My Kindle DX is dead...

...and Amazon's customer service is alive and well.

So there I was, on the train, settling in for 30 minutes of reading in the AM.

Around me, others are tapping at email, spreadsheets or, heaven forfend, PowerPoint presentations. Others are reading, books that is, listening to iPods, or just dozing. I do a lot of that last on trains.

Out comes my Kindle, I open the cover and flip the on/off switch to wake it. First thing I notice is the screen-saver image remains on the screen. Looking more closely, I see the text of the book I'm reading behind it.

OK. We've been well trained in the software industry. If there is a problem, reboot (I can hear readers of dead-tree format books laughing, and bragging that they never have to reboot an honest-to-god book printed on honest-to-god paper as St. Guttenberg intended). I will concede the point.

So, reboot my Kindle I did. All the text and image that had been on the screen remained, now augmented by a flood bar as the software reloaded itself. Hitting menu added a menu to the mess. Dismissing the menu left the ghost of a menu on the screen.

Things were not good - and re-booting again wouldn't help. I know this, because I tried.

About this time I noticed the band of bright lines running down the screen, about a third in from the left margin. They ended in a triangle, small, perfectly formed, and quite out of place on my Kindle's screen.

I've seen the like on LCD screens that have suffered trauma. But this is not an LCD screen, and the only trauma being suffered here was by me.

I turned the device off, returned it to my case, and settled back to listen to Bach's Goldberg Variations on my iPhone. I can avoid problems with the best of them.

Later, at the office, I clicked on the "Contact Me" button on Amazon's Kindle Support page. I clicked, my phone rang. Impressive. Yes, I know a computer called me, but it did tell me the average wait for a human was under a minute. It had barely finished advising me of this when I got my very own human speaking to me.

He was quite thorough. We tried all the things I had tried on the train. The results were the same. So, he said they would send me another, along with a "return to sender" pre-paid label for my defunct Kindle.

He then said something about an estimated delivery date and the word "tomorrow". I understood this to mean I would receive an email regarding the estimated delivery date on the morrow. (I can extrapolate with the best of them too.)

No. He took pains to ensure I understood that I had heard incorrectly. The estimated delivery date itself was the following day. My goodness!

Later that day I received an email thanking me for the purchase of a Kindle DX. Looking more closely, I discovered this was the registration email. My new Kindle already knew me.

And, indeed, early in the afternoon the following day, the Kindle arrived. In little time, I had downloaded about 20 of my books. That would be enough to be going on with. The remaining 100+ are archived on Amazon's cloud. I can retrieve any one of them with a click or two on my Kindle and have it "whispernet-ed" to me over the air.

I was unhappy that my Kindle died. Amazon made me forget that with their impressive response.

Bottle on a beach

A bottle made of shells on a beach made of pixels.

What a connected world it is in which we dwell. Billions of text messages flash from phone to phone, from mind to mind, in moments - each moment of the day.

Friends and relatives, those whom you friend at least, can keep up with your every move, every mood and even contribute scribbles on your very wall. A virtual wall, that is, so no damage done. So it is that Facebook keeps us in touch with one another.

With our tweets we cast thoughts (or tweets) out into the ocean of our followers, or re-tweet (remembering to include the RT prefix so others know of the forwarding) to forward those that catch our fancy.

I came across another communication mechanism recently. It differs from the above-mentioned mechanisms in one specific way. It is entirely unknown to whom many of your messages will be delivered.

Distant Shore is an application for the iPhone by the same people who created the Koi Pond application for the same device. While the Koi application is only for the pleasure of the iPhone owner, bringing the peace of a pond to the handheld device, Distant Shore establishes communication, of a sort between iPhone users.

The application shows a beach, endlessly stretching to the right and to the left. You, the user, "walk" (leaving bare footprints in the sand) along the beach looking for shells, or bottles. Five shells turn into an empty bottle in the your inventory. Of more interest are the bottles that may be found on the beach.

Such a bottle contains a message, written by another user of Distant Shore. There is no indication whence the message comes, nor when it was thrown into the ocean that laps against the beach. It's just a random message, written by someone with an iPhone, that washed up on your beach.

Your can write your own message, using the empty bottles you gain by finding five shells and then toss it into the ocean - to later wash up on someone else's beach.

The application also allows for replying directly to a message, thus establishing a more conventional style of message/response.

There is something oddly attractive about this. The graphics, to be expected of the people who wrote the Koi Pond application, are smooth and appealing. The idea itself, also appealing, though I don't see it becoming the next Twitter.

Elementary my dear...

I am not sure if I should be offended or not. There is a website that purports to rate the reading level of blogs. This blog was rated as Elementary School.

My previous blog, http://kjmackey.spaces.live.com/, is rated as having a reading level of Junior High School.

I am not at all sure what this means. The link for this test is: The Blog Readability Test.

Should I use more, and larger, words? More complex sentence structures?

I remember being told, many years ago, that I wrote as I spoke. I recall the tone of voice too - it conveyed astonishment. Even then I was not at all sure what that meant.

Well, for what it is worth, it seems that the reading level required for understanding what I write in my blog has come down since I abandoned Microsoft's Live Spaces and moved to TypePad.

I recall the reason was to make things easier for me. If an added bonus is that readers have an easier time, so be it.

Interestingly enough, the blog http://rjchristopher.blogspot.com, is rated at Genius level. Well now.

Quick and easy blogging

I just ran across, in a Guy Kawasaki post - reached via a Tweet from M (what an interconnected world this can be), a site that gathers, aggregates, and disperses your posts to many (and possibly) all the social - virtual that is - venues you might normally reach.
 
http://www.posterous.com allows for simple email posting of blogs, music, pictures, video. All this gets hosted and distributed, to your blog(s), twitter, facebook, what-have-you "a-u-t-o-m-a-t-i-c-a-m-e-n-t-e", as an ad for speech to text software once had it.
 
So, this is just a post to try the service. Who knows? This may become my primary tool for this.
 
Everyone, stay warm.

Christmas present for someone

I am still really fond of my MacBook Air. It is a beauty, the design still is fabulous. It has worked for most of the year as a replacement for my normal work laptop.

But I am selling it.

The limitation of 2GB of memory is too restrictive for what I need for work. Of late it has been causing problems, delays, inability to do some of the things I need done.

The new MacBook, the all-aluminum 13" version, solves a number of the problems. 4GB of memory, a faster and larger disk, a faster processor. All these directly address the problems I had with the Air.

And, the new MacBook is lighter than the previous version was. It is, however, 50% heavier than the Air. And nowhere near as thin, smooth, rounded, gorgeous.

If the above sounds conflicted, so it is.

It may have been that conflict which caused me to forget one detail as I created the listing on eBay. I forgot to put a reserve price on the item. The last time I did that I ended up selling a very new iMac for half what I paid for it.

Someone may be in line for an early Christmas present of a, relatively inexpensive, MacBook Air.

So be it.

Electronic devices - the art of the compromise

There are things about my iPhone that I do not love. Horrors!

When the phone was first announced a key phrase that caught my ear was, "for a phone, the killer app is - phone!"

I heartily agree. Which is my issue with the iPhone. It is a great iPod, music and video-wise. The internet experience is astonishing. Better on its small screen than on my 4½" Nokia N800 screen. It is a terrific application platform, even if many of the applications are not of interest to me.

Yet, in making phone calls and sending messages on the phone I find it wanting. A complete lack of MMS messaging is something I cannot understand - given the connectivity and multimedia capabilities of the device. It lacks the ability to forward SMS messages. This, coupled with the lack of copy/paste functionality, means you have to retype messages you wish to pass on to someone else. An irritant rather than a bug yes - but when other, demonstrably lesser, phones can do this...?

One key redial - or simple tapping on a Bluetooth headset. Why not? In these days of handsfree operation one would think it would be there. Voice dialing. This has long been part of high-end Nokia phones - where the phone supplies a voice tag for every contact in your address book. Why not?

While on the subject of Bluetooth, why not the ability to send a contact card via Bluetooth to another phone? In fact, sending a contact card by any means is not possible. This from a phone with great email capability.

Ah yes. All of the above is true and causes me to cast about for a Nokia that might come closer to perfection (ever a receding goal). And then something like Google Earth shows up as an application on the device.

It has some issues, needs further work. And is astonishing! The Google Earth application, tied into the address book to make searching for locations easier. On an iPhone.

Whatever will they think of next.

Bet your phone can't do this!

Then again, it's very possible that you don't want your phone to do anything of the sort.

Why ever not?

I have this odd affinity for koi. If I come across a koi pond I can be found, much time having passed, staring at them. Just watching. There is something very peaceful about them.

Of course, I have my koi fountain pen. A functional work of art - signed by the Japanese artist who made it.

And then there's the fish. A pair of them. Chasing one another in a circle. Just above my left shoulder blade.

A fifteen-year-old tattoo. My first. Fish, because I am a Pisces. Koi because I saw the image. Koi. How could I not?

And now there is a Koi Pond application for the iPhone. It doesn't do much - except display koi in a pond. And make noise. Water, birds, frogs, insects. All of the above. I turn off all but the water.

And, I have a koi pond on my desk. It just looks like an iPhone.

Sometimes it's harder than it needs to be

Sometimes I just hate computers. Given what I do for a living, this is not a good frame of mind for me.

What inspires such feelings is the inexplicable, the incomprehensible, the random failure. That, and the supercilious tone adopted by some who are designated to dispense wisdom (or at least help) to we, the Great Unwashed.

Oh dear. A tad prickly today I'm afraid.

My MacBook Air has suffered problems with the new automated backup function that arrived with 10.5 of the Max OSX operating system (Leopard). Backing up was not such a problem - although with the dearth of connectors on the laptop the ability to back up files wirelessly was to have been a great feature.

And so it was, although updates to drivers, the Time Capsule device's firmware and the backup software were required to solve initial (teething?) problems. Even with all of the above, the actual backup activity seemed to impact the running of the laptop disproportionately.

But, 'twas not the backup that was the main problem. 'Twas the restoring. And, a backup solution that cannot restore... Well, let's just say that there are better ways to waste disk space.

When the software has been changed and nothing improved it is time to look at the hardware. A replacement Time Capsule was provided by Apple (the previous one having developed some quirks such as forgetting it had a disk internally - making backup that much harder - and providing the other MacBook in the house difficulties when it tried to connect to the wireless network). No joy. The new one could, at least, remember it had a disk. But the MacBook Air was no better at restoring files.

By this time I had been to the Apple Store multiple times and had checked out the demo systems. They did not seem to share the problem I had.

The purchase of a small disk to connect to the USB port took the wireless variable out of the equation(apologies, at work I am having far more algebra in my diet than is good for any one person). Still no joy. Backing up was faster - restoring presented the same problems.

At least I now had a self-contained set of hardware which I could take to the Apple Store - and a reproducible set of steps to demonstrate the problem.

The solution? Reinstall all the software on my MacBook Air - then everything would be well.

I managed to avoid saying that I could get that level of aggravation (and support) from the Microsoft world - and at far less cost. The teeth marks on my tongue will subside soon I'm sure.

So anyway. Re-install everything I did. The old backups having been obliterated (sorry, I've been thinking of the Aeneid recently and that construction just happened) I began again.

Seemingly no joy - until about 1:00AM Sunday morning when restore began to work as advertised. Why? Unknown.

And the MacBook Pro has begun to act up. Problems with its wireless connection. And no discernible reason.

I hate computers!

---

This weekend, all of the above notwithstanding, was enjoyable. I have returned to the concept of micro-vacation and, thus, this was a 3-day weekend.

A particularly lovely invention.

Sometimes things work, other times - well...

The "Testing 1...2...3..." entry was the result of a frustrating time spent with the new version of the iPhone software and a program from the good TypePad folks.

The application failed to post two extensive "first" posts using my phone. It was unable to publish the posts - and simply informed me that it had received an "unexpected response from the server". (See the image below).

The error was no less unexpected for me. It caused me to question my move to TypePad for blogging.

As with many things in the software world, a wiping out of the application from the phone, from my computer and a re-download from the iTunes AppStore solved the problem.

They say that the definition of insanity is the repetition of actions in expectation of a different result. The software industry, of which I - to my great shame at times - am a part, has trained us well in this approach. And driven us mad.

My reloading of the application allowed for the "Testing 1...2...3..." post to make it all the way from my iPhone to my blog. Third time's a charm they say. So it would appear.

For the record, neither of us has bought an iPhone 3G. Though we are running the new version of the software on our existing phones - and we have checked the local Apple stores for inventory and the length of their customer lines.

Testing 1...2...3...

This is a short post to test if posting from my iPhone works - or not.