Been looking at the new e-readers after participating in a survey/contest with an e-reader as a prize.

OMFG is this a clusterf*** of a market still. I was pretty young when the Betamax/VHS thing happened, so I missed out on most of it.

I’ve heard nothing good about the Sony Reader. Which is just as well, since Borders.com doesn’t offer e-books for sale on the website. To get even a listing of e-books for purchase, you have to download and install a Windows-only library app.

I’ve heard a lot of negative things about the Kindle. While the fiasco with the Orwell books last year seemed to make sense once it came down to facts and not internet panic, I’m still not real comfy with having books I’ve purchased just disappear and the money for them just reappear. Not without some better kind of notice. I’d much prefer an email saying Hi, we sold you this book under some questionable circumstances, with directions on how to return the book. Or they could take a cue from software – if I exceed the trial period on my software or if I fail to properly license the software, no-one comes along and secretly uninstalls it from my computer. Instead, they give it a big error when I go to open it again telling me how to fix the problem.

On top of that, it seems that books purchased for the Kindle are licensed to the device, not the person. Lose or break your reader, buy your books over again. Because there’s so much precedence in copyright law for moving to a new location and installing new bookshelves requiring you to purchase new copies of your books to be compatible with the new shelves.

However, option three, the B&N Nook, seemed on the surface to be heading in the right direction. Android-based, with the possibility of 3rd party apps to install later, when B&N opens up the SDK for developers. But it’s not real encouraging when I visit B&N.com to review information and find…..
A. their desktop reader app doesn’t work with my Mac version. It’s 10.5 or later only.
B. the “sample” I requested of a book I was considering purchasing included, when I finally found a reader that worked on my OS, the title page and table of contents. Absolutely no sample content at all. (to be fair, this may have been a publisher decision, not a B&N decision. Either way, whoever made that call needs to be slapped with a fish.)
C. Absolutely no “technical” information about the device and it’s compatibility with other devices. The “Tech Specs” page literally starts out by telling you what’s in the box. (a USB cable and a power adapter, if you’re wondering) and then has various boxes devoted to outlining the features of the device. Even in the FAQs, I don’t find anything telling me either why I’d want to plug it into my computer (loading music and other files onto the device?) and if it will be compatible with my older, 10.4 Mac.
D. The book I was looking at (Steamed: A Steampunk Romance) costs $6.39 as a digital download. It’s on the shelf at Target for $5.99. I know that the ability of stores like Target and CostCo to buy huge quantities of best-sellers cheaply is a large part of what’s hurting the writing and publishing market right now, but…. Really? You can’t even manage to match the competition when they’ve got shipping and stocking costs and you’re offering a digital download?

If my name is drawn in a couple of weeks as the contest winner, right now, I’d probably get the Nook. If my name isn’t drawn…. well, maybe in a couple of years the market will figure itself out and we’ll get adequate customer service, a common reader format, reliable and open Wi-Fi, and fewer pinheads butting heads over who’s privilege it is to do things like set prices. In short, hey, maybe we’ll eventually get to a reader-driven market instead of a bookstore-driven one.

Pardon me a small grumble here.

Twits.

Sure, Facebook Causes may not drive substantial amounts of donations – yet – but it does something useful to raise awareness. MySpace Causes would, too, if they were more stringent about what a “cause” was.

And, here on Earth, awareness means something. Money ain’t everything, MSNBC, no matter what your big corporate ad-driven people tell you. When it comes to causes, spreading awareness counts, too.

Next up, MSNBC picks on benefit concerts because more people watch them on TV than buy tickets or donate.

Gang, SMTP Authentication is everywhere. It’s not going anywhere any time soon. Y’all better start getting used to it.

As my regular readers ought to know by now, my day job (i.e., when I’m not behind the camera or curled around a book) is working as an IT Consultant. The organization I work for operates 1 email server and 3 web servers. Our mail server runs on SmarterMail, which is a really incredible and underknown mail server. Easy to use, pretty darn secure, etc etc.

Our mail server employs SMTP authentication for all 12-15 of the domains we host email for. This is, generally, a good thing. SMTP authentication is NOT new anymore, and most commercial ISPs employ it or some other form of SMTP security.

And yet, the email newsletter services, the membership management services…… even big service providers (cough, cough, Salesforce) fail to support SMTP-Auth. Forcing email providers whose subscribers use these services to either refuse to support them or to poke holes in email security for umpteen different IP addresses.

This is beyond ridiculous. Isn’t it time yet to catch up to pre-Web-2.0 tech? Either provide your own email servers which send mail from your system out (with the appropriate reply address attached, of course) or allow your users to configure a login and password for SMTP auth when they configure their mail server address. It’s as simple as that.

That is all.

On an old veterinary invoice is the following:

“Your invoice total reflects out Non-discounted Clients discount.”

Non-discounted Clients. Discount. Suuuuuure. Makes perfect sense.

Today is just one of those days when I feel the need to share it with all of you. So sit back and enjoy the SPAM Express.

Entry 1: From a sender calling themselves “Psychology Degrees”, we have the subject line
“Earn a Psychology Degree Online”
I’d really like to know if their psychology degree online is somehow better, faster, cooler than the one I earned the hard way…. Wonder if they’d be interested in a trade…. I’ll buy THEIR psychology degree if they buy mine….

Entry 2: We’ve seen quite a rush of these fake “MSNBC” news emails…. seems pointless to me, but then, I’m not a spam bot.

msnbc.com – BREAKING NEWS: The Beatles – Back Together Again
Reeeeaaaaalllly….. How are John and George feeling these days, hmmm?

msnbc.com – BREAKING NEWS: Spongebob Denies Reports That Hes Gay
Look, world, I hate to break it to you this way, but Spongebob is a fictional cartoon character. He is not in any position to deny, affirm, tapdance, or fiddle about his sexual orientation. His creators might, but the character himself? He’s pretty lifeless without someone to draw and animate him.

msnbc.com: BREAKING NEWS: God Accepts Responsability for Hurricane Katrina
Y’know, it took him long enough. Wasn’t the ol’ guy paying attention. And which god would this be now? Most of the good storm deities were female – excepting Zeus, who likes to juggle wenching and thundertossing.

Opted, Pushed or Just Plain Not Welcome?
(Via BlogHer – Feminism & Gender.)

Let’s Talk
It gave me a little thrill to see this article from Michelle Obama appear in my reader – I’m excited at the level of internet-usage in the campaign if she’s posting to BlogHer.

The history of America since 1980
I don’t always agree with Tyler, although I’ve come to enjoy having Marginal Revolution in my reader. It’s often food for thought. This one happens to be a short little article with some good points.

This may just be the one thing that pushes us XX-types over the edge, though. I have yet to see – nor do I expect it to arrive shortly – a musk scented razor for men who can’t bear the possibility of – what, exactly? Depilitating with something that doesn’t smell like food? Holding one of the thousands of things that the average human might pick up in a week that doesn’t carry an attractive scent?

All of which is to say – WHY on EARTH would we *need* razors with scented HANDLES? Y’know, I can see them trying to sell us on some kind of scent added to the moisturizing aloe strip that’s standard on razors now. In a very loose theory, that aloe strip might even be replenishing our skin’s need for unnatural citrus or lavender smells. But the HANDLE? WTF?

Evidently, the Boy Scouts council in Southeastern Pennsylvania raised funds 80 years ago to build an office for their council – on public land. The city of Philadelphia agreed to charge them $1/year rent on the land so long as they maintained the building.

In recent years, however, there’s been a lot of government withdrawal away from BSA because of their anti-homosexual stance. They’ve been increasingly denied access or charged full price for access to public facilities, such as marinas, parks, etc.

And now Philadelphia wants them to either include gay and atheist boys in their mission, pay full market rent on the land, or relocate off of public property.

If BSA wants to make it a freedom of speech issue that they are a private organization and permitted to deny admission to anyone they please, the city of Philadelphia is well within its rights to deny to rent to an organization that violates city anti-discrimination law. I suppose, since the Boy Scouts council raised money and built the building, they could try and take it with them, but really – is it that hard just to become more inclusive?

I wish this had been the Philly I saw when I lived there for two years.

Tangentially, this quote comes from the Time article:

While some organizations and governments have been hostile to the Scouts, Bork said, many have been supportive. “We clearly had some issues with organizations that don’t respect the Scouts’ right as a private organization to set its own membership standards and have withdrawn their support,” Bork said. “But frankly that’s their right too, and we respect that.”

Let there be much “argh-ing” and gnashing of teeth. Talk about twisting words! Yo, Mr. Bork, let me clue you in on something – respecting the Scouts’ right as a private organization to set its own membership standards and AGREEING with those standards are two very different things. And while I respect your right to appear in national media to be a two-bit, ignorant sack of dung for twisting your own words to worst effect, in no way do I agree that this supports your cause.

From Time.com via Digg.

Recently, she called my attention to an editorial from the Guardian, titled “When Harry met Sexism”

In terms of which books sell plentifully and are acclaimed among knowledgeable fans, speculative fiction is not male-dominated at all – quite the opposite. It is the critical establishment which marginalises women. Bestselling female contenders remain unacknowledged while their male counterparts are robustly namechecked, absorbed reliably into the official history of the genre.

I have to say – I find it very curious that we have developed a society where we pay people who have no interest in books to pretend to read them (how much of the book do these critics actually read, anyways?), and then lumber forth with their ponderous opining on speculative fiction, which they had no interest in, think is childish at best, and certainly isn’t “high culture”.

I’m vaguely reminded of the ship full of hairdressers and phone cleaners depicted by Douglas Adams, a space ship full of people who had been deemed “too useless” by their own planet, and sent out into space to go colonize another world (or die trying) as an attempt to simply get RID of them. Perhaps we have developed this type of “critic” as an attempt at keeping cranky people out of doing further harm in, say, politics?