Ahira's Hangar

I would love to get a Sony Reader. I have been yearning for one for a while now. But with a kid in college and another not that far away from college, I am trying to be careful with my spending. From what I understand, even people like myself with bad eyes and who cannot read long texts on computer monitors can easily tolerate the Reader. And I can put hundreds of books on the little gadget, and carry them around with me on trips.

Next paycheck I will order Xar's story.

Interesting program, Menolly! Sounds like it would do the job. I just meant that it would be a huge hassle to scan something big, like a 400-500 page novel.
And I'd still end up physically wrecking the novel in order to do it. I mean, I could, but I don't want an e-book version that badly.

Ah, true enough.
At least ripping CDs is somewhat easier...

Hell yeah. I can't imagine how long it would take to scan my book collection.

--A

Time might not pose a problem for Av, if you accept my admittedly unreliable hypothesis that he is in fact a machine or alien intelligence of some kind, judging by his superhuman reading speed.

MW, I think you've hit the nail on the head there. Av must be some sort of machine! Come to think of it, Duchess gets through the books pretty damn fast too...

I'll swap humanity for not worrying about time. (Actually, come to mention it, I think it's about time I stopped aging. )

--A

Talk to SRD. He must have found a way of doing it, since he's agreed to never die.

Well, today I almost died lugging home my new TV from the store. (Bet you never did that, SRD! Then again, you probably were never much of a TV junkie.) I could use some hurtloam right about now, and some aliantha (heh). Wouldn't mind some springwine either! Good thing I'm fit for my age...or I would've suffered the ultimate irony of dropping dead at my door before I could enjoy my purchase. It's a 32" Samsung LCD TV - a very modest size by current standards, but then my place is pretty modest, too. What matters is that this particular model received very good reviews, and that I got it for a sweet price: $430 (original was $750). Now I just have to set it up and see how well it lives up to those reviews. The manual will be my reading material tonight...

Sweet!

Friend of mine had organised us a building to ab/rap-jump off yesterday, and I'd been looking forward to it all week. But we've suddenly got extremely unseasonal rainstorms, so we had to cancel. Hopefully we can do it next weekend instead.

In better news though, I've got a four-day weekend. Tuesday is a public holiday, so work gave us Monday off as well.

--A

Better luck next week, Av. We're waiting for some rain here - it has been bone dry the last couple of weeks.
But I'm not gonna feel sorry for your long weekend!

Well, after a night spent fiddling with the new TV's controls, I managed to get a picture that approached what my old CRT delivered (which had been tweaked to perfection - to my eyes, anyway). I'm not ready to give up my old TV just yet, as it's still superior in some important ways. The new LCD does shine if I feed it native high def content: I put on an episode of the Planet Earth series on blu-ray and the picture was glorious. But movies didn't fare as well: Blade Runner on blu-ray was adequate, but nothing like the razor sharp detail of Planet Earth. Maybe that's because I'm still using the old "analog" component video cable (the one with the separate red, green and blue connectors). I'm heading out today to get an HDMI cable to see how it improves the picture. (I didn't buy one when I bought the new TV because HDMI cables are ridiculously marked up at electronics stores. I'm getting mine at a computer warehouse store that sells them for cheap.)

It's bloody cold. High of around 12°C and totally overcast.

Not looking forward to winter.

(The long weekend is pretty good though. And the prospect of a 3-day week doen't hurt either. )

--A