I spent a little time last night working on the new computer, and got it to boot from the hard drive. After that I went to bed though, so not a lot of news on that front. One piece of information that I don’t think I’ve shared here though, is that William tossed Erin’s PDA to the floor a while back, and broke the screen. That meant that we were sharing one PDA as a bookreader for a while before I could replace it. I put in some bids on some pdas on ebay, but I didn’t see anything there that just screamed at me to purchase them. I had seen the Ebookwise 1150 and wanted to check it out - I even had my credit card number typed into the order screen before I got the shipping section where the (then) $99 ebook was going to incur another ~$35 of shipping, which suddenly makes it a lot more expensive than getting another PDA. On a whim, I punched “Ebookwise” into ebay’s search, and came up with one seller, selling them for the same price as ebookwise.com, except she ships via USPS, so instead of ~$35 shipping, it would be ~$10. Turns out she’s the mom of the guys that own/run ebookwise.com. Anyway, I ordered it, and it arrived on Friday.

After spending the weekend with it, and reading on the bus for a couple of days, I have to say that I’m very impressed. I’d have a really hard time going back to a PDA after using this device. The screen is big, bright, readable, and white background with black text. My only complaint is that the battery isn’t user-replacable, and with the known limitations of LiIon batteries, it’ll be dead in a couple of years :( Hopefully if I take it to the local battery shop, I will be able to get it replaced at that point.

I think Erin still prefers the PDA because it’s so much smaller and lighter though.

Speaking of reading things from a screen…I’m scheduled for a computer upgrade at work, and the new computer came in last week. While it’s being set up, I got to break out the new monitor - a 17″ Dell LCD (E173FP) I was pretty excited about it, and hooked it up right away. Within a short period of time, I had a massive headache though. I haven’t had a headache like that in a long time, but for some reason I didn’t put two and two together for a couple of hours. At that point, I turned the brightness down from the default 75 to 0. (No kidding, zero) and my headache disappeared. I was pretty relieved, because it’s got more screen real estate than my old CRT, and I didn’t want to have to go back to a CRT.

Erin tells me that William has his molars coming in, which is making for a less than enjoyable trip through Alberta. The house is pretty quiet without them, but they’ll be back before I know it - it’s Tuesday already, and they’ll be back either Friday or Saturday.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Now, now, this is not a lending library. Put down that
magazine or I???ll blow your heads off!??? - Apu