_Right America, Feeling Wronged_, Alexandra Pelosi

I would imagine that after it's not just on HBO, it'll be available on DVD via netflix and maybe on some basic cable some day. We have HBO because I was watching True Blood, which I currently find completely unappealing, but hope someday to maybe be interested in again.

R. watched a small (very small) part of this with me. He said he didn't think he could stand to watch the whole thing, and in many ways, this is a remarkably painful experience. I know, when I watch Keith Olbermann, that there's probably some key piece of the story being left out. I often go look it up (altho these days, I watch Rachel Maddow -- she's less inclined to leave crucial details out, but even there, I check things that don't pass the sniff test). I know there is bias and I work to counter it where necessary. I also know that a lot of people believe -- or say they believe -- Faux News' claim to be "fair and balanced". But actually watching a string of people say that, watching grown men cry because there's about to be a black president (or, even if they had gotten McCain, a woman vice-president, when they don't even think women should vote), watching an anorexic woman try to convince people in the soup kitchen to vote for the pro-life guy, watching people worry that Obama is the antichrist, or Hitler -- all that is really pretty cringeworthy.

But the very best moment, hands down, was _not_ the guy who couldn't spell socialism, and couldn't remember the word capitalism. No, the very best moment was the person who said that if McCain lost, they were going to move to Canada. Moving to Costa Rica, or Spain or the Bahamas, was mildly amusing. But the idea that die-hard Republican would threaten what all my center-left friends kept threatening to do up until 2006 -- that was funny.

Until I remembered Stephen Harper, of course.

But then I was okay again, because even a right wing Canadian is still in favor of universal health care.

I also thought the answer to the question about why the anger levels were getting so high around September or so was interesting. A woman came right out and said, they're hitting us where we live, I looked in my 401K the other day. I understand that watching the money melt away can lead to fear and anger. I'm a little confused about why it would be directed at Obama, who clearly had precious little to do with the policies that led up to that moment, and support for McCain who is/was about an establishment a figure as can be readily imagined. But then, that kind of fear and anger is often directed towards minorities. No surprises, right, other than that this is all kind of unpleasant.

Second best moment was the black guy ranting at Pelosi for coming all the way down to Mississippi to find someone who calls a black man the N word, as if she couldn't have found that in New York. Nice rant.

life is not fair

Jill Scott, who I luuurrrrvvvee with a deep and abiding passion, apparently has the Mma Ramotswe role in an HBO version of the never to be sufficiently damned Alexander McCall Smith's series. The series, as regular readers of this blog probably still don't recall, is one I have gone after on account of being culturally colonial. Judging by the appearance of small, point and shoot digital cameras in the trailer, the time frame in which the stories are set has been brought up to the present day, which would seem to run into some serious problems given the setting in Gabarone. However, maybe they moved it. *shrug*

So. I love Jill Scott. I don't like McCall Smith at all. What to do? Any suggestions? Perhaps the series is Nothing Like the Books. In a good way?

ETA: FWIW, the University of Botswana History Department is not so inclined to go after McCall Smith and his fiction as I am:

http://www.thuto.org/ubh/about/about03.htm

"The books should not be made to carry too much weight, and criticisms that they do not deal in depth with Africa's problems are a little unfair: part of the original point of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency was to counter western perceptions that Africans were incapable of living ordinary lives and running their affairs, but lived entirely in a state of disaster."

Fair enough.

design guy noodles around with kindle 2.0

Of course, just pix and all. But check this out:

http://www.raizlabs.com/blog/?p=367

In Greg's world, the only important buttons on the kindle are on/off, page forward and page backward. Ignoring, for the moment, the importance of being able to turn wireless off separately from power (after all, Amazon is ignoring that too by moving it to software only on v.2), let's contemplate a design which implies that moving forward and backward in a book are equally important.

Or, let's put it this way. Turning that way <--- in a book is as important as turning this way ---->.

Maybe Greg's native language is Hebrew?

Just saying. Now that I'm done laughing.

Wow. I understand a lot of people don't grok the keyboard (these are people who apparently don't write in their books, thus making them either civilized, or unlettered idiots, depending on whether you are an Old School Librarian, or a person who owns their own books and believes that an important part of literacy involves producing words, not just consuming them). But this is _exactly_ why IT led design of, well, anything is completely pointless. Okay, unless it's something primarily used by IT folk.

great kindle coverage! Apparently, it takes a Muslim. . .

http://www.islamonline.net/servlet/Satellite?c=Article_C&cid=1234631357085&pagename=Zone-English-HealthScience%2FHSELayout

Seriously. Really great analysis.

I have a couple of quibbles. First, a lot of times I'm reading something non-fiction, and a point is made that I become curious about in a way that the book does not address. I'll often reach for my laptop to dig up the study referred to, or do additional research googling the topic, then, curiosity satisfied (possibly to the detriment of my opinion of the author), I return to reading. I can't use the browser on the kindle because of where I currently live, but I see it as more compatible with long-form, serious reading than the author of this article seems to.

Second, I don't think reading is either solitary, or incompatible with multi-tasking. I often read with the TV on, while supervising one or more children, while cooking, eating, hanging out with my husband, etc. I've read a book while walking somewhere, even on a trail in the woods. I've read on a treadmill (altho not on a rebounder). I've read in the tub. I've read on the toilet (haven't we all?). I love the kindle because it is closer to hands free than almost any paper book form factor, altho I'm too chicken to read in the tub with it, much less anywhere near sand.

The author of the piece, however, displays a rhetorical skill perhaps unique to someone who really does focus single-mindedly on the written word, without interruption. And that, I have a lot of respect for. It is, today, very, very rare.

I can't mock Apple

I own AAPL and I'm up (a lot). I can't mock them. It's painful.

But look at this priceless paragraph:

http://www.newsobserver.com/299/story/1409481.html

"If a surge in iPhone readers is really happening, it's easier to give credence to the rumors that Apple is developing a device to explore this market further, a larger version of the phoneless Touch that would be both ebook reader and turbocharged tablet computer."

[ETA: Someone else is working the tablet netbook touch screen angle:

http://www.yugatech.com/blog/personal-computing/gigabyte-m912-tablet-netbook-review/

Runs hot, crappy keyboard, not for me. But interesting, particularly as a kiddie entertainment device on flights.
]

Apple has a history of really, really, really nailing a market, and then missing the next several big trends and more or less torpedoing themselves. Then nailing a market, blah, blah, bleeping blah. Apple also has a history of absolutely True Believer customers killing themselves because they were convinced Apple was going to do something breathtakingly sensible to catch that next trend. And just dying when they were disappointed.

This paragraph is noteworthy because while the word "netbook" is not used, it's quite clear that's what they are talking about. Apple, in the process of having missed the eBook thing, and in the process of missing the netbook thing, is now being rumored to have a category killer that Magically Combines the Best of Both.

Hope so. I'd sure buy one. But I've ordered a Kindle 2 in the interim, and fully plan on buying one of the Q2 or Q3 HP Mini-Notes.

google books mobile

I am an idiot. More people should point this out to me. Maybe.

http://books.google.com/googlebooks/mobile/#Read?id=_Ljso0aS6HQC&page_num=17

Google books _is_ supplying the scanned text for mobile reading. Sort of. The table of contexts (hit previous pages) is an image. The page I pointed at has the title of the book at the top, rendered slightly incorrectly due to the joys of OCR -- Cables instead of Fables.

So, yup, they are supplying their understanding of the scan, not just the scan. I want to know how many people are reading stuff this way.

ETA: Has anyone who lives within the kindle coverage area tried using the browser on the kindle to read google mobile books? Did google lock the kindle out somehow?

think kindle 2 is expensive?

A lot of the gadget press wants color touch screens. Hey, they could buy Fujitsu's reader, which has both. For $900.

http://www.htlounge.net/article/7443/fujitsu-color-e-book-better-than-amazon-kindle/

once upon a time, when I was a comp sci student

Before I was accepted into the department, I had to take a couple introductory comp sci courses, taught by a lecturer who had quite the reputation. He was actually really good at his job (which was conveying a substantial body of knowledge to the kiddies, and weeding out most of them in the process), altho he definitely had a unique(ly annoying) sense of humor and approach to his task.

In any event, one of his standard rants was about programmers, how many of them currently existed, how there were all these people writing about how we were going to need so incredibly many more of them every year and blah, blah, bleeping, blah. Remember, he was supposed to be weeding out a lot of people who wanted to get in on this lucrative opportunity. His rant went something like this:

Once upon a time, if you wanted to make a telephone call, you picked up the phone and told the operator, who was basically waiting there to talk to you, who you wanted to talk to. The operator connected you. As telephone service became more and more common, more and more telephone operators were needed. If you had done the math then like the math currently (back then, of course, not in 2009) about how many programmers we will need, only for telephone operators, just about everyone would need to be a telephone operator in order to meet demand.

And, indeed, we are all telephone operators, when we press the buttons on our phones to make a phone call.

In the future, he went on, most computers will not look like computers. They'll be in our appliances, we'll wear them, we won't think of them as computers -- and we won't think of ourselves as programmers, even when we are engaged in programming like tasks. I'm sure every time he has to help a family member figure out how to filter e-mail, he remembers all the kiddies he inflicted this little rant on. I can only imagine his reaction to helping grandma google something, much less when his dad is struggling with a navigator.

Whenever I see stuff about the kindle, netbooks (oh, gosh, am I supposed to TM that for those fuckers over at Psion? Gee whiz, sorry about that.), cell phones and blah, blah, bleeping blah, I remember that lecturer.

Thanks a lot.