I forgot the password to this and had to do some hacking to my database. True story.

Uhm, it's been forever since I updated, nearly a year. It's been busy.

Dorée asked me, in one of my status updates, to talk about my experiences with the Kindle. Right this moment, the K2 has landed at my place, but I haven't gotten a chance to use it yet, so I can only talk about the original. So, for now, this (ongoing) note is discussing the K1. I'll update it as I go, to give a thorough discussion of what I like, don't like, and what not of both Kindles.

As many of you know, I am a prolific reader. Primarily, I read trashy books, but also other fiction. This academic year aside - I've been wicked busy and gone down to about one or two books a month, and with my mom's Kindle purchase, I've been severely limited as to when I can read, namely when she's not reading and I'm not otherwise busy - I usually read 3-5 books a week, every week.

For the original:
The biggest con, as someone with a huge library, is the utter lack of organization. You can't create author/series/genre folders (or show ONLY authors/genres/series and then authors/series/books within the selected author/genre/series, etc). You can't tag books, to try to fake a system like that. I honestly don't know what I'm going to do with the K2, because for the K1, my mom resorted to buying a bunch of small (128-512 MB) SD cards and organizing by genre (and in cases where the author's been quite prolific, like Nora Roberts, by author), and that worked really nicely.

Granted, you don't need to have every book you own on the Kindle at any one time, and quite frankly, you could just have everything sorted into a book library on your computer (non-Amazon purchases) or use amazon's online bookshelf thing (amazon purchases) and only have the books you want on the Kindle. With the original, it's obvious that that was the intention - it had a tiny storage drive. However, with the K2, the intention is to allow you to have an actual library of book (with nearly 2GB of storage space). If the K1's lack of organization is present in the K2, with the lack of SD cards, it could be a huuuuuge negative.

For the K2:
The buttons on the K2 are much nicer than on the original, and I like the smaller size quite a bit as well. However, my biggest complaints about the original are still present: huge library, no organization. And, in fact, it's probably worse: the K2 offloads your non-downloaded books into an "archive" that you can't sort by most recent purchase (which, to me, would be an OBVIOUS thing to sort by).


For the covers:
I heartily DISCOURAGE the Amazon hinge cover, as it actually BROKE my K2 -- a stress fracture right where the top hinge was, probably because the Amazon cover doesn't attach the Kindle to the cover aside on the hinge. What kind of crack they were smoking, I don't know. I did get my Kindle replaced free of charge, but man: what a pain in the ass!

I do encourage the M-Edge hinge cover. So many color combinations, and it attaches the K2 at the hinge and at the outside edge. It also has a strap (which the Amazon cover lacks), and a nice place for a light (such as the M-Edge Elluminator). I likee.


All in all, I really like my Kindle, but that organization thing... I really wish they would fix that.

Monsoon is an interesting little season here in Tucson. It's not a proper season, like summer -- it's only about six to eight weeks long, so it's considered a "mini-season" by climatologists (or at least wikipedia).

At the beginning of monsoon, it's so arid that there will be "rainless" thunderstorms. From the ground, it looks like it's just a lightning storm, but from air, a proper thunderstorm -- the rain drops evaporate before hitting the ground. This, of course, is not a problem this time of year as the monsoon is usually in its third or fourth week, and it's humid enough that the rivers are flowing above ground once more. Lucky me, both this year and last year, I left before the start of monsoon to go travelling, and returned to a turbulent rainless thunderstorm. (I hardly ever get airsick, but monsoon storms are so much worse than normal rain storms with the turbulence that I very nearly lost my lunch both times.)

I somewhat dislike the smell of the rain here. It smells dirty -- but not the clean, fresh dirty of the midwest (or, for that matter, every place else I've lived), where it usually smells like freshly turned dirt and a bit green. It's a dustier scent, almost chokingly so. (For that matter: the tap water also tastes like dust! So I tend to use my water filter way more often than back home, where the water is delicious and non-dusty.) It was great to be outside in the rain in Boston, even though I had no umbrella, because it smelled so nice and clean.

Another interesting monsoon thing is that the clouds have a tendency to just sit in one place and build and build and darken right before a storm -- not at all like the midwest, where you can see them moving around before the rains. (Incidentally, I haven't experienced many cloudy days here.) It's actually kind of cool how quickly and greatly the clouds will grow and darken, as you can see in this four minute video - and not much rain in it!

Yesterday, we had one righteous storm - power was out in parts of the city, there was hail, and it rained so hard that some places had water flowing uphill. That's right, uphill.



Anyway, when I went hiking again this morning (waking up at dark o'thirty so I could be parking my car at 6am, when the trail opened), there was still some standing water on the roads where they dipped a bit, on both of the access roads I have for leaving my apartment complex. The trail was pretty moist too -- not enough to be really muddy, but enough that it was a little squishy in places. The clouds were amazing (the photo up by where I was talking about them was from my morning hike, as is this one, though the first one shows the clouds better; this one is right around the time I was leaving, and it started sprinkling again not too long after I returned to my car), and it was nice and cool. I was surprised by the number of people that were out and about, given that it was 6am that I was hiking. Then again: 6am is probably the best time TO hike out here in the summer - it'll be fairly cool (low-to-mid 70s), unlike the afternoon (where it may be in the upper 90s to low 100s).

Yesterday at work, we had a little field trip to Sierra Vista to do some flight tests. Because we don't want to haul the really heavy (and thus gas guzzling) trailer, we take two SUVs, packed full of equipment and people.

It was pretty interesting. We set up a tent, tables, and what not. Do pre-flight checks, fly, come down, do some analysis of the telemetry, and decide what the next action will be. Sometimes it goes great, sometimes it goes like crap. We had planned on 2-3 sets of tests, and only managed to finish one successfully (and then, the controls were not as nice as we would have preferred). It's not a total loss, though - we knew the new hardware configuration would likely have problems, and now we've got an idea of what they are (but not necessarily the causes). First flights are usually pretty ... twitchy.


Anyway, the most interesting thing is that on the way home, my car (my manager's Suburban) got to talking about fuel efficiency and hypermiling. And of course, being a bunch of engineers, we had to analyze and test some of their methods, and other proposed methods of increasing efficiency.

The Suburban got over 50mpg for a significant portion of the trip, at just under 70mph. It was pretty amazing what shifting into neutral going downhill and following a staggered pair of semis does for your efficiency.

I just wish I had had my camera out when it hit over 100mpg.

As an engineer, there are fewer things that rock my world quite like getting something to work (even if it's something someone else designed and I'm trying to get it up and running).

There's a high to it - a feeling that I'm on top of the world.

I've been high on it all week, as I've been in the lab at work. Lab time usually means I run into more problems (and not just software bugs), and thus must fix them. But normally, they're smallish problems, such as "the motor's a little loose" or "the elevons need to be recalibrated" or what have you.

And for me, at least, the smaller the problem, the smaller the high.

Yesterday (or, rather, two days ago as it's technically Thursday), I came upon a major problem -- one that would stop our flight tests entirely (not that the thunderstorms might not do it for us). It took some persuasion to convince the senior engineer I work with in the lab that even though we're flight controls people, we could fix the navigation code that was not properly working. And I rocked it.

Since I diagnosed and fixed it, I got to be the one to tell the other group that works with that hardware configuration (a new one - we're the first to fly with it) what the problem was.

Interestingly enough, I got scolded later for making the email "we" instead of "I" - the whole "you found it, you fixed it, you take credit for it" thing. I try to come from the more Japanese school of thought that it doesn't matter who broke it or fixed it, what's important is that it works now, especially since as an intern, my impact tends to be fairly limited. I have my initials in code that will be doing some really cool things one day, if this hardware gets used by anyone other than us (and others are looking at it), and I got to get a geeky natural high that I still haven't come down off of, and that's enough for me.

This summer has sped by -- I can't believe it's already July 9th! I'm flying to Minneapolis in exactly one month, to visit with some college friends, and renting a car and driving through Ames (to visit more college friends!) before ending up at home. I should arrive right around the time my car does.


My new favorite piece of software: WinMerge, for easy comparisons between two files. It helped me become a rock star yesterday.


Reminder to myself: tonight, I have to fax some paperwork to school -- funding related muckity muck. They need a new copy of my resume, a form, and for some reason, they want my statement of purpose again. It's school stuff, so I can't use the company fax (but there's a Kinko's on the way home, so it's all good). Also, set your alarm for dark o'thirty, because your butt needs to be at work at 3:30a. Yay flight tests!

I nearly forgot what it was like to meditate.

I used to do it every day, before going to bed.

I don't know why I stopped. Too busy, no doubt. Life has a bad habit of doing that to you -- piling more and more obligations, things to do, and something gives, because you're just too tired to do it. I've given in many areas of my life - trading in a social life for a second shot at a career, trading 20-30 minutes to "be girly" (go all-out with hair/make up/actually considering what I wear) for that extra sleep time, and trading in 15 minutes of meditation for that much more sleep.

I decided to sit today.

It felt weird and uncomfortable, as I shifted from position to position. Nothing felt right. I ended up using an old stretching position instead of the half lotus I used to use -- feet together, pulled in as far as comfortable, knees down. I started out with my back straight, but bent so my head was on my feet, more because I wanted to stretch than because I wanted to sit like this. But I was able to breathe, and to concentrate.

As time went on, I straightened myself - more like a marionette than of conscious desire to sit straight.

Out of practice.

I never did manage to get to that quiet, mind off state. But it slowed down, and concentrated on how my body was feeling and what it was doing.

I could feel my pulse in my thumb, the stretching of my hamstring, each slow inhalation, the rush of air over my tongue as I exhaled, and it was good.

I came out of it when my pager went off at 4:05 -- 7:05 east coast time.

It was most disconcerting to be jerked out.