After seeing Ross Turk’s Kindle while I was in Belgium, I decided that I’d order one for myself — given the amount of travel that I do and the amount of time I have on airplanes to read, it’d be much nicer to have a decent eBook reader with me than to schlep dead tree books all over the world.
I placed the order on February 24, and I just received a note from Amazon that I’d be getting my Kindle sometime between April 10 and 17.
If you’re thinking of getting anybody a Kindle for their birthday or some other occasion, you might want to start thinking about ordering it now.
I’m not thrilled about patronizing Amazon so much, given their annoying software patent activities and other anti-competitive behavior. However, the big A is the only one really getting it right in the eBook market.
If only I had the startup funds — I’d love to see a decent eBook a la the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that has a constantly updating stream of information and new material. The components, software, and other technologies are around — it just requires someone with the money to create the prototypes and get cracking. Anyone want to lend me a few million bucks to get started?
Without going into a great deal of detail, let me just say that if you’re looking for a bank for a checking or savings account, or if you have a choice of banks for an auto loan or other type of loan avoid Fifth Third Bank if at all humanly possible.
Long story short: I’ve been fighting with Fifth Third Bank for a couple of months now about providing proof of insurance for my car between October and December of 2007. (Fifth Third has the loan on my car.)
In December of 2007, they sent me a letter saying that they had no proof of insurance (I’ve had State Farm since 1989, without a lapse in coverage since) and would be billing me retroactively for coverage during that period until I provide proof of insurance. They sent this to the wrong address because they failed to update my address after I went to a local branch of the bank and gave a teller the new information along with a payment.
Now, how it’s legal for a company to retroactively bill for insurance coverage, I have no idea — since I can obviously make no use of insurance for a period of time that has passed — but they’ve either claimed they did not receive proof of insurance from State Farm or refused to accept the form of proof from State Farm several times now. I’ve spent well over five hours of my time calling Fifth Third about this problem and have also no doubt wasted quite a lot of my insurance agent’s time.
With any luck, it will be resolved soon — but I will be looking to pay this loan off early or find another lender to allow me to get away from Fifth Third and warn as many people as possible to avoid doing any business with this bank.
What galls me most of all is that the bank acknowledges they’ve spoken to State Farm and have been told that, yes, I do and have had coverage — but they refuse to accept that as confirmation. They also accept no blame for failing to update my address, and no shame whatsoever about trying to charge me for insurance during a period of time that has already passed and can be of no use whatsoever except as a penalty for not assisting the bank with their shoddy recordkeeping.
Some basics about religion and ethnic groups that most people in the U.S. probably don’t know.
For example, frighteningly few know the difference between Sunni and Shia Muslims, and most think the words “Arab” and “Muslim” are pretty much interchangeable. They aren’t. So here’s a very brief primer aimed at raising the level of knowledge about the region to an absolute minimum.
My only complaint with the post is that the author stops at 10 items. There’s a lot more we should know about the Middle East (I’m counting myself here, too) than we do.
One thing my limited travels outside the U.S. have taught me so far — people outside the U.S. often know as much, if not more, about our politics as we do. But it’s rare for Americans to be as well-informed about politics in other countries — any other country — as they know about us.
Now, I understand part of this: To be perfectly equitable, we’d have to be well-informed about politics in a lot of other countries, whereas we’re just one country. But most people I’ve talked to in the U.S. often have no idea even about politics or culture (aside, maybe, from sports) in Canada or Mexico — much less anywhere else. I understand we all suffer from information overload, but I suspect we could do with a little more news and information about, say, Europe and a little less coverage of celebrity gossip.
Upgraded the blog to WordPress 2.5, test-driving the new hotness now. Please leave a comment if anything’s broken.
If the comments are broken, well… that’d be a problem, wouldn’t it?
Back home after trips to BrainShare (Salt Lake City) and SDForum/OSBC (San Francisco, CA).
Tons of fun were had, some really good food (and some exceptionally bad food, but let’s not focus on the dreck served by the airlines…), interesting company, and the opportunity to meet and talk to a lot of people about openSUSE.
Good stuff, but glad to be “home” for a few days. Next trip: Austin, TX for Linux Foundation thingy, and then LugRadio Live in San Francisco for a couple of days. (Note to organizers of shows — San Francisco is so overdone. Seriously — great city, but once or twice a year is enough. Seattle, Orlando, and Boston are nice too, you know….)
Getting set today to jet off to SLC for the big Novell conference of the year — BrainShare. It’s a biggie — five days, thousands of Novell employees, partners, customers, all jammed into the Salt Palace Convention Center. (I’ve been there before… not sure “palace” is quite fitting, but it is ginormous…)
I’ve covered BrainShare once as a journalist, so it will be interesting indeed to attend it as a Novell employee. I recall that Novell pulls out all the stops for BrainShare, and I think it’s going to be a fun (if exhausting) week. I have two talks on KDE4 during the week, and a spot in the Friday keynote — which will be all sorts of fun and excitement.
I think they’ll have videos online once the whole shebang is over — so if you can’t make it to SLC and BrainShare next week, you’ll be able to bask in some of the keynotey goodness anyway. In a little window on your desktop. But you’ll have your choice of comfy chair, so there’s that.
See you in SLC!
The other day I used Google Docs with a colleague to hash out a project, and I was really digging Google Docs at the time — thinking “man, this totally blows fat client software away,” because we could both update the document, and chat in the sidebar about changes… it was really useful.
Today, I’m trying to create a spreadsheet with Google Docs and keep getting an “Oops, a server error occurred” when trying to save a spreadsheet and just thinking, “man, this totally blows.” I just spent 10 minutes creating a template that I can’t save in Google Docs. Luckily, I was able to copy and paste the content into an OpenOffice.org spreadsheet with no problem.
I know that OpenOffice.org is not completely bug-free, but I’ve never had it refuse to save a document before… every time I start to think that I’d like to switch to Web-based software completely, I run into a problem like this and think “nope, Web-based software still isn’t production-ready.”