Gonzai Gallery

I left the Kindle's wireless on while I was driving home today, and from time to time I looked to see if I had a signal. At one point, a locked signal popped up with the name 'ThisIsNotTheFreeWiFiYoureLookingFor'.  Brilliant.

Well, whaddya know - we have a white Christmas. Can't remember the last time that happened, but almost an inch of snow fell today, just enough to touch up everything. Nice. Unfortunately it also touched up the roads, a friend didn't even try to come after she barely made it home, and the family was late.

I've got a decent haul: the Kindle, of course; series 2 of 'Luther'; Dr Who's 'Christmas Carol' special; Cards Against Humanity; a party game called 'Martini Time', how appropriate; some books and some accessories for the Kindle. Promptly spent time playing backgammon with No. 1 nephew on the Kindle. Mom's haul included a book written by a certain meerkat-ish author (thanks for the signed nameplate, she loves it!) and a ton of Keurig-related things to include the machine itself. I don't drink much coffee, so I've never been inclined to invest in one; but the family is crazy for theirs and felt Mom should have one. Fortunately they did include a lot of tea for Mom and cider & chai for me. The boys were very happy with their games (Carcassonne, Ticket to Ride USA, and various card and Star Wars games), Janine loved the necklace & earrings and Mike is intrigued by his annual sampler CD.

The dinner was crazed; we did the usual pickup of a complete dinner at Safeway, but for some reason half the stuff was frozen solid. The turkey's juice overran the pan and caught fire in the oven, fortunately just smoke. The mashed potatoes needed over twice the recommended time to cook because they were an ice cube, and Mom forgot the vegetables until after everything else was cooked, so by the time the veggies were ready most things were cold :/  But it was a darn good turkey and mashed potatoes, and I suspect we'll be eating it all week.

Phew. Need bedtime. After I let out the hysterical dog.

So far today, I have had 2 backup drives fail, the internet has shut off 3 times of its own accord, and it turned out the Kindle doesn't like pdfs or epubs. The epub was my mistake, I didn't catch that the Kindle doesn't do those, but the pdfs were supposed to work and they're screwy. I'm clearing off a couple of older drives to use as backups and found a document conversion program, but I really wasn't planning to spend the day fighting with the computer.

Well...

My supervisor spent much of last night and today trying to e-mail her husband's documents to herself, without success. I suggested plugging the Kindle into a computer through the USB port and transferring them that way; she said she didn't have the right cord for that. Meanwhile, she couldn't get a Wi-fi signal at the office or at the restaurant across the street. She finally gave up and told me to give it a shot (I'd been offering to do that all week). She thought it needed to be deregistered and reregistered to her, so that's what I did first. And all of her hubby's docs disappeared. Yikes! So I called Amazon help. They like me. I had both CSRs cracking up. Anyway, they suggested deregistering her and restarting the gadget. Worked like a charm; his docs were back. Then came the fun part of trying to transfer them. The CSR thought she could find them in the cloud, but they were never Amazon docs, they were proprietary to the seminar he went to. I suggested buying a cord and transferring them to my computer; they said the docs wouldn't work on the computer because they were in Kindle format, but that there was a USB cord built into the power cord. I had no idea. Nifty! So I plugged it into the computer directly and...turns out the documents were all .pdfs. Moved all of them onto a thumb drive to give to supervisor tomorrow. Meanwhile, I loaded up the newly me registered Kindle with classic authors for Mom (who will be the primary user) and sent her off to read Mark Twain. The case and light should be here next week. Phew.

We have Kindle!

I finally finished reading the book, ten months after I bought it and 3 months after I started reading it. (I had to get a move on, the Horde is collectively reading a Civil War historical tome and I didn't want to start thinking dragons fought for the North and the South was full of wights.) A few thoughts, without spoilers:

1) Damn, but the TV show hews closely to the book. I'm not sure I've ever encountered film that faithful to its book.

2) Every once in a while, a visual piece is superior to its written source. This is one of them. Even with the addition of naked women, the TV show is an improvement on the book, and I think it's the POV. The show is omniscient; we see everything and without bias. The books are limited by the POV, not everything is seen or heard and it's all very biased.

3) That said, the books are helpful for the details and the history. You can exposition-dump history in a book, but not on TV.

Time to read about Reconstruction (yippee) and then maybe on to Clash of Kings. Hopefully will have a Kindle by then. It would help.

STILL waiting to hear from the yo-yo with the dog crate, so I started futzing around on craigslist in the faint hope I could find another such crate. Instead I found someone passing along their unused gift Kindle for a reasonable price not far from me. So I took a chance and bought it for Mom. She won't go to the library anymore, but whines that she has nothing to read, so I'm hoping this stripped down Kindle might do the trick. Now if I could just get it to talk to my Amazon account...

Oh, and off to Balticon for the next few days to be a grunt in the art show. Probably won't be back until Sunday or Monday. Enjoy the weekend folks!