Friday, April 8, 2011 Lethbridge

7:55 am

I slept in this morning. I do that every now and then, but not often.

Now to get my head around today. The weather remains very unseasonalbly cold. It is -5 C at the moment with a chance of flurries. There is just a smattering of fresh snow on the ground but it will melt later today. Not a good day for photography or birding.

But a very good day for drinking coffee and reading.

11:00 am tag: Technology

This started off on the wrong foot. I thought it would be a simple matter to access my Rogers account for the iPad2 and see how much data I had downloaded since I bought the device. It took 3 separate telephone calls to 3 different technicians before I finally had it working. Pathetic is being charitable.

But the upside was that I found out that I had 2 months unlimited access as part of the introductory offer. That is very nice.

I then sat down with the iPad and noticed an app for Kindle (an e-reader that is a competitor to the iPad). I was impressed that there was an iPad app that allowed it to read Kindle files. Once I had that downloaded (about 10 seconds) I was able to access the kindle store (actually this is part of amazon.com) and noticed that the new James Gleick book on Information was available as an e-book. This would cost $9.99 compared to $29.99 for the hardcover version. This seemed like a particularly good choice for my first ebook. It took less than 10 seconds to download and I was able to begin reading it.

It took me a couple of minutes to learn the interface. It is not quite as sophisticated as ibooks from Apple (for example, there is no provision for yellow highlighting) and the page numbers are replaced with something called a section. But the quality of the text is excellent and there is a way to make notes as a pop-up.

The bottom line is that I now know how to obtain e-books online.

Addendum (1:10 PM) There are a number of features in the kindle version. One of the intriguing features is having the pages display any underlining that other readers have made while reading this book. Fortunately this feature can be turned OFF as well as on. I continue to learn.

8:00 PM tag: Literature

I have found time to continue reading "The Lacuna" this evening.

One of the fascinating features of the novel is the way the text changes as the boy writing the journals grows up. There is also some interesting history inserted into the story. The way Hoover, with the assistance of Patton and McArthur, cleared Washington of the tent city that had grown with WW I veterans asking for the money they were owed has parallels with much of the unrest that is going on in the middle east at the moment.