The movie wasn’t all four seasons of the cartoon from Nickelodeon. It was just the first season and it was about an hour and a half long. So obviously some story lines were cut out and some side stories were cut. The actors looked like themselves so that was good. The scar on Zuko, the Fire prince’s, face was barely noticeable. That’s the only quibble I could find in the actors. Their acting was… good enough. Aang had a pouty lip. I guess there were two things and they were physical attributes. Seriously, his lip was always pouty looking. He looked like he’d been punched in the bottom of the mouth or maybe stung by bees or something. OK, crap. There were three things. Uncle was skinny and serious and didn’t seem as funny as wise, funny uncle had in the cartoon. That brings me to my biggest difference in the movie vs. the cartoon.

You know how Aang is 12 and an airbender? You know how airbenders are supposed to be pranksters? Fun-loving people who appear to not take things terribly seriously? They’re fun, funny. Couple that with Aang being 12 years old and you have a recipe for funny cartoons. Hiding behind ppl as they look for you, playing jokes on people, hide & seek, that sort of thing. A big part of my enjoying the cartoon was enjoying the youthful enthusiasm of the airbender. There was a lot of laughter and joy. The joy of life and living. That made it fun to watch. It made the character likeable and someone you wanted to see turn out OK. Not just physically, but mentally. You don’t want to see his joy of life hurt. In the movie though. M. Night Shazamalamadan decided one of the things he needed to cut was all the funny, fun, jokes, or joy. There were exactly two scenes that MIGHT have been reminiscent of the sort of fun-loving antics of cartoon Aang that made the show fun to watch.

You know how Katara’s brother, Sokka, and how he’s there primarily for comic relief? Always hungry, tries to eat the Appa The Flying Bison and Momo, the bat-lemur. Falls a lot? Twice he did something funny, and both times it was to fall victim to Katara’s bad water bending. She got him wet once and froze him into a block of ice once. Also, Uncle was never funny. Never did any funny stories or witty things that had a point. Just sort of a physically fit, taller, very thin Yoda. All serious trainer uncle, no funny uncle that liked to drink tea.

The bending effects were only meh. They did LOTS of the movements and motions and then something would happen really quickly and be over with. The effects were cool but too short. They could have been longer, not necessarily more spectacular. The end fight where Aang finally did his thing using the ocean to fight of the entire fire nation army by himself. That was cool. It was also done in the avatar state, also cool, and with a minimum of jumping around and arm waving… which is as it should be. For him to knock back two guys he did like 15 seconds of tai-chi, maybe tai-kwon-do… I think water was Tai-chi… movements, swung his arms around, and did a no-hands somersault just as an example. Lots of build-up, for not enough pay off. If it’d taken that long to bend the elements they should have had their butts handed to them by any relatively quick fighter. They’d be knocked out before they bent anything. (Don’t get me started on how all the earth benders ever did was pull rocks out of the ground.)

I’d give it 7.5 out of 10 stars. I enjoyed it. I liked the actors. I liked the story. I wish it hadn’t been as dry. I wish it’d been funnier. At least some funny. He was tortured. He was sad. He was grief-ridden… he wouldn’t have been any fun to be around. I hope they make more. I hope Aang (whose name isn’t pronounced the same in the movie as in the cartoons for some reason) has lip reduction surgery. Maybe they could put some of his lip fat into Uncle so he’d be fatter. A skinny Uncle was distracting.

So why do I care about Facebook if I’m so careful about what I do on the Internet? The most common thing I hear about people when I bring up privacy concerns is “If you don’t have anything to hide what do you have to worry about?” My answer to them is, “Why do you use curtains or walls? Why do you shut the door when you go to the bathroom stall?” There are times when you don’t want the whole world up in your business. If I have co-workers and bosses who follow me on facebook, and I did, and they didn’t like what political sites I visited that suddenly showed up on my facebook page could that have consequences? Of course it could. Should it? Nope. But it could. What if it showed that I was on facebook while I was supposed to be working. Would they know I was on hold for the weekly conference call? Of course not.

Those are just the easy work related issues. The thing is. What I do on the Internet is no more Facebook’s business than it’s my phone company’s business if I go to the mall or to Wal-mart. It’s not their business. They don’t need to know it. Just because they CAN know it doesn’t mean they should know it. If they wanted to enrich my Internet experience they’re welcome to it, but ask me first. Let me CHOOSE to ask for it. Don’t opt me in.

I don’t really feel like I should have to explain my expectation of privacy honestly. The part where I expect and want it and am being asked to defend it is almost as offensive to me as my perception of Facebook’s violation of my privacy.

From a social hacking point of view what can we find out about a person from their facebook profile? Often they list their parents’ names which may include “mother’s maiden name” or “Father’s middle name” as appears in some security questions on some websites. Perhaps they show you graduated from Monkeyspanker High School and that security question is also asked, “What was your high school mascot.” Now decent social hackers would know that. That’s sort of my other point. Why should all that information be gathered up by the fine folks at Facebook for the social hackers out there to use? Maybe I don’t list my Mom’s middle name, but perhaps my sisters do, or my brothers, or my trans-gendered first pet whose name was “Sieze-her” and with all the information out there linking back and forth whether I put it out there or someone else does it’s out there.

I won’t deny that I greatly enjoyed re-connecting with my friends on Facebook. That added value to my life in general, and to my enjoyment of the Internet specifically. It was really good to meet them again as adults after having not seen them since high school. There are some really interesting people out there that I knew back when we were just high schoolers.   I will miss them. If Facebook were to decide that our privacy were important I’d gladly be back, but as much as I love re-connecting with everybody I feel like staying says it’s OK if a company has no respect for their customer’s wishes. It’s my saying it’s OK to treat my personal information as a publicly tradeable commodity. I’m not OK with that. My leaving may not make a difference to Facebook, but it will make a difference to me.

Thursday I’m going to be on Farmville meeting a friend of mine to watch Survivor together and then I’m going to log off my account, perhaps deleting it if I can find a way to do that.

The Levity Effect: Why it Pays to Lighten Up

I’m reading The Levity Effect: Why it Pays to Lighten Up and listening to Brain Rules from audible at the same time and they’re surprisingly related. I’ll cover Brain Rules later. For now The Levity Effect is being reviewed. It was good. I enjoyed it. It’s a book that will be enjoyed, I believe, by people who already believe what it’s saying. I don’t know that the people who don’t believe it will be persuaded by the book. It’s not that there isn’t enough evidence suggested in the book. It’s just that it’s not terribly persuasive. As such I think it will mostly preach to the converted. I can’t, for example, see my boss reading it and embracing it. That’s now how he does things stylistically. That’s not fair. He does try.

One of the things the book does work hard to point out is the difference between fun and funny and it’s a good distinction. It can be fun at work without someone having to be funny. Fun is not the same as funny. It’s been said at my work that if one enjoys their work then their work will be fun, not fun like volleyball fun, but fun as in “I enjoy what I do and feel fulfilled doing it” fun. I totally see that and agree with it, but that doesn’t mean a little silliness doesn’t have its place at work. According to a lot of the research presented in The Levity Effect the bottom line is always better if people are enjoying themselves at work. Morale is up, people are more productive, and turn-over goes down… how is this not persuasive? I don’t know.

My favorite part of the book is where they discuss how important fun is as a measure of the strength of a relationship. Trust, Communication, and Creativity are all increased by the precepts put forward by The Levity Effect. That part was a surprise to me, but the truth of it came to me as I read it. The people I was most comfortable with and most trusted were the people I was most able to joke around with. I’d never put that together before. I use humor to establish relationships and maintain them.

The list of things to do that help introduce levity also look as if they would be good for team building and morale building. They don’t expressly say that, but people who have fun together I think will perform better together. If you’re a person who believes that work is something that we do an awful lot of and so it should be fun because we’re doing it a lot you should read this book. If your boss tries it then leave this book laying around where the boss will see it. Maybe he’ll give it a read. If your boss is a reader let them read it. It’s a good book. I don’t know how persuasive it is, again, it persuaded be because I already bought into it.

If you’re a manager and you want to be a more effective manager this book will help. Please though, don’t forget you have an HR department. Read the back portion of the book. Remember that mean isn’t funny, and the authors are spot on when they warn that if you’ve got to start a joke with “I hope nobody’s offended but…” or end with “just kidding” then you probably shouldn’t say it. Those things are typically not a good idea. This book is a good idea, after the recession we’ve been in lately and the grim news about it and the cost cuts and lay-offs many companies have been through I’d say it’s a book whose time has come.

“I will believe it a good comfortable road untill I am compelled to beleive differently”
~Meriwether Lewis’ Journal via
Into the Unknown: Leadership Lessons from Lewis & Clark’s Daring Westward Expedition.

Into the Unknown by Jack Uldrich talks briefly about Lewis & Clark’s expedition, but the focus is what leaders can learn about Lewis & Clark themselves both from their writings in their copious journals and notes and from their actions. I can say they were interesting men and the book has piqued my interest in them to the point where I will probably read a more bibliographical book to get a more complete story about them. It was published in 2004 and I’m surprised I didn’t hear of it sooner. I discovered it while looking for kindle books. I’m glad I did.

I started with a quote from Meriwether Lewis’ journal. After cresting the first of a range of mountains, and expecting to find a river leading down into a land of milk and honey he saw mountains as far as the eye could see, and no easy going. His response wasn’t to give up, wail or despair… it was to marvel at the beauty before him and to expect the road ahead to be an easy one until it proved otherwise. This optimism of Lewis & Clark’s is credited with being a primary reason they succeeded.

But as optimistic as they were, and they were, in the face of overwhelming odds, they planned extraordinarily and didn’t count on wishful thinking or the power of positive thinking to solve their problems for them. They packed a 200olb steel shell to make a boat with in anticipation of needing it. (It didn’t work out and they abandoned it… discarding ideas that didn’t work when it became apparent they wouldn’t work. New Coke anyone?)

My biggest takeaway from Into the Unknown: Leadership Lessons from Lewis & Clark’s Daring Westward Expedition was to plan exceptionally, proceed confidently, and believe unflinchingly in your success. I suspect this was my takeaway because this is how I strive to comport myself in my daily life. I confess to slipping at it at times. Sometimes my optimism bulb dims a bit. Sometimes I tend to see the shadows rather than the light, and sometimes, when I’m tired, I forget that I’m not alone and that I’ve got the help of friends, co-workers, and a support system out there willing to help if all I do is ask and trust them to help me.

The book itself has lots of lessons from the expedition which is exactly what it advertises itself as. What it doesn’t have is concrete, memorable examples of how to directly apply the lessons to real life. OK. That’s not fair what I did there. I added the word “memorable” because I can’t remember any of the examples they gave. I know they gave some. But what they mostly did was talk about the character of the men who were Lewis & Clark and how that relates to leadership on the whole.

Remembering I don’t know much about the men I’d like to stress that this book was written by a person who liked and respected the men. It’s possible they did things that others would like to talk about badly, he didn’t free his slave right away when he returned from the expedition for example, but I’m not interested in hearing about or studying famous men’s faults. I’ll assume they had some. I’ll assume that the men in the party had some. The part where they kept coming down with VD tells me they weren’t saints. I get that. Please… nobody take an opportunity in the comments to post some sort of Lewis & Clark expose of how they were Expansionist White Men who were only great by trampling minorities and blah blah blah. That’s a different book. The one I reviewed made mention of some of this stuff, but it wasn’t the focus and wasn’t intended to be.

Starship: Mutiny introduced us to a military man who was too smart for his own good… too smart for the military. He kept getting in trouble and demoted twice for doing great heroic things that showed off his genius while rubbing his chain of command in how much smarter he was than them. I could totally identify with that. After all, I’m a genius right? Just ask me. I’ll tell you. And, as in the book… I will go on to explain over and over again why my reasoning is right, why my compatriots should trust me, why everybody else is stupid, and why, in painstaking detail both before, during, and after, my plan will succeed. Wait. No, that’s not me. That’s the protagonist of Starship: Mutiny, Wilson Cole. By the end of the first book I was really tired of hearing him explain himself over and over again. I get it… you’re smarter than everybody else. So was Lazarus Long and everybody on the Gay Deceiver (Deety, Zebediah, Jacob & Hilda) but Heinlein didn’t constantly beat me up with it. He let them ACT intelligently without constantly blowing their own horn.

Wilson Cole came across not intelligent and witty and urbane. He came across over-bearing and arrogant. That was the first book, which I mostly enjoyed. I don’t mind arrogant that much if there are other redeeming qualities. By the time I got to the second book, Starship: Pirate I was tired of the arrogance and tired of how Resnick used the supporting characters as foils for Wilson Cole. I felt like he, Resnick, could have allowed the other characters to have a brain too. Every time a decision had to be made in book two there was an argument where the supporting characters fought with Wilson Cole only to have him bulldoze them into accepting his way of doing it and in every case he was right. Seriously… if they’re that stupid why would he be friends with them?

The head of security, Sharon Blacksmith, isn’t just a strong woman who is head of a hugely strong security department and who is incredibly competent at her job and amazingly smart at her job is, for some reason whenever she gets around Wilson Cole, a giddy slut who can only talk about the previous night’s sex and their future sex that they may or may not have depending on if they’re getting along at the moment. She does this all the time, in person, by hologram, in front of other members of the crew, just whenever Resnick needs to try and break tension. Instead of coming across flirty or flirtatious it comes across trashy and wrecks her character for me.

By the end of the second book in the series (Starship: Pirate) I was done with Wilson Cole and his supporting crew. I liked the story and really wish I didn’t hate the characters so much. I won’t read books 3, 4, or 5. This is saying a lot since I already bought book 3 on audible.com. I’d rather listen to nothing than subject myself to more of Wilson Cole bullying his “friends” and telling us how smart he is and how blind and unobservant his crew is.

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Dirty Little Angels by Chris Tusa was a good read. I’m from the South, and worked in New Orleans for a short while before Katrina. The book excellently captures the feel and tone of the area. If you’ve been there, and I mean there as in not just in the Quarter you’ll know that might not be the best tone to capture. The poverty, crime, and feeling of helplessness and inability to escape from the dead-end that surrounds New Orleans is excellently captured. The characters lives and their emotions came across really well. Unfortunately I didn’t find their lives something I could identify with… thankfully, and the primary emotion was despair, bleak mind-numbing despair.

European movies have to me always felt like they were different from US movies in that they seemed to be snippets of life without huge climaxes and then a nice tidy resolution scene where all the ends are tied up like most American movies. Dirty Little Angels is the same way. The book is like turning on the TV and coming in part way through a movie about someone’s life and watching a few hours and then turning it off without knowing how the players got there or what happened later. There’s no neat little resolution here. Life isn’t neatly wound up with little bows either.

They say the sign of a good book is that when you’re done reading it you want to read more. I usually agree with that. Here I didn’t want to read more because I was sympathetic to the characters, but I wanted to read more because I wanted to know that things turned out OK for them in spite of all the other crap going on in their lives. I hope they’re OK. They were in the shadow of a city that swallows people alive when I found them, and they still were when I left them. I recommend the book if you enjoy Southern fiction or books with/about New Orleans.

I received a free copy of this book digitally in exchange for reviewing it. I got a review copy and I agreed to review it. I didn’t get paid and I didn’t rate it higher or lower because of being given a review copy. I thought it only fair that I mention that. And yes. I read it on my kindle and I still love my kindle. I’m off to read it again now!

Would I recommend it? Not the paperback. It’s just too expensive. The 99c version of it on kindle was good. It was worth a buck. I’d pay anything up to five dollars for it as it’s a fun story that the cover does not sell at all. In fact, the more I read of the book the less I liked the cover. While you can’t tell a book by the cover I like to think you can tell what type of book it will be by the cover. Uncubicled was an action/adventure book with an office intrigue cover. If M. Night Shamalamadingdong were on crack and had a cattle prod massaging his spine THIS is the book he would write. OK. It’s not that full of twists… but there are a few more than it absolutely needed.

It’s a good first book. I really did enjoy it. I liked the characters, without giving anything away, in spite of the deus ex machina twist that got so predictable that I fully expected a can-opener to develop the trait that was over-used towards the end.

I read this book really wanting to love it. I’m a new author. I’m a fan of twitter, and was dying to “discover” a new author who was great and about to make it big in a huge way. This won’t be the book that does it as it stands now in my opinion. Will I read the next book he writes? Absolutely. I enjoyed it and I like supporting new authors. It’s a good novice effort. If I owned it in dead-tree version I’d loan it to friends if they promised to give it back. I own it digitally so I can’t loan it which is my biggest gripe with digital formatted books. They’re unloanable.  This is a problem for new authors because I can’t loan the book to a friend so they can discover him and buy his second book. They can’t enjoy the thrill of discovering a new author without paying $20 for it. That’s a lot to pay for this book. Too much. THIS is the downside of digital.

Full Disclosure: I didn’t pay for the copy I’m reviewing here. I was sent an advance copy to review. I don’t believe that impacted my review at all, but thought it would only be honest to mention it to those of you who read me. OK. Disclosure over, on with the review.

As I read the book I had a lot of time in MANY of the chapters when I was thinking to myself, “This is exactly what THAT boss of mine did wrong!” As the evidence started piling up I started worrying that if my employees were to read the book they’d say the exact same thing. I know I’ve found Dilbert comics on their peg-boards that I thought were funny… even after I realized they had to mean I was the pointy-haired boss. I will be getting a copy for managers of mine that I think would read it and take it to heart. I don’t think all of them would… they’re not all the avid reader that I am.

The start of How Did That Happen?, where it talks about the title is a real eye-opener and a game changer for the way people think. If I had to sum up the impact of the book in one line it would be way towards the front of the book where it suggests instead of looking at a problem or break-down of some sort and saying “How did that happen” we should ask “How did I let that happen?” Those two words are so powerful. It addresses where I so often see a breakdown in communication. That sort of personal accountability is, I believe, the hallmark of a good manager. If I find someone who does that automatically instead of blaming their employees, the weather, or the economy I’m thrilled and work hard to get out of their way and help them to be great.

One of the breakdowns that hit home the closest was when a manager will give vague expectations, unclear boundaries of responsibility and authority, and accountability and then be surprised later when expectations aren’t met. Vague goals of “Make more money.” Would certainly fall into that category. Sure… it’s an easy one. But should we make more money or make more profit? I can make more money by marking things down steeply, but that will decrease our profit. I can make more money in the short term by cutting back on merchandise in a store so I’m not spending any more. Without giving clear, concise, and measurable outlines of my expectations my employees will find it hard to not disappoint me. I will be setting them up to fail over and over again by my own carelessness.

I’m one who typically scoffs at acronyms, as annoying mnemonics along the lines of Every Good Boy Does Fine for the piano. But Framing an expectation using the acronym given in How Did That Happen looks about fool proof, even for ingenious fools.

Expectations should be Framable, Obtainable, Repeatable, and Measurable.

Framable as in the expectations fit within the framework, context, business environment and culture of the business.
Obtainable, this one’s obvious and one I’ve been good at following. I once told a new supervisor they should ask for things a little sooner, faster, better than the employees volunteered to do as he was the leader, and should pull them forward, not let them wander wherever they wanted at their own pace, but I cautioned against giving impossible goals that nobody could finish in that time as it set them up to fail. He wanted to help them to exceed their expectations, not to teach them to expect to fail.
Repeatable was the one I had the most trouble “getting” as I read the book. It finally clicked when I quit thinking as in “do it over again” and thought of it as “communicated over again to other people who are working on the project. If the goal or expectation is so numinous and vague that only someone with a degree in macro-economics can get what is being talked about it’s going to be hard to get everybody on board with working towards that goal. Making sure that the goal is something that can be conveyed to everybody involved easily, and in a way they understand is important. It will be hard for them to get invested in a goal they don’t “get.” “We need to increase mom and pop profit store to store year over year by 5 percent” is not meaningful to a lot of front-liners who haven’t a clue what that means but they KNOW that they don’t work for their parents.
Measurable was and is my favorite part as my biggest “Ah Ha!” moment for me. Having a measurable goal makes it so much easier to know where on the progress bar we are towards achieving the expectations. Having delegated parts of a job that is measurable into other measurable parts it makes it easier for me as a manager to find where my bottle neck is and address that with further training, or reassessment of  how even I was at delegating the jobs.

I hate to sound like this was a new concept to me, it wasn’t. But in this context it was put in a way that something inside clicked that I just liked. I’m not a complete convert to acronyms yet, but I don’t hate this one.

Overall, How Did That Happen? is about accountability, it’s right in the sub-title, and it talks about accountability in way that makes sense and is applicable with real world examples. This brings up one of my stylistic complaints about the book. At the outset of How Did That Happen? the authors point out that they’re going to change the names of people and businesses to protect their identities and they’re going to put their names in quotes whenever the name is changed. Here’s the thing… those quotes get really repetitious and distracting really fast. I get it. In examples about the real world people names and company names are changed. Honestly, you’d be crazy not to for liability reasons. I think most readers assume that’s going to happen. Attributions, quotes, advice and suggestions coming from someone, those are attributed to real people. We understand that. It’s the reason I use names like “Mongo” and “Roy” in my blog. I have no employees by either name. They’re safe names to use, as are “Mega-corp,” and referencing products as “widgets.” We don’t need to put quotes around everything that is changed. Seriously, I got it, and by the end of the book I was seeing sly wink and air-quotes every time I came across it. It really took me out of the book. This is totally a stylistic quibble. The content was really good. I just wish they’d dispensed with the quotes around altered names.

There’s a diagram three-quarters of the way through the book that talks about people who are above the line and below the line with personal accountability. The above the line employee will see a problem, own it, solve it, and do it. That’s obviously the desired approach. The below the line people are depicted with someone with a lot of other options going through their head as they encounter a problem, choices like: Wait and See, not my job, cover your butt, and finger pointing to name a few.

This huge difference in above and below the line employees was highlighted for me personally when I went to work one day recently and found a note in my fax machine from Mongo, a relatively new employee who used to work for a competitor with a very different culture: “Rich, A customer bought a widget and when he came back later he said the box had been empty. I tried to call Manager and Assistant Manager but neither of them answered their phones so I told him I couldn’t help him. He got hostile so I called the police and had him removed.”

I was floored. The police had been called to remove a customer who was upset because we’d done something wrong and Mongo really thought this was a good answer. The cost of the widget in question was around 8 dollars. Obviously there’s room for improvement in this one. I still don’t know what I’m going to do in this situation to fix it. I don’t know if it CAN be fixed. I haven’t got the customer’s name and don’t know how to reach them but I really really want to. There isn’t enough time today for me to apologize for what went wrong there if I can ever find that customer again. But as soon as I read the note in my fax machine the graphic for below the line accountability came to mind. (As an aside the manager was on vacation and the assistant manager called minutes later after leaving doctor’s office, but it was too late it’d already happened. It was the perfect storm of bad timing.)

The take-home from How Did That Happen? is that accountability isn’t a bad word. It’s not the stick part of carrot and stick. Accountability is akin to ownership. I won’t equate it with ownership, because it’s bigger than that. It’s an empowering tool as much as it is a tool that makes us responsible. Accountability as it came across in How Did That Happen? was the perfect marriage of responsibility, authority and drive. I know — that’s a three way marriage, but just go with it would you? Please?

Some management/business books are thin, have fun drawings in them, clever titles, and have the feeling of a fad diet to them. This book is not that kind of reading. It’s not diet, it’s a lifestyle change. I say that in a good way. Those purple cows out there moving fred’s cheese factor are all great books I’m sure, but they all left me feeling a little hollow. Something like Angel Food cake. Yeah, I know I ate something, but it’s later and I can’t remember what it was I ate and I’m hungry again. How Did That Happen? isn’t a beach book and it’s not a read in a day and walk away book.

There was a point in How Did That Happen? where they said feedback was a habit that people quickly fell out of or started with good intentions but didn’t keep up with and I smiled to myself and thought immediately of Rosa Say’s Daily Five. Anybody who is a practitioner of that will take to the feedback discussions in here like a duck to water and will also smile at the idea that they wouldn’t give feedback.

I was pleasantly surprised by How Did That Happen? by Roger Connors and Tom Smith. I’d never heard of them or their other books before now and I find I’m going to have to go back and read The Oz Principle and the only real decision there is whether I’ll read it in kindle or paper edition. If the marking I did in this one is any indication I should get the paper edition. It might be a good time to learn to mark-up a kindle edition of a book though. (I just checked and The Oz Principle is available on the kindle. I’m going to get it that way.)

Another of the quibbles I had, and I believe I mentioned, was how hard it was to get anywhere in a book. Compared to thumbing through a paperback to find my place, the kindle was much harder, after reading through the instructions ON the kindle, I learned that I can use the thumbstick to navigate by chapter instead of doing it one page at a time. This made it a lot easier and faster to get to where I’m going.

I wanted to buy a magazine and see how those were done on the kindle. The cover price of the New Yorker is $4.99 but buying one issue on the kindle was $1.99 and had no dead trees involved. It was delivered within minutes and it was imminently readable. The cartoons are there and good as usual. This month’s edition had an article about the kindle curiously enough. The ease with which I subscribed, read the article, and enjoyed the comics sold me on it right away. Also, no lapcards falling out of the middle of it, and no ads for whatever it is they advertise in the New Yorker. Certainly worth it for me.

As soon as I find a way to do crossword puzzles on the kindle I’ll be thrilled! We’re not to that point yet.

In the experimental page of the kindle there is a basic web browser that I’ve used to get to the mobile versions of pages, news sites, wikipedia, webmd, and Chris’ site where I was able to make a comment from within the kindle. The keyboard is a little smallish, and I made a typo as my hands drifted off home row, but it was certainly more usable than my blackberry and bigger than that so I was happy with it. Navigation on the experimental web browser is a little hinky sometimes. It’s not super-fast at updating it’s video so it’s easy to shoot past where you’re aiming at with the thumbstick, but if I’m using that as a browser it’s a case of there’s no real browser available so it’s better than nothing and I think better than my blackberry for text intensive sites.

One of the concerns I had was how I would get some of the e-books I already own onto the kindle without having to buy them again. Sure, I’ve read them already on either the ipod or the palm t|x but I may want to re-read them on the kindle. Once again the instructions came to the rescue. If I plug my kindle into a USB port on either a mac or a PC it will open as a hard drive and I can drop .prc, .txt, and .mobi files into the Documents directory on my kindle and it will open them. This is free, unlike the e-mailing it to myself at my @kindle.com e-mail address which costs a small amount for conversion. I was worried the laptop and kindle would form some sort of ipod/computer relationship where I had to keep files synced between the two and if I plugged the kindle into one computer. I could never plug it into another, but that didn’t happen so I was/am very happy about that.

When the kindle turns itself “off” it throws up a random picture that must be built into the kindle. I haven’t looked for a way to get my own pictures on it yet at least. The pictures are of famous authors, and I keep finding them interesting. They don’t appear to have any relation to the books on the kindle because I have no John Steinbeck on mine and he’s staring at me now. Oh, and if I were Oscar Wilde I’d be really ticked, the picture they picked of him he looks like a complete fop, and maybe a bit light in the loafers if you know what I mean.

Overall, so far the kindle has been easy to use if not always intuitive, sometimes I still try and turn the page using the thumbstick and that jumps me to the next chapter. It’s convenient and amazon makes it easy to get information on to the device. The hoopla over George Orwell’s books that were fraudulently uploaded and then deleted by amazon notwithstanding I’m still very happy and comfortable with the purchase.

First impressions? The box that they shipped it in said “KINDLE” right on it. Not a fan of that. Once I opened the brown box the inside packaging looked as if it were made by Apple. I think Apple has redefined premium gadget packaging from clamshell to an art-form of pressed cardboard, molded plastic, and logo imprinted goodness. It may not be green, but it sure does make it luxurious to open the package. First impression so far is very favorable. The packaging is nice, makes me feel like I got my three hundred dollars worth of toy out of the purchase. I suspect that’s what the packaging is for, to help maximize the experience of discovering the new toy. It totally worked. Plugged it in and turned it on and it just worked. It already knew who I was — amazon had set it up for me before shipping it and sent me an e-mail letting me know they’d done that for me. While it charged it grabbed my book list from amazon. I’ve been buying books as they went on sale for a couple months now.

I tried to wait but it didn’t work. I snuck online at work and subscribed to a blog for the kindle and watched it show up. You’ll see a picture on the right of this post showing what the screen looks like. If you click the picture it’ll take you to my flickr page where you can see it even better. The blog was delivered over the whispernet which works wherever you have Sprint service so it works at my work, but not at my house. Not a big deal really, probably will help down the road with impulse buys truth be told.

There’s a noticeable flicker on page turning and at first it was very distracting. I’m used to it already and I read only a little last night. After playing with my Mom’s Kindle DX I was worried the flicker would make me crazy but it really did fade into the background quickly.  There are page turning buttons on the left and right of the device and I used both with equal ease. I wish there were a “Previous Page” button on the right as well, but there isn’t. Where it would be is the “Home” button. It isn’t a deal buster for me though. Just an “Oh, hunh” thing.

One thing I haven’t found how to do yet is go to a specific page that makes sense to me. The page numbering system is weird. Instead of saying page 3 of 256 it says Locations 782-89 which means nothing to me at all. I wish there were a way to go from the page I’m reading in a paper-bound book to some sort of corollary in the kindle. As it is I haven’t found it yet. I should, in the interest of full disclosure, add that I haven’t read the instructions at all.

I did e-mail myself a PDF version of an e-book. It was Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother. It was readable but the formatting was wonky and it wasn’t perfect. I’d probably choose a different format to e-mail to myself. I’ll look into that more later. But it did work and it was readable but I agree PDF conversion does belong in the “Experimental” tab of the kindle2 so far.

My questions so far are will it be able to be patched and/or updated or will it only be replaced? Will hacks ever show up to turn on the hidden features, OK. I know there probably aren’t any hidden features, but I can dream right?

Impressions so far I’d still give it a 96% rating. I’m downgrading it 4% because sometimes it’s slow to switch between books, like the processor needs another little bit of go-juice and because there’s no “Previous Page” button on the right side of the thing. It was only a 4% downgrade so neither was that big a deal for me but they’re my only real quibbles.

As an interesting aside to bloggers interested in a kindle feed or what it’s like. When I subscribed to Chris’s blog on the kindle I got an e-mail from amazon letting me know that it was 1.99 a month and that I had a 14 day free trial and my favorite part as a blogger… the bottom of the e-mail, in a line all by itself and very visible it said “Solo Technology Blog is also available online at: http://www.solo-technology.com/blog” This is cool because I could cancel right then and subscribe via my favorite news reader if I wanted to. Now I assume most people will find the blog first and kindle version second, but this is cool of amazon to do that. I wondered if they’d hide the source of the content or not and they didn’t. So Kudos to amazon for their treatment of bloggers, in spite of what George Orwell might say of them. *grin*