This domain will expire on the 29th and it’s time to move on from being a clear plastic cup. Just as I moved on from a universe away, this particular chapter of my life is coming to a close and I feel like I should document it.
Despite my best efforts, I’ve had a tendency to document all my relational endeavors over the last two years. I’ve documented them to exhaustion in a way where I don’t know whether it has helped, or if it has harmed. Oddly enough, the only one I haven’t documented thoroughly is Jen. Maybe it’s out of frustration, maybe it’s out of self loathing. I really don’t know. It seems that every time I sit down to talk about her my mind becomes blank and refuses to operate. I end up spending those moments talking about some current lust.
There was a moment in January where I couldn’t think about anything but what happened between her and Zack. It was all I could do going into 2010 and thinking about my least favorite moment of the decade. Rather than dwell on such a monumentally horrible moment I decided to compile a list of things I loved most about 2009. It made me feel better but it still hasn’t changed what I have viewed as betrayal. Even to this day, I still don’t know what to do about it. Zack has no recollection that he tried to kiss her, and I can’t shake the moment where she asked to hang out with him. Jen always said that you would have to say ten nice things to make up for one bad one. Even the tears that fell the next morning as she told me not to leave couldn’t make me feel better about it.
During a rare and vulnerable moment with one of my best friends I said we were, “cosmically screwed” for not being in love with each other. Maybe it’s not so much us, but more just me. I’ve gone on record before saying that I don’t think I’ll ever love someone like I loved Jen. Not a single experience in the past two years has made me think to rescind that statement. Really, that’s what this blog was originally about, to get over the love of my life. To move past the hardest decision of leaving her because I believed we both deserved more peace than we could offer each other. We still both deserve it, and I think she’s well on her way to becoming the person I knew she could be.
As for me, I still don’t know what I’m doing. One day leads to the next and I attempt to have goals but, more times than not, they seem like smoke and mirrors. Will I ever start a brewery? Will I ever finish my Android twitter client? Will I ever stop being in love with the idea of love? Will that light I have for Jen ever fade? Will I ever finish this album? It’s these questions that I will discover in life and not in the transparency of a clear plastic cup.
They must have been really disappointed when they got here…
One of the first things I did when I got my Kindle was to hack it to display my own screen saver. It comes with a default set of images that I removed so it wouldn’t cycle through them at random. Yesterday I decided to go back and look at all the images that they had preloaded. The selection of images are primarily of famous authors throughout the years. You could imagine my surprise when I realized there was no screen saver of F. Scott Fitzgerald. I decided to create one and I’m posting it here for everyone to download.
It was January 2008 and Apple released the Macbook Air. Impossibly thin yet with compromises beyond belief. One USB port, no CD/DVD drive, and RAM that was soldered in place. Roughly two weeks after the unveiling Lenovo released the x300. A no compromise ultra-portable laptop. It had been in development for years and Business Week writer Steven Hamm followed the design and engineering teams in the quest to build the perfect laptop… the x300. Given my love affair with Lenovo this seemed to be the next logical business related read.
Early last week a couple serious developments had me leaning towards getting a Nook. The first was that someone figured out how to “root” a nook. This essentially means you can run a bunch of cool software on your Nook. Imagine a world where you could check your email or browse the internet on something that more or less looked like a real piece of paper? Awesome.
The second development was that someone did in-fact make a web browser for the nook. eReaders like the Kindle and the Nook have FREE internet. No monthly fees, notta. Having a browser opens the possibilities to how a person can be mobile. It’s basically taking advantage of what would normally cost $40 a month in AT&T bills.
The last and fairly significant development was that I discovered that the free out of copyright books from Amazon are not wrapped in DRM. This means you are free to use those book on the Nook or any other eReader. This is also significant for another reason, the same free books from B&N (which they actually charge for) are poorly formatted in comparison to Amazon’s versions of the same book. Below is an example:
*It’s important to know that the screenshots above are taken from each companies desktop readers. The line width issue is not –an issue- on the actual nook device.
So having the ability to buy all public domain books from Amazon meant I didn’t have to worry about B&N’s complete ignorance to properly formatted text. To be perfectly honest though, I’m quite afraid to purchase another eBook from Barnes & Noble seeing how they format their books.
After seeing the Nook in person I really liked what I saw. It’s a much more elegant solution than the Kindle currently is. The use of Android means that a person like me can write apps to take advantage of what it has to offer. It means it’s not just a dedicated eBook reader… it’s a much better value proposition. Also, the use of the touch screen means you aren’t constantly looking at a QWERTY keyboard that you almost never use. Unfortunately, the sad reality is that B&N’s software department know absolutely nothing about typography, the very essence of making a good eBook reader. B&N itself still has much to learn and more content to add before it can call itself a contender… maybe they can save 15% by getting a membership too.
