eBooks (or A Ripple in the Space-Time Continuum)

I love my eBook! I've had it about 8 months now. Why do I love it? Let me count the ways!

1. It's lighter than carrying several books around. I realize it's ridiculous to need to have choices of books on a trip, but I'm neurotic that way. I am fine with going to the store to pick out a new book (love doing that!) but I don't ever want to be caught without a choice of what to read.
   
2. I can download books instantly. Granted my Kindle only works in North America, but before I went to New Zealand earlier this year I simply downloaded 4 or 5 new books. This also allows me to avoid a situation like on my trip to North Carolina a year or so ago. I took my 450-page book that I'd been working on for 3 weeks. I was on page 185. The trip was so awful that I spent so much time delayed at the airport and wasting time in the hotel room (work was a disaster too) that I actually finished the book after 3 days. I surfed the web for the nearest bookstore: there was one locally open from 9-4 (I was on-site from 7:30am-6pm, so that wouldn't work) or a Barnes and Noble down the highway about 25 miles. I went to the grocery store where I had choices of Harlequin Romance or Louis L'Amour. I should've taken the opportunity to broaden my horizons (having never read one of either) but instead I was grumpy about it and decided to "tough it out" by waiting to buy a book at the airport.
   
3. I can search the book easily. I love electronic searches!
   
4. I look up more words that I don't know - because the dictionary is *right there* and I barely have to move a finger to get the answer.
   
5. I can search things on Wikipedia - like when I was recently reading a historical novel and I kept looking up events and people. (I was highly impressed that the author got it right – I mean *I read it on the internet so it must be true*!)
   
6. I can make notes on the fly and highlight stuff I like - and retrieve it later.
   
7. I feel like part of Star Trek when I read it. Seriously - I'm participating in the future! Someday I'll have a flying car too!
   

I would like my eBook even better if it:

1. Had a touch screen.
   
2. Allowed me to share books I purchased with my friends.
   
3. Had a color screen.
   

And guess what? There's one on the market that has some limited capabilities like that!
So by the time I buy my next eBook it will be even cooler! I love competition that benefits the consumer (but that's another topic).

This week I've seen a couple of interesting news stories. In the first it seems that there's a market to *print* books that were only available electronically to-date.

Hewlett-Packard Co., the world's top seller of personal computers and printers, is teaming up with online retailer Amazon.com Inc. to join Internet search leader Google Inc. as the latest entrants in the quirky new market of re-creating digital books as paperbacks.

The concept represents a different type of book recycling, as digital copies created from print get a second life as paperbacks.

MICHAEL LIEDTKE, HP, Amazon to Sell Paperback Versions of E-Books, AP Technology Writer, October 21, 2009

Does that seem odd to anyone else? (Ironic? I don't know anymore – after the controversy of Alanis Morissette's apparently misinformed definition of "ironic" I avoid that word.) I guess it's not really all that odd. I work with companies who "want to go paperless" but then print out every meeting agenda and who are miffed when I tell them the software system they bought from my company only has on-line help. (If you printed out our on-line help it would take 1000+ pages.)

The second article was equally pause-worthy, but for a completely different reason. It almost compared the advent of the eBook with the advent of the Guttenberg Press! Holy Smokes!

On Monday, the Kindle 2 will become the first e-reader available globally. The only other events as important to the history of the book are the birth of print and the shift from the scroll to bound pages. […] In literary terms it's a transbook, by which I mean that it is the book which can contain all books. Why are so many writers so afraid of this staggeringly wonderful possibility? A book is a singular object that can contain many voices, but the transbook has the potential to be a singular object containing all voices. It is not just another kind of media; it is the dream of ultimate text.

Stephen Marche, The Book That Contains All Books, Wall Street Journal, October 18, 2009 (quoted from Amazon's Kindle Blog)

It's not that I disagree. But W-O-W! I totally like the idea of a book which contains all books. It's Escher-esque. It makes me feel like there's been a ripple in the space-time continuum like when Marty McFly started to disappear because his mom started falling in love with him.

Stress and the Inner Valley Girl

I've missed you. I've missed blogging. I've thought about things to say...but my work (which hit a slower period when my first client of the year went live in March) has been C_R_A_Z_Y! Or normal. Really the slower period that allowed me to think and breathe and relax was atypical.

I wanted to write about a piece I've been going over in my mind on my bike ride -- hopefully I will get to that later this week.

But here's today's ... boggle ... I guess, is a good word.

1. I ordered a bottle of wine with my take-away dinner. The hotel bar tender asked "how many glasses?" I said "one". You would think this was unheard of! (Is New Jersey dry? Or is it, like, part of a northern Bible Belt? Maybe I missed that somewhere...) I was planning to consume it over my entire stay here. After I got back to my room I remembered that I only stay here 2 nights...even though this trip lasts through Thursday. I have to fly to the next location on Wednesday. Maybe he had a point. It's already half gone, though, and I think I'll have just one more tiny little glass before I go to bed...
2. I TOTALLY thought that it would be SO COOL to be that super-smart business person that hops between cities consulting with clients and solving problems. This combines a couple things I like: travel and problem-solving. But now that I at least travel and problem solve I feel sorta disillusioned. I never feel super-smart or like I save the day. The client always wants something my company's product won't quite do. And it really is a lot of effort to convince them that my way is so much better and really is what they wanted even though they didn't know it. It's just not that glamorous! (siiiighhhh)
3. Plus, let me just say that I somehow missed the trip to Hawaii even though I helped with that client. Instead, I, like totally, get to go to rad places like Cincinnati, Salisbury (SC), Burlington, St.Paul, etc. Nothing wrong with any of them - they all had their own adventure (remind me to tell you about the 3-alarm hotel in Cincinnati sometime) and I think I might be stora glad I made to all of them. Fer sure.

Anywhooooo - back to why I need a bottle of wine:

1. The trip started by getting a center seat on the plane. (Like, no WAY!)
2. Then I watched a woman stow her wheelie bag in the overhead bin, walk 4 more rows and stow her other carry-on in the bin across from my seat. (Which totally explains why there usually aren't any places left for my rollie bag!!!) THEN she sat NEXT TO ME and ate her smelly sandwich. EEEWWWW!
3. Upon arriving at Newark I had this total deja vu...I guess from a previous business trip to Mahwah. That's like a whole other story.
4. My fellow Business Analyst told me "it's really easy - just take the shuttle from the airport to the hotel". I asked an information person for the way to the hotel shuttles. He told me there weren't any. Um, so, like, what? So, ok. I'll just ask someone else. They told me to take the train. Back to that Mahwah thing...I did that then and got my entire party lost and the little conductor guy got mad at me for missing my stop. Then he stood by me until the next stop to make sure I AND my party got off his train. Lousy conductor guy. Not even cute.
5. Anyway I do take the NJ Transit and after the 3rd train get to the station at the town listed on the hotel address. But, like, guess what? The hotel isn't really in that town. Like how's that even possible? Rat-friggin' bas....nevermind. I give up, call the hotel and order them to send the shuttle.
6. A car shows up. Black. No stickers. Guy hops out. Says "you need a ride?" Did I happen to mention that by this point it's totally DARK and I'm completely frustrated? Do I get in this car? Did I mention that the book I was reading while I was waiting was a mystery/thriller about serial killers? Then he says "you're going to the Marriott, right?" So either that's an amazing coincidence (or maybe it's the only hotel in town and I do have luggage with me) or he's my ride. My stress level is nearing the "high" marker. Whatever.
7. This hotel doesn't have room service. What the?!?

And, in re-reading this, apparently when I vent, I resort back to the Valley Girl talk I so carefully emulated in 6th grade -- from all my cool friends that were newly-arrived from the States and totally in the know of what was happenin'!

Broking: not just a funny word

I learned a new word today. My company strives for "broking excellence" in the insurance brokerage market (I don't really know what that is - I have a lot to learn, even though I've been here 3 years -my job is related to a different branch of the company).

Although, I guess Merriam-Webster recognizes it as a word:

Main Entry: bro·king Function: noun Date: 1569 chiefly British : the business of
a broker : brokerage

The business of broking sounds a lot like Wall Street trading to my uneducated ear. There are big centers around the world, with open cubicle format and big monitors on the walls showing current quotes/prices and such.

At any rate...I started out thinking "broking" was a funny word, but ended up feeling overwhelmed by an industry I didn't know existed that's actually related to the paycheck I bring home.

Frosting Deprivation – then Backlash!

This summer I went to a birthday party for a person that doesn't like cake. This is a completely foreign concept to me, by the way. At the time I was sorta happy to not have the calories. But over the next couple weeks I kept thinking about frosting – which is the real reason I like cake. You can't just have frosting, coincidentally, you have to have cake to anchor the frosting – and it allows you to pleasurably consume more frosting if you have cake than if you were just eating frosting out of the jar. Not that I've done that – oh no, never, never. Ok, maybe once or twice. Or that I've conducted a scientific study. But I am pretty sure I'm right about this frosting stuff. I have a lot of experience.

At any rate, I went to a lunch at P.F. Chang's with some girlfriends. They have those mini-desserts. After lunch, I ordered first and I asked for two: the velvet cake and the chocolate one. You should've seen the look on the face of the girl across from me. "I didn't know you could order more than one!"
she blurted. I giggled, but honestly, I don't think mine is a revolutionary idea…no one likes to be limited, do they? Both the desserts I ordered have plenty of icing.

About a week later I found myself dog sitting for some friends. I went to the store to buy myself some snacks and found myself in front of a single-sized serving of carrot cake. Coincidence? Probably not. Here's the cake before I consumed it – look at that frosting-to-fork ratio!

I was surprised that I couldn't eat the whole thing in one sitting – and not even in a single day. I would normally say that's a sign of maturity and growing up…but I really don't think a mature person would still eat so much of the cake that they feel icky. Granted I felt slightly better after complaining on FaceBook that I ate too much frosting. But it didn't stop me from finishing the cake the next day (and getting a minor sugar rush/wooziness all over again). 

I must conclude from this experience that I should've had cake the day of the birthday party because I had thought about it so much that my body needed it.  In the end that would've saved me a lot of calories.

The moral of the story is: even if you don't like cake, people expect birthday cake at a birthday party. (So please have mercy on us and have cake anyways!)

Memory Lapse (High School)

I found myself in one of those situations where I was feeling disgruntled and simultaneously appalled that I was feeling that way. Does that happen to you?

A high school buddy "friended" me on FaceBook and his profile picture showed someone I didn't really recognize. I was vaguely offended that this person had "gone on" with his life and visibly aged – that they didn't fit into the mold or the image I still held of him. At the same time, it was cool to see that he'd turned out totally different than I expected and that he seemed super happy. Really, this was a minor player in my high school life (and never a romantic interest). It's akin to the feeling I have when my cousins (who were 2 when I met them) started driving, or graduated high school or (gasp) got married. It's jarring and elating all at once.

So it got me thinking specifically about high school. I HATED high school. Or, more specifically I HATED Greeley. I've basically blocked a lot of that experience from my mind, I think. For example, in the last few months the following events came up:

• A friend says I wrote letters to him one summer that he spent out of state. While writing letters to an acquaintance that is out of state is definitely something I would've done as a teenager, I had no recollection of this until he produced the letters.
  
• Another friend emailed me that "every time I hear Pour Some Sugar On Me by Def Leppard, I think of sitting on your kitchen floor and singing that at the top of our lungs". I can totally see us doing this – because we were
  HOT (so hot), Sticky Sweet! From [our] heads to [our] feet! Yeah!
  But again, I have absolutely no recollection of it.
  
• I found this picture of me on FaceBook:
  

  
  
  

Don't I look like I'm happy and carefree and obnoxious? Even though they seem totally in character with how I remember myself during that time, I just don't remember those moments. I do, however, remember just about everything since the minute I left Greeley.

There were certainly some good things that came of my time in Greeley (my best friend to this day, my brother and I learned to drive, my parents were the happiest I'd seen them in a while, I learned how to survive in "typical America", etc.) but I counted the minutes until I could leave.

I moved to college in the fall of 1988 and spent the next year coming back to Greeley on the occasional weekend to visit my mom and brother. When my dad came back from his remote tour and the family moved to New York State, I gave Greeley the double-bird in the rearview mirror and avoided it for the next several years.

I remember the first time I was asked to go back and do something fun with a friend. I really didn't want to, but it was important to her so eventually I said I'd go. She drove. When we got to the old section of town, my body had a physical reaction – my throat closed up, I gulped for air and hyper ventilated. But it largely turned out to be anticlimactic. So I got to thinking maybe it was really just my issue. In fact many of my high school buddies still lived there – and were raising their families there.

There are some obvious superficial reasons that I disliked Greeley almost immediately when we moved there:

• I was in High School in Las Vegas. But in Greeley, 9^th grade was still Jr. High. (Huge insult at 14!)
  
• In Las Vegas I had 6 classes – including computers!!!
  
• In Greeley I had to take 7 classes AND they didn't have a computer class (what sort of backwards place was this to not have computers in the mid-1980s?!?). So I had to pick 2 classes to join mid-semester that I didn't think I would fail. So I took Home Ec (my male counselor seemed to think I could handle that) and French 2 (since I was in French 3 by the time we left Germany, I figured this was safe, plus the counselor wouldn't let me go higher than that without some sort of testing despite what my transcript said).
  
• Everyone in Greeley had lived there for a lifetime. This was unfathomable to me. I actually had someone tell me "don't talk to him; he wet his pants in the 3^rd grade". So, apparently a single mistake in an entire lifetime would never be forgiven AND I was lacking a lifetime of history which would tell them who I "really" was. This was completely foreign to a kid that moved every 2 years on average.
  

And a couple reasons I was slow to let go of my prejudice:

• I got to read Romeo and Juliet for the 3^rd time (and in my third school).  Lucky me - but my essay was easy to "write"...
  
• I took all the math (my favorite subject) my school even offered by the end of my junior year, but if I'd lived on the "better" side of town I could've gone to a high school that offered Calculus.
  
• My Speech/Semantics teacher thought it was appropriate to let 2 students use the PA-system for their project. These two students had the principal announce that there had just been a shooting in the front drive and that the school was on lock-down. They used the next 10 minutes to observe our communication and then presented on "the language of duress" or some nonsense. Note that this is a good decade+ before Columbine. Nevermind that I'd actually lived through something similar when we were overseas (but with unknown foreign terrorists to blame, not American teenagers). After class I told the teacher about that incident and that I sincerely hoped she lost her job. I didn't follow through on going to the principal though – after a little reflection he was also without the ability to judge appropriateness (since he was a participant).
  

There were some other less obvious reasons:

• A girlfriend of mine was raped by one of her sister's friends at a party her older sister threw when the parents were out of town.
  
• Another girlfriend was raped while walking home from cheerleading practice.
  
• Another friend's mom got a restraining order against her dad when they moved out. Eventually my friend and her mom just left town in the middle of the night with no forwarding address. We did hear from them later…but several months later.
  
• One of my girlfriends had her mom and dad start charging her rent the day she turned 18. This was mid-way through our senior year. Who does that?
  

I'm not saying these things don't happen. I think one of my biggest issues with Greeley is that it was billed as "an all-American town – the perfect place to raise a family". It's not like a "big city" where everyone universally accepts that "bad things" happen.

Beneath the lovely veneer Greeley was insidious and creepy. I always get the image of the witch in Snow White when I think about this… At this point, Greeley's grown enough that its creepiness would be expected, in my unsolicited opinion. Or maybe it's just me – and my trite coming-of-age experience.