I have always been interested in Amazon's Kindle. The thought that I could carry around a small tablet to read books and textbooks was relatively intriguing. However the high cost and limited PDF support has left me wary. Ultimately, as a few book readers have found since purchasing the Kindle, those are small costs for owning an ebook reader. The Digital Rights Management on the books sold on Amazon has provided book publishers with a a surprising amount of control over the content AFTER it has been purchased. This provides a huge potential for abuse.

DRM on most software, such as video games, seems mostly content to only prevent copying. DRM on Amazon's proprietary ebook format allows publishers and Amazon itself to change the rights of book purchaser's with very little notice after the book was purchased by the consumer. It largely began with publishers, such as Random House, disabling the text-to-speech features on books as so it will not compete with their audiobook purchases .

This was definitely not a deal breaker, but the next one was. A couple of weeks back, it was discovered that there are a limited number of times one can download a book onto a Kindle device before you need to REPURCHASE the item. Seriously!? Some books can be downloaded a few times, but others maybe only once or twice, but customer service won't tell you how many times a book can be downloaded.

As for the most recent news the publisher Secker and Warburg (I believe) has recently decided that they no longer wish to have a couple of their books on Amazon. They also decided that they did not want ANYONE who had previously purchased the books to have them either. Thus Amazon complied and deleted the books off everyone's Kindle. While they received a refund, I see this as equivalent to theft.

As you can see in the picture, Secker and Warburg publish George Orwell's classics such as "1984" and "Animal Farm". A publisher using rather authoritarian measures in order to control a book on oppression and censorship is rather humorous. It is a rather good symbol on who information providers seem to enjoy alienating their paying customer base. I am going to shake my head, but at the same time enjoy the fact that I did not spend over $400 on a device that will allow you to buy a book for a limited time, either because you run out of downloads or because the publisher decides that you no longer have the right to own a book you purchased.

-Trevor

I came across a rather catchy song on how United Airlines broke a musician's guitar. Enjoy.

-Trevor

Eve Online is one of those games that if I was to start playing I would be sucked in. Eventually I would have to drop out of school and end up living in a basement. Thus I have to content myself to settle by playing X3: Terran Conflict. Unfortunately, I found it slightly alarming when I started to talk to my computer wingman so perhaps playing an online game may be better for my mental health .

In any case, Eve Online is awesome because it not only has a resident economist who produces awesome economic reports it also has some pretty awesome stories of deceit in which players infiltrate an in-game corporation (like a guild) and then assassinate the leader and take money. It has also happened again recently. There are even cases of bank fraud!

I mention these because a media professor from Loyola University (click title for link) ran an experiment on online social culture using City of Heroes. For those who don't know, City of Heroes is a game based on Heroes/Villains. They are supposed to be morally opposed to each other, thus fighting each other to the bitter end. Though when Twixt (alias for the professor) entered, he found that most were idly chatting in the city! Rather than living in some Bizarro world, he chose to smite the evil villains like the scum that they obviously are. In a sad unintentional parody to "Make Love, Not Warcraft," the villains found it impossible to beat Twixt in the game, even after ganging up on him, while Twixt's supposed allies (also known as the French) sat by like the sad pacifists they are.

Real problems arose of course when players posted death threats and other harassing comments towards Twixt, who was only playing the game as the designers intended, unlike one of my college roommates who enjoyed using the flashbang on Counter-Strike on his own teammates until either enemies killed us or it crashed the game server, Thanks Dan.

In any case, I have a message for the players of CoH, go play the Second Life. There you will only have to worry about annoying floating penises.

-Trevor

I was shopping at Albertsons the other day (though as Mike had mentioned when down here, it is not owned by Supervalu) when I came across some rhubarb for only $1.99 a pound. Of course everyone knows what one does with Rhubarb other than to collect its leaves for the toxic oxalic acid, make Strawberry-Rhubarb pie. I was going to originally use a recipe from Grandma's recipe books, but she did not include cook temperatures and times, definitely a no-no for someone just starting out in the pie trade. Instead I came across a rather simple recipe off of the Food Network. The ingredients are shown above.

The preparation was amazingly simple and I was amazed at how the sugar turned the mixture into a quasi-jelly. Even more amazing is my physics lesson on volume. I was certain I messed up my measuring that there was no way the amount in my mixing bowl would fit into my small pie tin (which I was able to by with a graham cracker crust in there.






I found out how unhealthy my pie is as well. I found a neat website at shopncook.com which can create custom nutrition labels so I gathered the nutrition information for my pie and created this label which should give everyone the impact that just one slice can have. Though it is definitely not as unhealthy as Death Pies. Though I suppose one could argue that even the Death Pies can be part of a balanced diet if kept to special occasions though I do wonder how my grade school classmates who had these every day for a snack didn't end up morbidly obese, though this may also be due to the fact that we weren't as slothful back then??

-Trevor

I woke up this morning and went for a run with a friend; it has certainly been a while since I have run a couple of miles. It felt really good to get up at 6 in the morning, sort of. It rained steadily during the night so it is very humid today, but at least there is not any dust in the air.

Hopefully everyone is going out and having a good day today. By virtue of not working all day as I did last year, I will have a wonderful day. I am attempting my first Strawberry-Rhubarb Pie, I'm very excited. I will probably even document the experience. Also going to do some grilling this afternoon. Hopefully the pesky monsoon rains will hold off long enough.

By the way, I found a different host which seems to have more responsive servers than what I currently have. You can go check out my progress at my new site. I will eventually have this domain point to the new server so hopefully there should not be any problems with the transition, though if you happen to get the RSS feed of the blog, you may want to grab the new one.

Stay thirsty, my friends.

-Trevor

It has been over a year since I have last posted anything to this blog . After someone had hacked my host they posted a nasty little script on my site. I guess at the time I was rather busy in DC at the time and didn't have a chance to look at it and then time sort of passed. I thought I would spend a couple of minutes last night fixing the site, but that turned out longer than I had planned, but this was largely due (in my humble opinion) to my host whose server doesn't seem to be working consistently; I seem to be getting random errors that I don't seem to be able to consistently figure out. I am considering finding another host, but we will see what happens.

Everything does not seem to be yet fully functional, such as my Gallery, but I will have to look at that later.

-Trevor