captpackrat: (i<3π)
It's been one full month since I received my Kindle, and I'm still loving it.  In the 29 days I've owned it, I've read 31 newspapers (2 issues of the San Francisco Chronicle and 29 of the San Jose Mercury News), 3 magazines (3 issues of Reader's Digest), 2-1/2 books (Little Fuzzy, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and currently reading Roo'd), 2 short stories (The Masque of the Red Death and The Cask of Amontillado), 1 poem (The Raven), 1 audiobook (The Roads Must Roll) and hundreds of blog entries (Ars Technica, Amazon Daily and AP Strange).  I've also used the Kindle's wireless web browser to check the weather forecast, movie times and stock prices when I wasn't home and I've performed dozens of Wikipedia lookups both at home and away.

I'm reading a lot more than I was before I got the Kindle, I'm watching much less television, spending less time on the computer, and I'm actually keeping up with news and current events. 

Amazon released an upgrade to the Kindle 2 weeks ago, promising they would roll the update out gradually over a span of two weeks.  I kind of figured I would be near the end of the list, since I had only received my Kindle a couple weeks previous, but I didn't realize I'd be nearly dead last.  I still had version 1.0 this morning, but it updated some time this afternoon.  Version 1.0.4 doesn't appear to offer much in the way of new features (so far I can only find some new screensaver images), but it definitely feels more responsive, especially the web browser.  Trying to use an image intensive site like VCL was frustrating before; with the update it's almost as fast as using a regular computer.

I'm still getting 5 bars on the cellular modem, which is strange because I'm out in the middle of nowhere and my Verizon RAZR barely gets one bar.  Even stranger is that my Kindle is getting a better signal out here than it does in Omaha (where it's usually 4 bars).  My contract with Verizon expires in about a month, and although I've been a customer since the days of Airtouch Cellular, I'll likely switch to Sprint.
captpackrat: (Professor Frink)
From the Letters to the Editor in today's San Jose Mercury News:

"In order to stimulate the economy, President Bush wants to give individuals $600 at a total cost of $150 billion. Now, since the war in Iraq is costing us approximately $250 million a day, adding up to that $150 billion every six days, why not leave the Iraqis to solve their own problems themselves, and instead of spending our money there, give everyone $600 once a week? That will save us $250 million a week, stimulate the economy big time and save lives as well."

250,000,000 x 6 = 150,000,000,000?

Maybe this should have been included in the Reader's Digest article last month on teachers helping students in California cheat on achievement tests.
captpackrat: (Smug)
The Onion, a newspaper famous for their joke headlines and off-the-wall and obviously fabricated stories, hit awfully close to the truth this time around....

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/40305

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Captain Packrat

December 2015

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