Carrie Vaughn, _Kitty and the Dead Man's Hand_ (kindle)

Can anyone please explain to me what that title refers to?

Kitty and Ben go to Las Vegas. She's going to do the show live in front of an audience AND it will be televised. Conveniently scheduled for when she's in town to get married. Which her parents will be attending. While there, Ben discovers he's _really_ good at poker now -- and uncovers and narcs out a ring of cheats, which turns around and kidnaps him, thus throwing off the wedding. In the course of finding Her Mate, Kitty turns up a bunch of other weirdness.

But I have no idea where the Dead Man's Hand comes in.

Mildly entertaining, but don't start the series here.

Jeaniene Frost, _At Grave's End_ (kindle)

In this outing, Bones joins his line (recently separated from his sire's) to his grandsire's, Mencheres, an Egyptian dude with an extremely mean wife (Patra, daughter of Cleopatra). There's this prophecy, see, and you so don't care.

Mom becomes reconciled to Bones, somewhat, largely by watching him torture Max, the guy who knocked her up with Cat. Cat quits working for Don (not in a bad way!), two of the team members become vamps, Bones gets more powers and Patra launches a zombie attack.

Not as much raunchy sex as in the previous book. Don't start the series here.

SSA/BSO update

Well, I called the SSA today, not optimistic at all, given what was going on on the website. But boy, howdy, they have some awesome phone service. Guy with a _great_ voice, extremely helpful, short hold time AND it was apologized for, problem completely fixed first time out the gate.

Then it was a matter of digging through IRS publications to figure out how to fill out a W-2 as a household employer, when you're paying both sides of SS/Medicare. Hopefully I got it right. I'll find out for sure, if I'm ever nominated to a cabinet position, hunh?

kindle commentary: the Dumbest Quote EVER

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/technology/personaltech/10kindle.html

[begin quote] Richard Sarnoff, president of Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments, a unit of Bertelsmann, which owns Random House and is the world’s largest publisher of consumer titles, said that for this reason, publishers have remained vigilant in fostering competition in the e-book market.

“The key thing for us as publishers and our authors is that the value to a consumer of the underlying content is not undermined by artificially low pricing policies that end up sticking,” he said. [end quote]

I'll just start ticking off the obvious problems with this, after noting that I'm not slamming the author of the piece. I'm going after Sarnoff and Bertelsmann here (Bertelsmann is a cheap and easy target and has been for at least a decade -- but they're huge, so it's still fair).

(1) Sarnoff believes that if a lower price sticks, it's not "real" -- it's artificial.
(2) Sarnoff believes that its important to have competition in the e-book market to ensure a higher price for publishers (and the authors who are signed with those publishers).

Those are obvious. With a small inference, however, we get to some inobvious things which I think are still attributable to Sarnoff:

(3) He thinks he can effectively compete with Amazon's dominance in e-book land _by charging more money for the content_.
(4) More content is not mentioned.
(5) A better user experience is not mentioned.
(6) A cheaper overall user experience (hardware + content) is not mentioned.

The rationale with the iPhone as reader is that (a) the iPhone is cheaper and (b) it does more stuff. Sure, as a reader, it's going to suck compared to a "purpose built device" or whatever the code phrase is, but that rationale is worth plugging, and explains why Bezos is vaporware-ing the ability to read kindle books on other devices. It's _nice_ to only carry one device (and a small, cute and cool one at that).

Not sure what the rationale with the Sony Reader is; possibly someone out there can explain it to me.

But it seems to me that if your primary goal in competing in a marketplace is to extract the maximum payment per item from the customer, and there's another big player in the game who is undercutting you, it's not looking good for you. And people are worried about Amazon extracting too much money from e-books by dominating the market. Yikes.

giving in to temptation. . .

"Special Opportunity for Kindle 1 Owners
Even though we’ve increased our manufacturing capacity, we want to be sure our original Kindle owners are first in line to receive Kindle 2. Place your Kindle 2 order by midnight PST on February 10th and you will receive first priority."

What does that mean, anyway?

Yes, I just ordered v.2. Once it has arrived and I have determined that it works and is happy goodness all around, I have even identified who v.1 will be going to. There will, however, be the problem of figuring out how to transfer it.