The Kindle - A Quick Little Review

I've had my Kindle for all of 4 hours and I think it's really cool.

The screen is really easy to read, it's simple to navigate and pretty darn straight forward to use. The wireless connection makes it really handy to download books, search wikipedia.com and it has a built in dictionary so you can look up words on the fly.

I bought it because I'm really sick of carting books around and not reading when I have time to read simply because I don't have something interesting handy. I've downloaded a bunch of sample chapters of some books I've wanted to buy and imported a few PDFs of books I already own. I've been using a free software download to do the file conversion - results vary depending on the complexity of the PDF, of course. Documents that are primarily text converted pretty nicely. The big study guide for my Microsoft exam is so-so. You can also email documents in various formats to it directly and Amazon will do the conversion for you and then deliver it automatically.

I know some people has DRM issues with the whole thing. I'm not too concerned. Sure, if you buy a book from Amazon it's in the Amazon format, but its available to transfer to other Kindle devices registered to your account (like a family member) and you can delete and re-load then as often as you want.

You can also download a lot of free books from manybooks.net and Feedbooks provides a downloadable index of their books that you can link to directly from the Kindle and download the books on the fly. Lots of classics, etc.

And seriously, having an easy way to read those crazy Microsoft white papers I feel like I'm always printing. It's totally worth it.

When Things Work.

This morning, I've been at the office. I needed to make a key change with our imaging system that affects the user's logons, so it's one of those things you can't do during the business day.

And due to the additional security features we have turned on for the system, sometimes regular changes to the system actually break things. I don't really like broken things, thus have given myself the entire weekend to fix anything that could have potentially gone wrong.

But it worked. Just like the documentation was supposed to. I appreciate that the tech just sent me their internal documentation, instead of making me rely on them to hand me information only when things start going wrong. Plus I didn't have to make one of them actively work on the weekend and I end up understanding the system better overall because I was doing the work myself.

I did have a tech available via email - but that was more for moral support. He would have only jumped on if things went badly and we had to roll back the changes. But I hate rolling things back - I really like to just fix the problem and keep moving forward.