Monthly Archives: September 2009

Experimental Success

One of the reasons why I purchased an eBook reader was in hopes of being able to read while I rode the mass transit to my day job. I get motion-sick when I try to read in a moving vehicle.

A few years ago I discovered that with a large enough print/font size I didn’t get motion-sick. Yesterday while riding home from work — after a frustrating and annoying day — I increased the font size a couple of step and continued reading my current novel, Last Call, by Tim Powers. I didn’t get motion-sick!

Oh happy day.

Share

Monday Night Movie: Macbeth (1979)

macbethdvdBecause of the long weekend I did not watch a Sunday Night Movie as I typically do. I spent Sunday night playing board and card games with my sweetie-wife and friends. Then late into the night we played video games. In other words it was more like a Saturday night than a Sunday night.
On Monday my sweetie-wife and I watched the British television production of Macbeth from 1979. The production starred Ian McKellen and Judi Dench as Lord and Lady Macbeth. Sharp eyed genre fans will also spot a much younger Ian MacDiarmid (Senator and Emperor  Palpatine in Star Wars) as Ross.

Now this story has been around for nearly 400 years so I think I’m safe from having to worry about spoilers. However, if you know nothing about the story of Macbeth and don’t want anything spoiled, then read no further and only accept that this production is well worth viewing.

Macbeth is the story of a Scottish Lord, Macbeth whose ambition — with assistance from his wife — leads him to murder his King and kinsman, King Duncan, and seize the throne of Scotland for himself.  However, as such thing often go, he cannot stop at just one murder. He sees threats from all sides and murders kin and friend alike to protect his hold on the crown. His ascendancy to King had been foretold by three witches and when those same witches foretell that his rule shall not fall until Birnam Wood moves on Dunsinane Hill, Macbeth feels unbeatable. When the witches further say that no man born of woman shall harm him he feels invulnerable . Being Shakespeare there are of course quibbles around these prophecies that Macbeth fails to appreciate until it is too late.

The story of Macbeth is not the story of witches and mystic powers to lead men astray. Macbeth himself confesses that murder was already in his mind before the witches spoke their first prophesy to him. Macbeth is a study in power and in ambition and in the ragged madness that lies for men when they are commanded by the lust for power and give their ambition reign over their souls. This is a timeless story that has been told and re-told over and over. It has been told as a mafia story and, in my favorite reiteration, as a Samurai action film, Throne of Blood. It is the basis for not my next novel but the one after that where I take the same basic story and set it in the far future. I hope I can do it some justice.

This production is quite startling and much to my tastes. The thing with plays is that every production is invited to reinvent the look of the play without changing the text of the play. Sometimes this leads to very historical with everyone in period garb and gear, and sometimes it leads to most fantastic productions such as the Fascist vision for Richard III. (One I liked very much.) For this production of Macbeth the production designed was very minimalist. There were no sets and the costumes were quite un-period. The stage was blank and bare. All atmosphere for the scenes were created by the use of light and smoke. While this sounds rather droll and dull it was quite the opposite. This production was tense and suspenseful. The director also made excellent use of the medium of television. He did not simply photograph the stage play. he used the camera and the frame to compose shots that heightened the tension, and emphasized the dramatic in the text and in the performance. For the soliloquies the actors delivered their lines directly into the camera lens, breaking the fourth wall and inviting us, the audience, into their thoughts.

This was a treat and one I may very buy on DVD as I saw it via my Netflix account. Man, I love my Netflix account.

Share

A Review of the EZReader PRO

On August 31, Astak began shipping their EZReader PRO eBook readers. The EZReader PRO is an eBook reader with a 5″ e-ink screen. After the usual trials and tribulations of courier shipping I received my EZReader PRO on Friday.
The Box Despite the image on the box, the reader I ordered is black in color. On the side of the box is the listing of the colors and a little sticker lets you know which color is in the box. I have been wanting to go over to eBooks for more than a year now, but I waited for the right eReader to come along.
I’m not a fan of the Kindle for a number of reasons. The two biggest reasons are that the Kindle is a closed format system and I have never liked being locked into a single format. I’m more of an open-source kind of guy. The other reason that Amazon.com is trying to hard to control the publishing industry from copyright thru sales and I do not think it is good for one company to control too much of the market.
I hesitated in going for eBooks because I like supporting independent book sellers but I finally took the plunge for ebooks when I learned my favorite local bookstore, Mysterious Galaxy, sells eBooks vis their web site. So now I have the best of both worlds.

WHATS IN THE BOX:
IN THE BOX Moving from left to right here’s what came in the box.
1) USB cable for connecting to your PC or Mac.
2) User Manual in English and Chinese.
3) 1GB SD data card with 300 free eBooks. (Public Domain titles) [update – turns out on those who pre-ordered the EZReader PRO or who buy it during September will get the SD card with the 300 free books.]
4) 1 Crush resistance leather case with the eReader already inside.
5) AC adapter for recharging the device away from a computer.
6) Ear Buds, carrying strap, and small screwdriver for accessing battery panel. (All bagged together)
The packaging was not particularly environmental, but it was efficient and everything was packed securely for shipment. I do not know if the crush-resistant case is real leather or fax leather, but frankly in my book that doesn’t make much of a difference. I do like that the case is held closed by a magnetic catch and not a velcro or a physical snap. With enough wear and tear both of those options would fail far too quickly for my tastes.

The Reader So here’s the reader sitting in its crush-resistant case. You can see the display turned and even in this photograph is quite legible. The display is 5″ diagonally, has a resolution of 600*800 pixels, and has 8 levels of greyscale. Because this is an electronic paper display, it take no power to display the image but only to change the image. The reader has a Samsung Arm9 400 MHz process. This produces very quick pages turns, though turning a page is still slower than physically flipping a leaf in a book. I adapted very quickly to the pacing of the machine and now I hardly notice the pages turns. Accessing menus is a bit slower. Generally you hold a menu button for two-seconds and then several seconds after that the menu will appear.
The listed formats supported by the EZReader Pro are: ADE, PDF, DOC, RTF, HTML, TXT, MP3, WOL, CHM, RAR, ZIP, Fb2, DJVU, EPUB, BMP, JPG, TIF, PNG, GIF, PDB, PPT, and LIT.
I have not tested ALL of those formats, but I went online and downloaded several free eBooks in various formats. I also went to Mysterious Galaxy and purchased one book in the Adobe Digital Edition format. (ADE) I can say that the RTF, TXT, DOC, EPUB, and ADE all worked fine. Depending the format some functions changed. For example depending on the format changed how many steps of font increase were available. Most eBooks and all the PDFs were simply too small for be read on the device is displayed in the native size. An 8 1/2″ by 11″ pages squeezed down on a 5″ display simply cannot be read. Pressing the ‘8’ key on the device steps the users through increasing font sizes and at the larger factors the image or rotated into landscape for viewing.
There are three ways of flipping pages. A left-handed person — I am right handed — could simply use the left and right arrow buttons on the left edge of the device. For a right handed person there are page flipping buttons, the ‘9’ and the ‘0’ at the bottom of the device. There is also a lever on the right side, not visible in these photos, pulling down on the lever advances a page and pushing up goes backwards a page. Holding any of the page turning switches for two-seconds will advance or back up the display by ten pages.
Provided the format supports bookmarks, such as ADE, each title can have up to five active bookmarks. You place a bookmark by pressing one of the number keys 1-5 while on the pages you want to bookmark. (It must be a currently unused bookmark number or you will simply flip to that current mark.) To erase a book mark, simply be on the bookmarked page and pressing the corresponding bookmark number to reset it.
The device does a very good job of reopening a book to where you left off, but the bookmarks are most useful when you are reading more than one file at a time. Simply open the file, tap the bookmark number, and you’re right back where you left off.
I took me a while to get the hang of transferring files to the device. I understood mounting and ejecting a USB drive device, and the generic files transferred just fine, but I was stuck for a while with the ADE files. That turned out not to be the device but rather my inexperience with ADE.
If you get an eBook reader and want to read ADE files, but sure to get the software you need from Adobe first. It will make life easier.
I tested the text-to-speech on the device, but the electronic voice was too electronic for me. I often have a hard time with those sort of voices and my opinion on the matter may not be a very valid one.
I have not loaded up any MP3s to play on the EXReader PRO as I have an iPod and I am very happy with that as my main music player.

Overall I liked the EZReader PRO and given that it is the lowest costing eBook reader using e-ink technology, it should be near the top of your list if you are considering an eBook reader for pleasure reading.

{UPDATE – MY EZReader PRo has developed a fault. IT’s refusing to mount on either computer I own. I am currently working with Aztek tech support to clear the issue and I will let you know the final resolution.}

[Further Update: The device is mounting again as an ejectable drive. Tech support has been helpful and we think it may be a defective USB cable which they have offered to replace. At the moment everything is working again.]

For all those people stumbling in from Astek’s website, Welcome. I hope the review is useful and please do feel free to poke around my internet home.

Share

Video Game Saturday

So yesterday was a video game Saturday here at my place. I had four friends over and we connected four xbox 360’s together into a local network and had five people on four screens.
(This worked out well as I have a 42″ LCD HDTV and two people can share that screen quite easily.)
Mostly we played Halo 3 because it was not picky about who had which version.
Personally I like playing Call Of Duty more, but the programers of that game make it difficult for players to put together their own local area network games.
1st) they require that everyone be on the same version of the game. So those who have been playing on-line and updating their software now have software that is incompatible with the original discs.
2nd) When doing a LAN game the programmers of Call OF Duty do not allow players to share screen. One player to a scree, so the max number of players in a system link game is 4. (‘Cause you cannot connect more than 4 Xbox 360 together in a system link.) With Halo of to 4 people can be on each Xbox 360 so you could have up to 16 players on a local system link game.

Because of this we played a lot of HALO 3. When we tired of HALO 3, we switched to Call Od Duty:World At War and played the bonus zombie levels. They are a lot of fun, but we could only play two people at a time. One on my machine and one on my friend’s Nathan;s machine.

We did have a break for dinner, that my lovely sweetie-wife made for us. A simple dinner of hotdogs and salads, but with good friends and good conversation it was very pleasant.

This afternoon we’ll do board and card gaming so my sweetie-wife can join in.

Life is good,

Share

Odd bits here and there

So it has been kinda slow day at the day job and I’ve spent a little break time on the internet.
I ended up on google maps looking at maps and pictures of my old hometown in Florida. (Verus my old hometown in North Carolina, moving when young can produce the two hometown syndrome.)

It was kind of odd the changes and the lack of changes. I found I could measure the distance from my old home to the home of a girl I was rather taken with back then. I used to walk from my house to hers and now I know that was about a seven mile walk.

(For those terribly curious, we dated, got engaged, never married and are now friends.)

I also saw a photo on google street view of a donut shop I used to stop at in the mornings on my way to school. Still there. I fondly remember getting a bag of donut holes to eat as I waited to be bussed to school.

I couldn’t find the old SunRise Theater where I saw so many movies. Either I was looking in the wrong spot or it’s history.

Curious the bits of memory and floatsam we gather in our lives.

Share

Experimenting

So as you can see if you have been to the blog before — and I suspect that is likely the case — I have selected a different theme for the blog.
Tell me what you think.
Is the new one better?
Worse?
No real difference to you?

Today was a frustrating day. I was late getting out of work due to a last minute call (Luckily I was able to help the pt so it didn’t feel wasted.) Then my sweetie-wife and I ran to the wrong FedEx location to pickup my package which is my new e-book reader.

We couldn’t get a consistent answer as to when the location with the package would close. Some said 5pm — and I don’t get off work until 5 pm, and others said 9 pm. I finally located the number for the facility — both answers were correct from a certain point of view (there were two facilities at the same address.) — but it didn’t do me any good today.

Luckily a very nice woman at the facility was able to re-route the delivery so I should have it delivered at work tomorrow.

We’ll see.

Share

A plan

So later this month I plan to do a couple of things I have been wanting to do for years. Some of this may seem cheesy and very touristy but hey it’s my time and money and not yours.
So I’m going to get dropped off at the Amtrak station on a Friday morning and take the train to L.A. From there I will make my way over to the Warner Brothers Studio and take their grand five hour tour. It’s pricey but I have wanted to do it since i first heard about it six or seven years ago.
Universal used to have a decent studio tour with a theme park element to it, now it is all theme park with the theme being movie studio. The WB tour is Monday – Friday of a working movie and TV studio. The five hour tour takes you into all the departments of the studio and includes a catered lunch in the Studio Cafeteria. I don’t think any of my friends think this is worth the price — or don’t have the cash at the moment to do it — so I will be doing it alone. (My sweetie-wife is not the movie fan I am so she will stay home during this, hence the train ride.)
Afterwards I’ll make my way over to Medieval Times and take in the dinner and show. Yeah this is very touristy, but ever since I’ve heard about the place I’ve wanted to do it once. I never got into the SCA, but I am a D&D player and fan so at least once I want to see the jousting battles — yeah I know as real as pro-wrestling– and just have the fun. My sweetie-wife will join me for this and then we’ll drive home.

I am so looking forward to it.

Share

The Sharpest Shiv

Back after the 2004 election President Bush famously announced he had earned some political capital adn he was going to spend it.
he wanted to overhaul out social security and retirement system.
I think the system is in need to reformation and expect without intervention we’re going to have some rough seas ahead. (that”s not to say I endorsed any particular Plan of Bush’s, just that I agree with the need.)
The Democratic party fought Bush tooth and nail on the plan and managed to kill it by pulling out the sharpest shiv in the cell block known as American Politics, Scare The Seniors.
Once they had scared the seniors, the Democrats had won their war.

Now it’s 2009 and President Obama is trying to reform the Health Care system in this country. Again I agree it needs to be done with agreeing to any particular plan out there right now.

The Republicans are now the ones fighting tooth and nail and they have taken the weapon sharpened by the Democratic party and used it to their own ends. It’s another round of Scare the Seniors.

Neither party is made of principles and both parties are more interested in killing the others legislation than in really solving the problems we face.

Share