinda the end of the good news, however good it actually is.

Over in the Pure Suck Department, I'm trying all to hell to make this work:

It must be good: compiling takes about five minutes each time

What you're looking at there is MobiPocket Creator [sucking] trying to compile an index.html and 723 jpegs into KindleFC2K.prc. Meaning that there's kinda that one last bit of good news: since I pretty much just replaced the computer last month, I got Acrobat installed correctly, allowing me to print KindleFC2K.doc as KindleFC2K.pdf, and then export 723 pages as KindleFC2K_Page_001.jpg through KindleFC2K_Page_723.jpg. Finally.

Then there's the actual hypertext.

I got the one part done; that didn't take too long. In fact, since I'm getting screenshots anyway....

There's a reason I don't do this for free

At the least, all the images are being called into the hypertext. What's not evident in the screenshot is that I haven't really got that far into anchoring everything. That'll be the really suck part: connecting 256 chapters to their correct jpegs, and whatever else I've got to intralink.

That's not really the problem. The problem is that, so far, for whatever stupid reason, while each jpeg is precisely 780*934 [which is relatively the same as 625*522, which is the size of at least the Kindle2's screen], they're not really working correctly in KindleFC2K.prc. And I can't guess why. Because they should be. They're just not.

What's happening, for no obvious reason, is that the first image fills the screen correctly; then the next is slightly smaller; ten pages later, the image is about half the screen. And then, just to be really weird, they start growing again, eventually filling the screen, and then shrinking back down to half the size they should be. So that's really stupid.

Meanwhile, the original issue remains: the way the book's layout works, I can't just do the whole thing as hypertext. Because A) the Kindle doesn't understand the layout in the first place and B) even if it did, the user's ability to resize the fonts would wreck everything. So it's something of a literal graphic novel. Except that, unaccountably enough, the graphics aren't doing what they're supposed to.

Yet. I suppose it's possible that I'll figure it out and fix it. I'm just starting to wonder whether I give a damn anymore.

I did get one thing accomplished though. I tracked down the flaw I couldn't figure out after I'd written the thing in 1999. The problem is that, while I technically speak binary [or at least read and write it], there's only so much I can look at before I stop trying to decode it. So, here's what it turned out I'd got wrong, incidentally copypasted from the notes I added yesterday to the potential Kindle Edition:

In setting up to build and compile the KindleBook graphic novel thing, hypertexting the table of contents, I found the original problem from 1999. What had happened was that I’d done all the chapters in binary, from 0 through 255. Nearly. Until, just before I was about to release the thing early in 2000, I noticed that I magically had an odd number of chapters, which was impossible when 255+1=256. Before finally releasing it, I found a chapter I was comfy splitting to end up with an even number after all.
I misguessed something. By splitting the chapter, I didn’t wind up with 256; somehow, I wound up with 264. Because, for some stupid reason, I’d gone from Chapter 11001111 to Chapter 11001000, meaning that I’d regressed from Chapter 207 to Chapter 200. And that threw me over 256 by eight.
That’s fixed now. I think. I’ll know more when I get done hypertexting the Table of Contents. One way or another, by the time you see this, it’ll have been fixed. Stupid though the need to have fixed it turned out to have been.
Hypothesis: smart + lazy = average, at best. And possibly actually retarded. A little.

So, if nothing else, I can [and should] fix that problem in the printed version. Whatever a printed book is, these days.

For the moment, though: I'm seriously trying to get the Kindle Version to do its damned job. And it's just not. So that's kinda giving me a headache. Literally.

If it works out at all well, I guess FC2K should be available on the Kindle soonish. If not...I can't really think of any alternative, apart from waiting for some future version of the Kindle to allow for various things none of them does yet. And, yeah: I get the irony in a novel fundamentally about EBooks being a solution to the problems with PBooks being at least nearly impossible to compile as an EBook itself.

Then again, FC2k, written in 1999 and spanning from 1985 through 2017, didn't predict the Kindle at all. I guess I thought the future would be better than it is.

More later....

My phone finally updated to Android2.2; I guess I don't have to wait until the end of summer after all—I'd been guessing I'd get it on September the Twenty-first, since Hunter's phone updated yesterdayish, on her birthday. Still, I'm kinda amused that it took another couple days for my phone to catch up, since both phones are on the same account, and my number [out of, theoretically, 9,999,999,999 available numbers] is off from hers by twenty-three digits; but...who knows how these things work....

Also amusing is that the update finally popped up a requester while I was playing an RTS [which I've cleverly paused and AltTabbed out of to write this], so kindasorta watching both the game and the update did bad things to the game; from what I saw, the update wasn't much to watch anyway.

Then there were the results, which were also a bit boring. For the first few minutes, I couldn't do much with the phone [I have no idea whether I coulda restarted it to calm it down; I thought about it, but it was probably still updating a bit], except for grabbing the DigiCam and get a few shots of what was going on....

Temporarily Broken Phone

Eventually, the phone remembered that it existed. And so did the firmware's desktop thing:

Fuzzyish requester asking whether I wanna stick with LauncherPro; the answer's Yes.

And then...back to not really working for a minute:

Caught in a timeloop, except that time's still happening

And then really not working:

This looks bad

And...back to this:

It's Groundhog Day...again

And now my phone looks exactly how it always looks:

Usually a bit less fuzzy though

So. Settings: About Phone: Fling Screen Down to Version Number:

Yay; much rejoice

To be simultaneously silly and official about it, I'd grabbed a meaningless app a couple weeks ago called Running Froyo?

It's there between RoboDefense and ScanLife, which I actually use enough that they're also on the homescreen

So, let's thump that one:

Not a lot of room for debate

So. my phone's all updated. Whatever that means.

It's been a while since I looked at the Official List of Cool Stuff 2.2 Reportedly Does; about all I really remember was that I should now have the ability to dump apps down to the 16gig MicroSD card and get them outta the palmtoppish Shared RamDisk thing making me have to choose between having cool apps and saving textmessages. Though, for all I know, I could have textmessages sent straight to the card too. I'll look into it when I'm done here since anyone reading this probably A) hasn't got a Droid or B) has already found out. Or, either way, wouldn't much care.

In other news....

Not a lot, really. I got the new Kindle2; I covered that last time. What I didn't cover, since I wasn't aware of it yet, was that my printer was all dicked. So, for the last week, I've had a cool PDF I could print out and tape onto the box to send the broken one back for free, and no way to do that. But, we got the printer working again, so that's printed out and taped onto the box. That just leaves actually getting it over to UPS sometime before it's too late and amazon.com charge me for the replacement after all.

Also, UPS are kinda next to the bank, which works interestingly out since someone sent me a physical cheque I should throw into my account, and then I suppose use the cash to grab the Kindle3 I still haven't ordered.

Which by the way is disturbing. There are a few things I've kinda been meaning to get, and I'm suddenly not allowed to. The Kindle3 is one of them, since it's perpetually backordered even in preorder [if I grab it this instant, I might get it by the tenth]. Also, I was gonna grab this, which at the moment is a deadlink reverting to the index: http://www.fashionablecanes.com/5702bk.html

That being unhelpful, but the printer being helpful again, le'me go scan something real quick....

Click for Biggerification

So, here's what you're looking at.

A) The cane I wanna get, which I can't get, because it's currently off somewhere with the Kindle3.

B) The cane Hunter got me recentlyish, because: why fight it....

Two significant differences, of course. First, the one I actually want is thirty-eight inches [being seventy-seven inches tall personally, I should optimally have a cane that's thirty-eight and a half...before I'm wearing shoes] while the one she got me is thirty-six and a half; so there's some awkward leaning to use it at all. Second: there's something oddly fanfickle and LARPy about the other one, even if it happens to make some sort of defensible sense that I'd have it.

In any case, the carbonfibre kinda matters to me. I'm not sure why. Though seventy-seven inches tall, I'm about 135lbs, which isn't a lot. You'd have to find a pretty suck cane before 61kg could snap the thing. But I still consider it a possibility. Especially granting that I've got something of a background in fencing, kendo, and pissing morons off. It's not beating someone to death with a mobility device I'm concerned about; it's breaking the thing in the process and having to limp home without it. Also, quick public notice: if you're an idiot I beat to death with a cane for getting all froggy in the absence of more civilised recourse, I'm laying claim to however much it costs to replace the cane I'll have broken, lost to an Evidence Room, or both. Stupid people don't register pain right away, but they seem to get real attached to the sixty bucks they get for collecting discarded aluminium cans alongside the road.

I wonder whether I could get away with, like, publishing a fee schedule announcing in advance that doing various annoying things at me costs $X per instance. Asking to bum a cigarette: US$10,000; lying to me about your lack of appreciation for whatever you just heard me tell someone else [by definition, that you're acknowledging that I'd said it is itself an appreciation, you illiterate imbecile]: US$50,000; stuff like that. Maybe I'll give it a try and see how well that works; if nothing else, it'll remind me to film these 'tards saying words at me in an effort to record the transaction...possibly with the punchline of beating them to death with a cane.

Just a guess:

TARD: Got a smoke?
GREM: Hang on....
[readies phone to film fullmotion]
GREM: Okay: action.
TARD: Huh?
GREM: Technical jargon.
TARD: No, but: have you got a cigarette?
GREM: Yup. I've got fourteen, in fact.
TARD: So, can I have one though?
GREM: First, you already owe me ten thousand bucks.
TARD: Uh...no I don't; and I never gave you permission to film me.
GREM: It's in my fee schedule.
TARD: Huh? Are you British or something? It's skedyull.
GREM: Whee.
TARD: Look: can I have a cigarette? Why you gotta be like that.
GREM: Waiting on prior remuneration.
TARD: Stop filming me!
GREM: Nuh-uh.
TARD: Why are you filming me anyway!
GREM: Because I run GotardsDotCom.
TARD: Gi'me the phone!
[TARD grabs for phone]
[carnage ensues]
[dead tard still owes minimally US$10,000; recording becomes Exhibit A]

Sounds like the sort of thing to happen to me, don't it.

More later....

To clarify, the new Kindle2 showed up; the new Kindle3 won't be here this month...probably.

I actually went off to take a nap, which is weird enough; weirder still, I wound up sleeping for...I'm not even sure how long it was—probably a while, since I went to bed while the sun was up, and woke up at 1.08 in the morning. But Hunter was awake the whole time, so she got the package from the UPS Guy.

Being neither Hunter nor Stephen Fry, I didn't do a lot of documenting while opening the box. Though I got this, since the coincidence of the little screensavers kinda amused me:

So, in some technical sense, I've got my fourth Kindle now. Sorta. There was the first one, in March, which rapidly went from being mine to ours to Hunter's, then turned out to have a bad USB port; so we called in about that and got a replacement even before I went back and got the third [the one on the right, above] in April, which was A) all mine and B) unbroken for three months. Of course, that one broke in July, so I called in a few days ago and they sent the the fourth [above, on the left] which is what I've got as of now.

Also, Hunter's got hers, and I've kinda also got the broken one [and a month to remember to send it back before they charge me for a third], and, because they send out full units as replacements while asking only for the actual Kindle in exchange, we've now got four of those cool MicroUSB cords here [actually, I've got seven, since each Droid came with one, and then my dockingstation came with another], which come in increasingly handy. If things are where I left them [never very likely, around here], I've got the new Kindle charging on the synth with one cord, another cord connected to this computer, and the third is in my backpack; the fourth is in the den with Hunter's computer, for in case she ever remembers to recharge her Kindle. And of course the black cord for my phone's dockingstation is keeping that charged, and the cord from the phone itself [along with the electrical outlet converter thing] is jammed in my motorcycle jacket. I assume that Hunter's black cord is near her computer, in case she also remembers to recharge her phone.

So. If I manage to run out of MicroUSB cords somehow, I'll be impressed. A little. And then I'll blame the cat, who'd probably actually done something with them all. She's apparently part ferret.

So, I got the new Kindle2. And, for the first hour, it sucked. It was connected to my account by default, which is a good thing, but registered as Gremlin's 2nd Kindle [not totally inaccurate] until I got the broken one all backed up through MicroUSB to the computer and deregistered it, letting me retroname the new one to Gremlin's Kindle. Then I got to start downloading a couple hundred books from my account [which at least I didn't have to go buy again], only to notice that, while the broken Kindle finally updated to V2.5.3 about a month ago, the new one had showed up with V2.3.3, which lacks a few newish features I'd got instantly used to.

Just as I was complaining about that at facebook.com [That's why facebook.com exists, right? To microwhimper about things too small to write a whole entry about here at my site?], the new Kindle rebooted and told me it was updating something. Turned out that it was upgrading to V2.5.4, which seems to have a couple more new neat things in it. I haven't really looked through everything yet, but I don't remember seeing Popular Highlights as an option to turn off in 2.5.3; maybe it was there, and I just never really cared.

There's also of course the slightly annoying thing where, using my Droid for the last month while the Kindle was broken, I got kinda used to the speed. The Kindle's fast enough to read a book on—thumping Next Page gets the next one loaded in about the time it takes to turn a real page, and less time than it takes to turn two real pages before getting them unstuck and ending up in the right place—but the emulator on the Droid is faster than that. It's not that there's anything wrong with the Kindle; it's that the Droid is just that much better than most aspects of reality.

Funny thing. I keep seeing stuff in stores. Stupid little things I'd probably otherwise buy. Standalone Electronic Sodoku Game. Garmin Global Positioning System. Electronic Calculator. Altimeter. Compass. iPod. Flashlight. Pedometer. Keychain EtchaSketch. Newspaper. Cordless Telephone. Everything I could just about impulsebuy is redundant: it's all on my phone. So that's kinda weird: I can't even waste money flipping a coin and dropping it out of sight, because that's on my phone; now I'll never find a morlock in a crate under the stairs waiting to be released since 1834....

I will hug him and pet him and squeeze him; and I will name him George.

The hell was I—oh right. So, yeah: the phone kinda does it all, including making the Kindle nearly redundant. But I still kinda need one for a couple reasons: A) it's damned cool and B) I need to be able to playtest books without wondering what shortcomings a given emulator has. I already know that there's a bit of a difference between a true Kindle and the Wintel emulator; if I can even playtest a book on the phone [I've never tried], there's no guessing what I'd miss through differences in software.

Then there's the Kindle3, which I mostly want because it's A) damned cool. Also it's a little smaller and more easily portable; the Kindle2 is reasonably small, but doesn't quite fit in all pockets. I can jam it in the side pocket of a suit, but not the internal pocket. And not the back pocket of my jeans. The K3 should just fit, being half an inch narrower. Otherwise, it should still be a real Kindle, probably fairly representative of the K1, K2, DX, and whatever else amazon.com think up.

Technically, if I were serious about making things look right [based on what I've seen from the KindleStore, I'm already as serious as anyone ever gets; it's alarming how many errors I catch in stuff from major publishers], I'd not only playtest on the Kindle2 and Kindle3, but also I'd grab a Kindle1 and possibly a KindleDX, just to make sure everything works on everything. Of course, following that to conclusion, I'd have to buy a Mac to see what its emulator does to things; I'm not sure I care that much, let alone enough to buy a BlackBerry. Sometimes, the problem's on your end: you got an emulator for a BlackBerry, so things suck; it's just how it is.

None of it matters a lot at the moment. The K3 won't be released at all for a couple more weeks and, if I ordered it right now today, it wouldn't be expected to ship until September the Eighth. Although, just to have the world make sense to me, my plan at the moment is to grab the K3 once the next batch of royalties falls into my account, which should be sometime this week; there's something cleverly zerosum about buying what amounts largely to a business expense with money literally derived from that business. I guess.

Which tells you how much I care about the system, or that would be a matter of course. Dear IRS: that money you wanted isn't there in that account, because I grabbed a Kindle. Instead, I fall back on Dear IRS: I kinda have no idea how much I made this year; I could try to find out, but Amendments IV and V say I don't really have to give a damn. Which also works. Kinda.

More later....

First: the issue. Jack 'TeeRex Only Ate Doughnuts' Horner, et al, have been spending the last couple years looking more closely at a number of species You the Public have never heard of, since we hide them in books; the preliminaryish conclusion is that a number of cool [yet anonymous] animals probably never existed, as such. Not that they actually didn't exist; they just weren't anything new.

The most obvious, to me, is Pachycephalosaurus wyomingensis. You may in fact have heard of that one: it tends to show up in those Learning to Read books alongside—you know—the other ten deinosaurs, like TeeRex and Brontosaurus and Stegosaurus and Triceratops and Dimetrodon and WoollyMammoth and SabreToothedTiger and Plesiosaurus and Pteradactyl. With me so far? Great.

Let's start with some really simple information. TeeRex is deplorably short for Tyrannosaurus rex, though it's not the only organism apart from Escherichia coli to get two names; it's not even the only rex, in fact; but, people on average like simple, easy to remember, laughably incorrect clumps of letters to memorise into their sophistrymix.

Brontosaurus ajax didn't exist. That had nothing [so far as I know] to do with Horner; it was a weird mistake made in the nineteenth century when Marsh jammed the skull of a Camarasaurus lentus onto the neck of an Apatosaurus excelsus. Maybe you've heard a little about that already; it took a hundred years, but someone noticed and fixed the problem at the source, as much as we're still waiting for trickledown information to get where it might be going.

Stegosaurus stenops. Its brain was a little larger than a walnut [a better analogy would be that its brain was only the size of a sodacan], but it was still a tremendously stupid animal; therefore, it's the State Fossil for Colorado.

I'll get to Triceratops horridus in a minute....

That leaves Dimetrodon and WoollyMammoth and SabreToothedTiger and Plesiosaurus and Pteradactyl, respectively and more accurately known as Dimetrodon grandis—a pelycosaur, Mammut americanum—a proboscid, Smilodon fatalis—a felid, Plesiosaurus dolichodeirus—a sauropterygian, and...erm...I have no idea what a pterodactyl is, since that's not a word...maybe it's meant to be Pterodactylus antiquus...probably it's supposed to be Pteranodon ingens...either way, it's a pterodactyloid. You people do realise that this information is available, right? You don't even actually need to go to college for it. You can just look it up, and then work out whether to sound out the big words, shut the hell up, or stick with annoying the hell outta those of us who know a little about it.

So. Pachycephalosaurus wyomingensis. This one's a little like Brontosaurus ajax, except that Marsh wasn't involved. And that's too bad: Marsh was a bit of a weenie, and I like it when we catch him having done something wrong, commonplace though that might be. Could be worse, I suppose: could be Bonaparte.

You may have heard of Pachycephalosurus in one of those Learning to Read books. Or you've seen a toy. Or it showed up in that second Jurassic Park film. It kinda looked like this:

Right? So, there is—or, was—a related animal called Stygimoloch spinifer, which kinda looked just like P.wyomingensis, but smaller, and with these cool spikes coming out of its head. Hence the name, in fact: devilish as it looked, it was named after the River Styx. Never say I don't teach you people neat stuff.

Of course, it's meaningless. Because it's starting to look as though S.spinifer, and for that matter Dracorex hogwartsia [yeah, really; someone actually named a pachycephalosaurid King Dragon of Hogwarts...I didn't do it], are nothing more [or I suppose less] than Pachycephalosaurus wyomingensis again, but before adulthood. To stretch the premise a bit: imagine seeing a tadpole and a frog, and assuming they were two different if possibly related animals. That's what we're thinking the deal is with various pachycephalosaurids now.

Which isn't a big deal, to most people. Because, what the hell's a Stygimoloch spinifer, anyway? It's not one of those ten things I saw in the Learning to Read books, so it doesn't matter. And it really kinda doesn't, as much as I'll miss the name; that's just cool.

By the same token, yet unaccountably larger a deal, the news now is that Triceraptops horridus is going away. I know, because the intarwebs told me. The intarwebs just misspelled a few things.

Here's the deal. Apart from Triceratops horridus, to date, there have been oodles of other ceratopians, most of which have remained anonymous within the Learning to Read books. T.horridus has just, for whatever reason, become uncommonly popular. Which I guess is okay, even if it leads to that annoying sophistry I was talking about earlier.

A number of other ceratopians—in fact, a number of other Triceratops [last I counted, there were twenty-one proposed species, two of which remain potentially valid today]—have disappeared. Well, they've all disappeared, of course; the last of them died out in the Maastrichtian. But, since then, we've folded a vast number of animals back into T.horridus, since Marsh [of course] named that one first. It's how science works, see: if you find a new species, and call it A, and then find another new species, and call it B, then if B=A, B reverts to A. Think of it a little like a copyright: whatever's oldest is the real one; the newer stuff is some sort of plagiarism.

Triceratops horridus was identified in 1889. Which is kinda a while ago, these days. So, anything [mis]identified later than that, which turns out through modern analysis to have in fact been Triceratops horridus, reverts to Triceratops horridus. Make sense so far?

Enter Torosaurus latus. That thing you'd never heard of a month ago. Some of us heard about it as early as 1891, when Marsh [yet the hell again] identified it as its own animal. Notice how it looks a little like Triceratops horridus? You're not the first to catch that. And, recentlyish, Horner, et al, caught it, looked into it, and posited that maybe, just maybe, like Stygimoloch spinifer being Pachycephalosurus wyomingensis, Torosaurus latus was actually just a Triceratops horridus. So maybe, just maybe, we should merge them.

Oh noes!!!1 screams the intarwebs, Triseritops iz are favritist dynasour!!!1 Sine teh petishin 2 saev teh triseritaps!!!1

First: shut the hell up. For ever and ever. I'm revoking your licence to speak.

Second: remember that copyright thing? Let's do a little math. I know: math's hard; this might not be that bad.

Now, if you have two numbers, and one is 1891, and the other is 1889, and we start at 1, and count up to 2010, which number comes first. It's 1889, innit. So, because T.horridus was identified in 1889, and T.latus was indentified in 1891, which one's got the copyright and gets to stay, and which one's the plagiarism which has to go.

It's easy; just guess.

Okay: best two outta three....

Right: Triceratops horridus gets to stay, because Torosaurus latus is two years newer. You don't even have to petition anyone to accept your creative spelling; it's simply how science already works.

Triceratops horridus isn't going anywhere. Probably. Simply because I personally can't think of anything identified earlier than 1889 which stands a chance of having been the same animal yet again. Of course, I can't rule it out; it's perfectly possible that Marsh identified something earlier than that, and forgot to publish it. But T.horridus should be safe from those evil scientist people who bothered to acquire a little more knowledge than those Learning to Read books contain.

So chillax: it's going to be okay.

More later....

Sorta. I didn't actually watch anything on cable; the HDTV just serves increasingly as a massive monitor, and for a couple new gadgets.

First, I guess, there's the history to date. I got an AtariVCS in the seventies, and—I guess that's too early to count for much.

In the nineties, I got a PlayStation. Partly because there was simply nothing else. Sega were setting up to leap into extinction by releasing more systems than games, and Nintendo were making interactive cartoons. Anyone who remembers the stark difference, around 1995, between the PlayStation's [largely faked] 3D games and the Nintendo's default topdown flashtoon things will know what I'm talking about here. I personally never bought a Nintendo until the next year, when the N64 [itself actually a pair of 32Bits] proved able to run Mario64—the first [and latest] Mario I've ever liked.

A few more years, and I replaced the PSX with the PS2, which worked pretty well for nearly a decade. Especially once I replaced the first one and started over with a new PS2 devoid of internal cathair. Though that didn't last long either.

There was the GameCube, at some point. We could talk about that, but Nintendo have since released a newer system capable of playing everything the GameCube could play [not strictly true, I suppose, since the Cube had a GameBoy plugin; I'm not sure whether we've got anything like that for the Wii]. That MarioSunshine thing sucked, but the Cube started getting most of the ResidentEvil games, so it served a purpose.

A few years ago, after spending however long hating the XBox on general principle [I actually had a reason, and it had nothing to do with Microsoft], I gave it until the very day that GTA4 was finally released, then used that as a reason to grab an XBox360; the PS3's version took something like another six weeks to finish up and get into stores.

So, here's the funny thing. The reason I'd avoided the XBox [apart from reports that it was little more than a massive spaceheater] was that...there are [or were] three sorts of games on the market: those exclusive to the XBox, which I didn't really want; those on the XBox and on the PS2, which I had on the PS2; and those on the XBox and PS2 which I didn't really want. That whole time, nothing was apparently released for the XBox which I A) wanted and B) didn't already have. So it was needless.

Then the 360 happened. And GTA4 and ResidentEvil5 and so on were available on that and the PS3, and various games were available only on the 360, and...I still can't think of a damned thing exclusive to the PS3 that I'd want. If and when they ever get GranTurismo done, I might want it [more on that in a minute], but nothing else impresses me much. And, yeah: I know about MetalGear; I just don't care enough to buy the game, let alone the system.

And now it's 2010. And I'd never got an XBox because it was redundant at best; and I've never got a PS3 for the same reason. I've got what I've got which, at a glance, is literally several hundred games dating back fifteen years [factor Sega and Atari and the pre64 Nintendoes, and...a loose guess would be around five thousand]; you'd think that would be enough. Really, it should be enough. It never is.

A big problem I've got with the PS3, and the real reason I've still never got one, is that, with what was apparently an accidental exception back at launch, the damned thing[s—there may be more versions of the PS3 than Segas now] can't play PS2 or PSX games. Which is stupid. Because I've got...sixty-four PS2 games just in a single cluster, plus whatever's not where it belongs on the shelves. Which is okay, since I've got the PS2; I can play any one of those games, except for ResidentEvil: DeadAim, since the newer HDTV isn't a CRT, and the GunCon doesn't work with wallscreens.

Technically, I could play DeadAim; it's just harder and less fun with a mere PS2 controller.

The problem now is that the newer PS2 has half a cat in it. So it kinda sucks. Now I've got a Nintendo and a 360. Which is still nearly good enough. Partly because the Nintendo plays GameCube stuff, and the 360 plays a decent percentage of XBox stuff.

Just, not all of it.

So, for example, I can play The Thing, which I've got for the hairy little PS2, on the 360, because the XBox version works. What I can't play is Jaws: Unleashed, which I've got for the hairy little PS2, because the 360 doesn't like the XBox version. And that's kinda tragic.

Really tragic is that, while I guess I wasn't looking, someone threw together Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath, releasing it only for the XBox, and it doesn't work on the 360. So my whole paradigm falls apart: there's finally an XBox game I A) want, B) couldn't play on the PS2 even if it worked, and, C) can't play on the 360.

The solution's simple. I buy the game anyway. Fifteen bucks, used. Also a peripheral: an old XBox and controllers and all. Given salestaxes, the game works out to about seventy-five bucks. After playing it for a few days, I've decided it was totally worth it.

But the XBox is expandable. Another fifteen gets me Jaws: Unleashed again. Ooh. And a few games Hunter actually kinda wanted, like Psychonauts [that actually works on the 360 too; but it also works on the original], and...whatever else we've picked up lately; I dunno.

The point is: I grabbed an XBox after all. And it's next to the 360 and the Nintendoes [the N64 is actually still hooked up to the HDTV, though the SNES is connected to an old Commodore1084 monitor somewhere] and the PS2. So, there's another input channel lost. Fortunately, I still have no need to buy a PS3 yet.

Well...nearly. There's the one thing, though I'm a bit opposed to it. Since the productmix for the PS3 flatly sucks, you may have caught Sony [reversing their original position that the PS3 could suck and still everyone would buy one for six hundred bucks] pleading with you to buy a PS3 because, while it sucks for games [see also the PSP], it plays BlurRy discs. Goody.

Here's the thing about that: I don't care. The reason I've only got the sixty-four different PS2 games on the shelf, really, is that I ran out of room amdist all the Nintendo and XBox games, along with thousands of DVDs. And the player I've got [technically, I've got about a dozen] upscales the hell outta them: 720*480 stretches pretty convincingly to 1920*1080. So BlurRy is kinda redundant.

Kinda.

Until....

One of the input channels is the MediaTower. That's a simple, standalone computer using the television as a monitor. Usually. Until things start getting old. And they really, really do. So that's starting to suck. In fact, it's getting clunky enough [could be more cathair] that it's generally safer to stash things on other computers on the LAN, then send films and whatever through the MediaTower to the television. As a simple bugfix. Until we get round to replacing the MediaTower. With something.

So we're at Sears. Because, at this point, it's cheaper to buy a BlurRy player than it is to build a new tower. So the MediaTower's offline [and really kinda dead] and, in its place, there's a BlurRy thing which A) pulls stuff down instantly from NetFlix.com [the main use of the erstwhile MediaTower, B) slurps things in from computers on the LAN [who knew], C) plays and upscales thousands of DVDs, and, to a slight degree, D) plays BlurRy stuff.

And we're shopping again.

I grabbed a couple things trapped in these weird translucent cases with the annoying little foldover bit [anyone else hate the hell outta that?]. One was Alice in Wonderland, since, somehow, I hadn't seen it. Around here, at least, it showed up at the cinema and apparently evaporated again after about a week. But that's okay: going to see a film is ten bucks to get in [twenty, since Hunter's just slightly too tall to look like a credible infant], plus food [the cinema I go to has real food—cheeseburgers and things], working out to about fifty bucks just to see something once, usually surrounded by boring, obstreperous morons texting each other and chortling at nothing. So, to my thinking, if a film is even reasonably likely to be good, thirty bucks to see it where I can smoke and keep the company of the cat, who's smarter and quieter than most people, is something of a deal. Also, the film didn't suck; in fact, it's kinda weird that it was released in March, since we might be hearing about it again toward the end of the year when the Academy pretend to put critical thought into nominees.

Also picked up The Dark Knight, which kinda did suck. It was sorta the same film I've got on disc [the suck part there was that the meaningless Digital Copy convinced itself that it was stolen, causing me to think heavily (before possibly acting; not telling) about ripping the unrippable disc to jam the thing into my PSP], but, since half the film was shot in IMAX, Nolan got the kooky idea to flip back and forth between roughly 2.35:1 and 16:9 every few minutes. The argument was that the stuff shot in IMAX [which isn't 16:9, by the way] displayed more stuff; maybe so, but it's meaningless when the letterboxing framing the 2.35:1 stuff keeps popping back in and reminding you how cool the IMAX bit woulda been if things weren't flipping back and forth to distract you. And there's no way to shut it off. In fact, I spent the first ten minutes trying to enact alternate views, looking for a straight 2.35:1 version, coincidentally hitting what turned out later to have been useless buttons just as the film itself flipped to and from the letterboxing; so that was confusing.

Also, I picked up Dogma. Of course, I've got that on disc too. But I got it the instant it was released, so it never had the extra stuff added to later versions. The BlurRy adds little to the cinematography [though, so far as I'm concerned, it's been about the best film Kev's done to date], but I've finally got the deleted scenes I've been wishing had been in the film for eleven years. That's not much of a secret, either. I read the filmscript in 1998, and it was far better than what I saw in the cinema a year later; since 1999, I've complained constantly about various things getting cut. So, watching the film, and then the stuff excluded from the release, Hunter at least now understands why I'd wanted that stuff to have been in there. Jason Lee ranting about Hell having been nothing more than the absence of, well, an omnipresent deity [?!?] until the damned fucked it up with their own expectations was brilliant.

I got some other stuff too. I haven't watched it yet. I'm not even sure what it was now. I just remember getting the cellophane off everything so I could watch it eventually.

So, anyway: that's where I lost the last week or two. Primarily. Oh: except for that one last thing....

If anyone remembers, I used to hit live.com every once in a while to play their little flashgames. And that kinda works, since each game is good for ten or twenty points. Then I forgot about it after I'd got enough points to order FlightSimulatorX for free.

Recentlyish, that's moved to bing.com, and the free stuff has changed. So the other thing I've been doing lately is grabbing up the thousand points a day I'm allowed to get [stopping every few minutes to separate cats from dogs and prove to Microsoft that I'm not strictly speaking actually a robot] until, after five days, I had enough to grab Forza2. I'm not totally sure what that is, exactly; Hunter says it's essentially GranTurismo, for the 360, with disintegrating cars. Which might be good. The problem with the GT games was always that, Sony collecting endorsements from the people making the cars, it was impossible to wreck them, regardless how hard and fast you hit a wall or another car. Not that the point is to wreck a car; but, as realistic as the game might be [I've driven a number of the cars in the game, and they seem to handle about the same], the fact is that hitting a wall with a car kinda breaks it and causes it to move differently. So, apparently, Forza takes that into account. And, either way, it was kinda free for having played a wordfind game for a few hours:

How cool is this....

So, I'm waiting for that game now. And various others. I preordered DeadRising2 from amazon.com, and stuff like that. Not that I've finished Oddworld yet. Kinda booked through the end of the year, at this point.

Of course, eventually, yesterday, I remembered that my Kindle broke. That was easy: it's been sitting, broken, but plugged in, on my synth all this time. So I called amazon.com's Direct Kindle Line [866-321-8851] to see how much trouble I was in. That went kinda like this:

ERIC: Hi; this is Eric; can I get the EMail address for you account?
GREM: I think it's gremlin at gremlin dot net
ERIC: And the name on your account?
GREM: Um...Gremlin?

Note: it actually is, by the way; one thing I like about amazon.com is that they don't dick around with No: really....

ERIC: And your billing address?

You can't actually have that, you little voyeurs, you.

ERIC: Excellent. How can I help you, Gremlin.
GREM: I guess my Kindle broke on me. It's got this vertical band of nothingness, maybe ten percent in from the left on the screen, and about ten percent of the width itself.
ERIC: I think I know what you're talking about.
GREM: Yeah. I found it in Troubleshooting; I guess it's a common problem. I tried turning it fully off to see what happened; it's still there. I've actually been trying that for a couple weeks, in case it's something simple.
ERIC: So, rebooting it didn't resolve the issue.
GREM: Right.
ERIC: Yup. Sounds broken. Do you know if you happened to apply any pressure to the screen, or spill any liquid on it?
GREM: Not that I know of. I tend to keep it in the case next to my netbook, since they're the same size; it's snug but not tight. So, unless a netbook can cause an EMP, I assume it's coincidental.
ERIC: Probably. Okay: not a problem. I'm entering a replacement order for you. Is [address] the best place to send that?
GREM: Uh, yeah: perfect.
ERIC: It's Friday, so there's the weekend. It'll go out Monday and be there on Tuesday. The shipping's free; I'll EMail you a prepaid shipping label for the broken Kindle—just box it up and get it back to us within thirty days after you receive the replacement, or they'll charge the MasterCard you used for a second Kindle.
GREM: Cool. I can do that.
ERIC: Did you have any further questions, Gremlin?
GREM: A couple. First: I assume that, even with the KindleThree about to come out, you'd be sending another KindleTwo.
ERIC: Right. The system can't replace your Kindle with a new one; it'll be exactly what you already have.
GREM: Fair enough. And, do you happen to know much about the Three? Mostly I'm wondering, with the WiFied model, whether there's a governor locking the actual ThreeG thing to amazon dot com, or—
ERIC: There's actually no modem at all in the WiFI version. You need to be in a hotspot to buy or download content.
GREM: Cool. That actually works well enough: I can hit the site on my phone, and even have the Droid's KindleApp; I'm just thinking about batterylife and all.
ERIC: Yeah. The battery on the WiFi model lasts for about a month. And, with the WiFi—I dunno—personally, with mine, I've got WiFi at home, and that's where I tend to do all the updates. I'll probably get the WiFiOnly model myself.
GREM: Kinda exactly what I was thinking.
ERIC: Y'know: supposing you upgrade to that, your KindleTwo still works; if you wanna just sell that off to someone, the warranty transfers with it.
GREM: So, I give that to someone for a hundred and fifty bucks, and swap to the WiFied thing essentially for free.
ERIC: Pretty much; yeah. If you find someone who'd need the ThreeG support, you'd still be saving them forty bucks.
GREM: Right. Of course, I got it for two sixty.
ERIC: Oh yeah. Did you get a refund for that?
GREM: Just missed it. I got it for two fifty-nine, had it for a month, then, a week later, it dropped to one eighty-nine.
ERIC: Right. Hang on a sec...yeah: there's nothing I can do about that. So, yeah: sell it to someone; you'll at least get enough for the WiFi model.
GREM: It's a thought.
ERIC: Anything else I can answer for you today?
GREM: Nope; I'm good; thanks.
ERIC: Thanks for calling....

...or so. So, that works out nicely. And, yeah: I'll probably grab the K3 when it comes out, and hand off the new K2 to someone who'd need the 3G bit. It has got the advantage, if you're not online through your phone, of hitting twitter.com and facebook.com and whatever. And, of course, where my phone dies after three hours of that, the Kindle works for a week or two out in the field.

Hell: maybe I'll just keep it as a backup in case the phone dies on me.

More later....

I'm not entirely certain what the hell happened. Like, minute by minute. Here's what I've got.

One trick with the Kindle2 is its size. The screen is six inches diagonally which, I've discovered, is easily big enough to read a book on without changing the fontsizes [reading a PDF, which essentially just becomes a jpeg, is a little harder if the PDF was formatted for 6*9; then again, you can zoom in or, in the extreme, just format the original to work on the Kindle as hypertext]; on the other hand, for approximately no good reason, the thing's over five inches wide. If it were, say, about 4.8 inches wide, I'd be thrilled; then I could stash it in my back pocket.

Instead, while the screen is the height of my phone and nearly twice as wide, the device itself is the size of my netbook, if otherwise thinner than a pencil. Which kinda works, at least historically: I've got a microfibre case for my netbook [it came with the thing; I'm okay enough with it to hang onto it] into which the Kindle also fits, nice and snugly. It all makes perfect sense.

Except of course that my netbook has become just about uselessly redundant against my phone and, while the netbook's far smaller than my seventeen-inch laptop, that just makes things worse: I can't fit the netbook into my pocket, and I don't wanna just carry it around [I've only got one arm devoid of canes, so I'm already juggling a phone and coffee and a cigarette and whatever else at all times], so the primary benefit is that the netbook's a tenth the weight of the laptop [with or without the Kindle slipped into the case with it] when I jam it into the backpack I've always got to have because I'm not gonna get a damned purse.

All that said, technically, the Kindle's as redundant against my phone as the netbook is. Meaning only mostly. Because amazon.com finally released a Kindle App for the Droid. And it works pretty well. The downsides are A) my phone does absolutely everything, and adding yet another function detracts yet more from ever using it as, you know, a phone, B) the phone's battery has no chance in hell of keeping up with everything the phone does, and C) I can't to my knowledge playtest a book by giving the .prc to the phone. So I still kinda need a Kindle here, if only to playtest books, preferably for more than maybe an hour before the battery dies and/or someone calls me.

So I've got these two little problems. The Kindle is relatively massive for no good reason, and the Kindle is broken.

Which, I was explaining, may have happened like this....

So, I jammed the Kindle in with the netbook a couple weeks ago. Hunter's parents were in town for a week, and we were off doing touristy stuff the whole time. To a large degree, I didn't need the netbook and Kindle and whatever I tend to have with me; I certainly didn't need the backpack, since they got here and rented this [alas, poor] Yaris which, while marginally roomier than it looks from the outside, still had roughly the internal capacity of a Fiero.

Figuring I didn't need the backpack as such, I jammed the Kindle in with the netbook, and gave the case to Hunter; she put that in her backpack, and I didn't have to have one. Good thinking, I thought.

I'm not sure what happened next, exactly.

Her parents went home; I remember that part.

I wanted my Kindle and netbook back. They weren't in her backpack.

Eventually, she figured out where she'd put the case after taking it unaccountably out of her backpack without actually giving it to me. I'm not even sure where she'd wound up putting it. I just know what happened next.

Next, since the battery was halfway dead, I plugged the Kindle in. At the time, it looked fine: the simple screensaver thing [not really; it's just a static image the device defaults to after a few minutes of being ignored] was okay. Then I turned the Kindle on, since I was charging it, and since I figured launching the 3G and synching to amazon.com could be a good idea.

It comes on, complete with that vertical band of suck, above.

I turned it off, and on, and off, and on, and phonecammed it, and that was a couple days ago, and it's still like this.

I'm thinking it's broken.

Which leads to a potential problem, of sorts.

I had the option, as always, to grab an extended warranty for an extra sixty bucks [when I got the Kindle, it was I think $259] and didn't because...there's a list of reasons I didn't: JestBuy, CircuitPity, UltimateExcuses, and every other place selling extended warranties with no intention of letting them do me any good. So, three months into having the Kindle, all I've got is the standard warranty you get for buying a Kindle at all.

I haven't called them yet. I should mention that before going on.

I looked through the troubleshooting list, once I was able to find it. Apparently, this vertical suck thing is common enough a problem that they've got it listed along with a solution: turn the thing off; turn it on again. So I tried that. Again. And it's still like this.

What I don't know, offhand, is whether that, being a commonish problem, is covered under the commonish warranty. Especially given that the most probable cause, according to the troubleshooting guide, is electromagnetic interference. Whether placing a Kindle in proximity to a netbook equates to an EMP is anyone's guess. Therefore, whether it's my fault for doing that, Hunter's fault for losing the thing and possibly stepping on it before finding it, or amazon.com's fault for making something with this known, commonish problem is anyone's guess. So guess away; I have no idea.

I'll call them tomorrowish and find out. Though. more and more, I don't care very much. Because there's other news.

The Kindle3 is out. Nearly. In a month. So, not only is the thing now available in less of an iTrendy Institutional White, but they've made it smaller.

The thing is, in fact, 4.8 inches wide. That makes it thinner than a CD jewelcase, which I can fit into my pocket. No more netbook case and backpack just to carry the thing around.

Also, it's got twice the storage [not that I'd filled mine up with fifteen hundred books yet, let alone the thirty-five hundred the K3 can hold], twice the battery [a full month on a single charge], more contrast [I'm not clear on the details yet; the K1 had four shades of grey; the K2 has sixteen; I'm guessing thirty-two or sixty-four in the K3] and, while the K2 dropped from $259 to $189 nearly immediately after I'd got it [not quite, or I'd have got a refund for having bought it less than thirty days earlier], the K3 maxes at $189 with the option of getting it for $139.

How, you ask? Don't answer yet. Or something.

One unknown benefit to the Kindle is that, apart from having books in it, it's got AT&T's dismal little 3G network. So, from anywhere on the planet, you can painfully slowly hit any website simple enough to show up on the thing's screen. For the first month or so, I actually used that a lot: hit wikipedia.org to look at something; throw tweets at twitter.com [posted via text]; even use the least intensive bits of facebook.com [Kindle != good for flashgames]. Then of course I kicked up from the Q9C to the Droid, which itself has a Kindle App, and...I don't think I've used the Kindle to hit a website since.

Other people might be catching on. Because the K3 for $139 hasn't got AT&T's borderline useless 3G. It's got WiFi, which is becoming ubiquitous; but, apparently, if you're not in a hotspot, all you can do with the Kindle is, you know, read a book. Like, one you've already got. I assume.

So that's a very slight concern. Suppose I get this newer bigger smaller darker Kindle, and want a book in the middle of the ocean somewhere. So, okay: that's not gonna work too well. Yet. But I kinda don't care. Because I've got my phone.

As of today, I can KindleApp my way into amazon.com and grab a book [or just, you know, hit amazon.com in the browser to the same effect]; that wouldn't magically send the book to the Kindle, but I could then WiFi next chance I got and download whatever's new. In fact, if and when the Droid ever gets Android2.2, that should give me the ability to turn the phone into a 3Gbacked WiFi tower, which'll then let the Kindle do what it needs to do.

All of which assumes that the $139 WiFi K3 lacks even the ability to hit amazon.com. That sounds stupid enough to me that I wonder whether they're oversimplifying the idea of locking the 3G directly to their store to save on the bandwidth people like me were wasting hitting twitter.com all the time. I don't know, and I don't really care.

When the Kindle's not [broken] hiding in the netbook case, I tend to plug it in and have it set up to synch for updates. And of course I've got WiFi here [even as fast as Verizon are, things get far faster if I turn on WiFi in the phone], so I'm really trying to think up a possible catastrophe resulting from having a book incapable of making phonecalls. I'm not coming up with much.

So, that's what I've got at the moment. My Kindle, three months old, is broken. It's not fixing itself. I really can't guess whether amazon.com'll fix or replace it without charging me at least some annoying amount for shipping. And the newer, better, bigger, smaller, faster, cooler model is on the edge of availability, for half the price I paid for the one I've got.

I think I see where this is going, whichever way I get there. All I wonder now, I guess, is whether it'll involve having amazon.com fix my Kindle for free, just in time for me to sell it to someone for $150 and throw $139 of that at the uncellular new model.

Either way, I'm buying the hell outta the Kindle3.

More later....

All I need now, potentially, is a telephone; the Droid really isn't that great for calling people. It works well enough, once you're actually on the phone, inasmuch as it rivals [if memory serves] landlines; what it doesn't rival is the Q9C or anything dating back to the first Motorola Meteor FlipPhone, which let me get into the habit of glancing at the screen to see how long I'd been talking [with the Meteor, I was guaranteed to have been talking for under ten minutes, since that was the batterylife]; with the Droid, I've got to look at the phone, see nothing but a reflexion, shake the hell out of it, get the screen back, and optionally thump virtual buttons to start up the speaker or dialpad or whatever else you'd think might be useful in proximity to a telephone.

It's a minor point. But, for my part, I kinda miss the ability to end a damned call without first getting arrested for causing Shaken Mobile Syndrome.

On the subject of SMS: I actually am kinda digging texting. Meaning really that I get the frustration everyone had about texting my phone until now. I know a few people who still lack texting, and it makes no sense to me that I can't just send them a simple MicroEMail without getting trapped into banal, leading questions: Hi, Gremlin; [how to annoy me instantly: answer the phone with Hi, Gremlin; I know you've got CallerID, you special little you] what's up; doing anything interesting? I'm just sitting here talking on the phone because I can't remember how to shut the hell up.... Better idea: up to 160 characters of Giving up on VillageIdiot; heading to the pub until that annoys me too....

Technically, I could do that with FourSquare. Except that A) FourSquare is easily confused [I've gone two hours without using it, only to get that Whoa there! No points for rapidfire bullshit; sit and stay for a while], B) it kinda tells everyone on the planet right where I am, and C) it relies on people whose phones lack texting to be watching twitter.com or facebook.com which, it seems, those people aren't doing either.

Mostly, I'm okay with the Droid. In fact, looking more deeply into the DroidX, I'm less bothered about going with the older, more stable phone. When I got the thing in May, I nearly got the stupidly named Incredible, but got talked out of it because its hardware wasn't really ready yet either [also, it lacks a keyboard, as little as I use the physical keyboard on the Droid]; the DroidX seems to be even less ready than the Incredible; the only thing working less well seems to be the iPhone4, which isn't my problem since I'm not Macintard.

Yeah, I know: Apples are [or at least were] pretty good; I'm just not willing to let people misunderstand my motivations behind getting the Toyota Prius of computers.

So. The Droid being pretty good, it could be better. And one way it might become better is with a firmware update.

I happened to get the phone, in May, a matter of hours after the Droid finally got Android2.1 [goofily known as Eclair], so my omission of action to date got me out of the agonising wait for that; instead, I get to wonder when exactly the hell the Droid gets Android2.2 [goofily known as Froyo (itself goofily not a hobbit so much as a contraction for frozen yoghurt)], mostly because it'll reportedly speed up and streamline everything, and allow for Flash10.1 [I think], which is something I kinda want: YouTube.com has its uses, but hulu.com has other ones.

On the subject of phones I didn't get, which also haven't got 2.2, I tripped across a review of the HTC EVO, which I barely care about since history suggests that the worst thing you can do to a phone is get it anywhere near Sprint; still, it's almost interesting to see the complaints about the phone unaccountably regarded as the best iPhoneKiller available.

Of course, the best part of the review has got to be And, on top of that, you have to pay a mandatory ten-dollar fee for 4G use; and I think that's just kinda unfair, because, if you're in a city like SanFrancisco, where there is no 4G, you still have to pay. Get out of SanFrancisco; not because there's no 4G, but because it's one of the most socialistic cities in the nation [possibly the world], and you're not politically qualified to live there if you see a problem with paying for things you don't personally get to use; it's reasonably obvious, to me, that the ten bucks you're paying for 4G you can't have lowers the cost to ten bucks for those who can use it, elsewhere. Kinda like how paying any given tax which leads to something you don't benefit from [at least directly] lowers the cost to those who can use it, like when you haven't got kids, but your property taxes fund the schools to the same comparative extent that parents' taxes fund schools, supposing they're not renting something and getting out of the taxes entirely. Sure: you benefit in the abstract, people tell me, because other people's kids get to go to school and develop into something other than reality shows them to develop into anyway; but, immediately, you're pretty much just throwing four figures a year at something you can't personally even visit unless your kids go there. Which, you know, is just kinda unfair.

I guess the difference is that Sprint are part of the Evil Industrial Plutonomic Complex, so...actually, that's not really untrue; Sprint suck.

4G sucks too, by the way. Not yet, since no one has it; but it's likely to end the 'net as we know it, and not in a good way. So far, it's only ten bucks a month because no one has it. As much as I back net neutrality on principle, the economic model is dicked; there will come a day—and relatively soon—when the 'net is going to become expensive down at streetlevel, simply because the magnitude of unregulated data streaming from point to point is growing faster than we can keep up; the bugfix for that is a sort of sintax to discourage people from throwing lawlcats at each other and to offset the geometrically rising costs of making it possible in the first place. So, again, it's just kinda unfair that the pretax price on a pack of cigarettes is about a dollar; but, see, we don't really want you smoking at all, and we're kindasorta sending the taxes into healthcare reform since smokers probably get sick more often; and, since we're convinced that anyone not named Me is an idiot, we can't trust you to keep the money and earmark it yourself to pay an MD to tell you that you're doing it wrong.

That's what I hate most about democrats. It's not that they make decisions based on emotions and hope for a better, impossible world; it's not that they keep getting it wrong and defending the wrongness with at least we didn't get McSame; it's not that every damned thing they predict/promise/demand is a blatant argumentum ad populum [AKA consensus gentium]; it's that they're actually convinced that intellectual is not only a noun, but an act of sheer will: I've decided to be clever; sure, I'm unqualified—a drooling moron who can't define fungible let alone understand basic supply and demand—but, see, I'm an intellectual, which false syllogism automatically makes me way smarter than anyone else whose IQ is marginally above roomtemperature because—hey look—an oilspill—candlelight vigil; fuck the technocracy and pass the echinacea!

Thank hell I get to pay for public schools; where would we be without them....

I may have strayed slightly offtopic here.

More later....

The first thing I've noticed over the last year is that, like anything, the whole concept quickly plummeted down into endless whimpering about who's said what, and when, and how wrong everyone is. And somewhere in the middle of the bitchfest is the basic truth. So here's what I've concluded....

Electronic cigarettes, more and more reclassified as Personal Nicotine Inhalers as part of the bitchfest, work inasmuch as they're supposed to. Not that their designed purpose has much in common with various expectations. If you're looking for nicotine, they seem to work better than patches and things, and roughly as well as actual, organic cigarettes. That's the good news. If you're sitting someplace the Nationalsozialismus prevents you from smoking in, vaping [until or unless some confused moron gets uppity about it] serves the same purpose: to get nicotine into your system.

There's also the bad news....

First of all, while there's nicotine, the electronics are missing something somewhat unidentifiable. I'm not sure exactly what it is. The steam isn't quite as thick as smoke, and it's lacking somehow; they smell different, and less impressive somehow; they don't do anything when you're not actively using them.

About the smell: there is one, despite any failed promises that they're odourless. But that's a given: nothing's really odourless. They just don't smell like smoke. That said, and like smoke, there are enough different kinds of nicotine fluid that it doesn't take long to encounter one you happen to hate. With organics, I tend to hate smelling the cheap ones people wander around with because they just want nicotine without caring how they get it; with electronics, people get this horrid minty stuff in the best case, while Hunter, being insane, has found this French Toast shit making everything smell like cold syrup and butter.

Also about the smell: one claim which turns out to be true is that electronic cigarettes won't give you bad breath. Which would be great if nothing else did. Instead, the things augment the basic decay endemic to anyone who's gone more than ten seconds without drinking a bottle of Scope with anything from Toxic Shamrock Shake Spill to Leggo My Eggo; this is not good.

One more thing about the smell. Regardless what you're vaping, and it's worse if you're not vaping enough, the heating elements in electronic cigarettes reacting with drying polyfil produce an oddly acrid burnout scent. Which really sucks if you've got your own electronic cigarette, or a computer, or anything else in everpresent danger of smouldering: all you notice is that something electronic is burning somewhere, and there's always that chance that the battery in your phone has just exploded. As much as people might complain that organic cigarettes smell like smoke, at least there's no confusing it with the house burning down.

Actually smoking an electronic cigarette is work. For a few reasons, some of them immediately remediable. If there's not enough nicquid, it takes more effort; if the battery's dying [and all batteries are always dying at all times, by basic design], it takes more effort; if the atomiser is too new or too old, it takes more effort. At best, everything's perfectly wet and new and old and charged and connected properly; even then, getting the vapour out of an electronic cigarette requires more waterlift than getting the smoke out of an organic one. So that's a bit annoying.

On that point: these things age. Also a universal constant: everything's subject to entropy. The difference is that, with organic cigarettes, the problem is mostly whether the Zippo is getting low; once lit [and notwithstanding meddlesome attempts to make cigarettes selfextinguishing], a cigarette simply works for the few minutes it lasts. Electronic cigarettes have an applied halflife of maybe half an hour; then they begin to wear out, leaving you to replace parts of them, by mail, excluding weekends, for an average of twenty bucks per component. Organic cigarettes artificially inflated through taxation to at least five bucks a pack, having to spend twenty bucks every few weeks isn't a huge deal; but you still notice it, and it's still annoying.

In the beginning, when no one knew what an electronic cigarette was, they got you out of better excuses than No every time some goof demanded to bum one. That's kinda ended. Now, with more people knowing about these things, you get everything from Oh: an electronic; I've been wanting to try one of those, to What flavour is that one; I've got Peach Cobbler a la Mode with a Side of Aardvark Sperm; can I try yours just long enough to make you wanna kill me? So the answer's still No.

Then there's my favourite claim, which also leads to the largest argument. Because, despite whatever the intellectually lazy consider to be obvious [see also thinkaboutitism], the Evil FDA Industrial Complex Alien Invasion decline to approve electronic cigarettes as a means to quit smoking. Since words mean things, I'm gonna be really, really precise here for a minute....

Electronic cigarettes work as a means to quit smoking. Simply because, while vaping, you're not smoking. Also, while swimming, you're not smoking. And so on. Vaping lets you quit smoking precisely because you're doing something else, to the exclusion of smoking. That's as good as that gets.

That said, they're approximately the worst thing I can think of as a means to quit vaping. In the same way that patches are the worst thing as a means to quit patching. There's still nicotine in these things; there is in fact more than there is in an organic cigarette. If your plan is to get over your habit of wanting nicotine, avoid the hell outta these things.

Fortunately, that was never my plan. I've stated all along that I have no intention of quitting. I like to smoke. For my own part, all people being different with different medical files, the benefits of smoking, for me, outweigh the detriments. Your results may vary. Still, knowing what I'm used to, having smoked since the eighties, I can tell you that, with the addition of electronic cigarettes, my habitual interest in smoking has actually increased. If it matters, I can for the most part meet that expectation with the electronics; but, what counts here is that I've actually increased my expectations regarding nicotine, regardless the degree to which, while vaping, I've quit smoking.

So, in that sense: electronic cigarettes aren't good for quitting smoking, apart from the literal. Also good for quitting smoking are swimming, eating, sleeping, and declining to buy more cigarettes. It's zerosum at best.

At worst—and this slays me—Hunter doesn't smoke. Or, to be real, she didn't smoke. Her parents did [they've actually moved pretty well completely over to vaping now], but she never got into it. For a few years, while she liked that I smoked, she wouldn't personally have a cigarette, because she didn't want to develop the habit. Then I got the Yeti a year ago.

At some point, she tried using the Yeti. All other things being equal, she's got anxiety issues; the nicotine helped her with the stress of being expected to deal with people and leave them alive [it's not fair, I know; I've got the same stress, despite my hip and cool exterior...along with a better understanding of crimescene forensics than most], so, having discovered that my Yeti helped her with that, she got her own.

To make a long story short: it's a year later; she's got a Screwdriver, a Yeti, and so on; and, now, when I get a carton of organic cigarettes [incidentally, I've dropped from two of those per week to one], she steals about twenty percent of them.

So. To the degree that vaping can get you to quit smoking, they're also pretty good at getting you to start. Which is kinda meaningless. If you drink a lot of coffee, you can quit by drinking a lot of soda; if you drink neither, and start drinking soda, that can kinda hook you on coffee too.

That's pretty much that. Except for one more thing: BluCigs.com still suck impossibly. It's been thirteen months since I ordered those, and eleven months since they finally showed up despite misreporting on their end that the order was cancelled; the announced recall of spontaneously combustive chargingpacks has had nothing to do with me, since they're lying about the order having been cancelled, so they've never sent me a new, safe one; their backend reporting on commissions is still dicked, and to date defrauds me on accumulated royalties down to zilch. So, from experience, I'd warn against going anywhere near those imbeciles.

Mostly, these days, I get stuff from http://www.totallywicked-eliquid.com, despite the forgettable URL; they're reasonable, rapid, and good at sending out replacements without pause when something's gone wrong.

More later....