Tipping Point for e-Books? Princeton University will be publishing Kindle-editions of its textbooks this fall, joining Yale, Oxford and Berkeley in supporting the Kindle. That's great news for trees everywhere. My interest in the Kindle has ticked-up lately. I very much appreciated Seth Goldin's recent review of the Kindle. Interesting observations include, "It's for women and women are buying it." "It changes what it means to buy and own a book." "The Kindle does a fine job of being a book reader, and a horrible job of actually improving the act of reading a book." "The pricing of books is whacked..." Seth's conclusion, "What's worth commenting on is how close the Kindle comes to revolutionizing the way ideas are sold and spread, and how short it comes out in the end (for now.)"
Albert Pascual is your LINQ to SQL guy. My bread-and-butter work is still VS2005 on Windows 2003 Server. I'm planning my Vista Ultimate Workstation and Windows 2008 Server combo upgrade for late July, but we'll see how that goes. As a result of being a VS2005 hold-out I'm not doing any LINQ (or I'd be blogging about it, wouldn't I?) When I want to start ingesting the LINQ info I'll need to become LINQ Everyman, I think I'll start with Albert Pascual's blog.
My wife keeps me technologically current. My wife is not a techie. At all. I read the ASP.NET Weblog feed for enjoyment, she reads Nora Roberts. Yet my wife does cool things with computers to which her Developer Dude husband can only respond with "WOW!" Today she showed me beautiful photos off her HP printer that she took on her cell phone. She transferred them onto her Verizon phone's SD Micro card, then via an adaptor into her printer. I never saw an SD Micro card before. "WOW!" (Again.) The size of a fingernail holding more than what I spent thousands on as a Network Admin in the early 1990's for the 2GBs of network server hard disk space we provided for 100 users. More importantly, my non-techie wife can print beautiful hi-gloss color photos she took from a cell phone!
Godspeed, CodePlex! I've been enjoying quality time on CodePlex recently, as it's the home of BlogEngine.Net and other Open Source applications I've been following. Did you know...CodePlex was 2 years old today??? Congrats to everyone who has anything to do with CodePlex. It's a .NET community jewel.
Code Camp Hartford! My friend SB Chatterjee (who among other qualities is a cool airplane pilot and Groove MVP), will be point man of Hartford, Connecticut's first Code Camp on Saturday, August 16th. Juicy, very juicy. And according to Google Maps it will only take me 3 hours and 46 minutes to join in the fun from Burlington...
Vermont girl and a MySpace Rendezvous. A 12-year-old Vermont girl is missing. Police think she was meeting someone she communicated with on MySpace. Apparently the missing girl's parents were divorced and an uncle dropped her off at a convenience store where she was to "meet a friend and then go to a hospital to visit a relative of the friend." Regardless of her parents' relationship or supervision issues, this is every parent's worst nightmare and we can only pray we'll hear good news soon. My little girl is 10-years-old so events like this hit me hard. My daughter read the Burlington Free Press article and has her own PC in her bedroom. We talked about the missing girl. All I could tell her was that no man could ever love her as much as I do. Maybe demonstrating it to her every day will be enough.