My New Sony Reader

I'm not one for saving the earth, countering the greenhouse effect, eating organic, or reducing my carbon-footprint. If anything, I'm all about increasing my physical footprint by consuming the dirtiest cow-meat that I can find, dripping in A1 and genetically modified vegetables that have no reason to exist at this time of year. Alas, the one thing that I can't compromise in the goal towards the betterment of society is my food.

So, it was with a great sense of hypocrisy that I purchased a Sony eBook Reader this weekend under the guise of saving paper and potentially preventing the inevitable felling of the rainforests. I can safely say, that it was worth it. I love this thing.

Here is why I believe you should get one (assuming that you find your personality or thinking to be inline with mine). Also, don't mind the intertwined arguments between Sony vs. Amazon and just physical books vs. eBooks.

1. Easy File Management: Kindle has wifi/3g. I don't care, I plug my Sony in to charge via USB anyway, so the wifi doesn't help me. Also, I wouldn't use Sony or Amazon's file management, regardless. Download Calibre, the open source book reader utility, and save yourself a feces-load of trouble.


2. Less To Move: Everytime I move to a new home, the part which chews the most rotten cud, would be moving my books. I have about 3 big boxes worth of books that I absolutely cannot bare to part with. I pull a back muscle EVERYTIME that I try moving them. Enough of that. When I relocate next, it'll be with my Guitars, Amps, Quiver of Arrows, Sac of Potions, Laptop, and my Sony Reader 505!!


3. Big Screen: For the most part, this thing is comparable to a paperback novel in text size. I happily read books on my iPhone with Kindle for the iPhone™ and Stanza, so this is an upgrade for me. I won't expound upon the virtues of E-Ink here, as its been touted widely elsewhere. Suffice it to say, that it rocks, looks great, and doesn't hurt your eyes after extended reading periods.


4. Looks: Sony's Reader looks awesome. The Kindle looks like my retarded cousin drew it (you know which cousin you are... yes you). It looks like something I'd have designed in pre-school. It is Manatee-white. The keyboard is a mar upon the face of an already dismal interface. Sony's has that matte Metal finish with Chrome accents.  It is so damn hip, that I feel uglier when using it.


5. Expandability: I, like most geeks, despise Sony Memory Cards. The world absolutely did NOT need an yet-another-flash-based-storage device. We already had a cluster-fornication of choices with MMC, SDHC, and Smart Media/Cards.  (A quick aside... Does anyone HATE those computers with a giant portion of the front-panel devoted to various memory-card formats? Seriously, appealing to the lowest common denominator seems ok, but is any one person going to be using all of those slots?). Expandability format aside, the Sony is expandable. The Kindle is not. That makes the Sony a winner in my book. ~200MB is paltry. Paltry, I say. Roger Paltry.


6. Wrist Pain Alleviance: Maybe most people know how to read books. I hold books with a very odd looking claw shaped hand formation. I do not believe there is anything ergonomic about a pile of cellulose sheets glued together. The Reader feels as if its a natural extension of myself that I have been holding for my entire life. Dudes, you know what I'm sayin'.

There are two cons AFAIK...

1. Scent: You don't get that 'book smell'. That delicious fibrous scent that persists from the first opening crack of a book to the final triumphant climactic phrase that typically makes you cry or smile. All you get with these readers (Kindle or the SR), is the cold metallic touch of a machine that serves your book from a silent array of bits. The very machine that probably plots the overthrow of all that you love and hold dear. The Sony Reader definitely looks like something that would join its SkyNet brethren in the conflict to remove the ability to read from all humans by terminating them.


2. Necronomicon: The beauty of the Necronominican reading experience is the fact that it is written in blood and bound in human flesh. You don't get those sort of experiences when reading ancient tomes on a book reader. The same argument applies to pop-up books for the kiddies, and bibles that are meant to contain Tommy Guns and Jail-Cell keys.

All of the comparisons on the web were laced with stats and numbers. I hate stats and numbers (a marked change from the stats-whore that I used to be). Just remember a few things.

1. Having an eBook reader is better than not having an eBook reader.


2. Having the Sony Reader is arguably better than having the current incarnation of the Kindle.


3. Having an eBook reader and possessing/reading physical books are not mutually exclusive operations.


4. I have a retarded cousin who can design Kindle-like hardware for you.

My reader came with Pride and Prejudice pre-installed. Which reminds me, the Kindle is not available outside of the US. The Sony Reader included a British book, almost in blatant scoff-age (scoff-itude?) at those Bozos (Bezos?).  For those of you that don't read regularly, GO GET ONE!

Site Relaunch

This weekend, I decided to merge my AHG Software and AxehomeyG projects into one entity. Maintaining a separation between both aspects of my life has caused me nothing but headaches.

Just a quick recap about ME, since this is MY blog, after all...

My name is Mike Cerna. I write music and software programs. I love Physics, Math, Quantum Mechanics, Thermodynamics, Chemistry and most of the natural philosophies (that is such a weird moniker for the sciences, isn't it?).  I'm also a web developer (www.thepoint.com, www.highend3d.com). I don't perceive my interests in the aforementioned to be driven by anything more than basic education and general feelings. Those general feelings are as follows..

Music

I've been playing for a very long time. I won't even bother saying when any more, because there were so many starts and stops from as early as I can remember. Music is about listening as much as performing and there are times when I just listen and analyze for weeks, months, and in the past, years. There is a key indescribable component to music (and the ordered collection of frequencies and timbres of which it is composed) which renders any sort of measurement irrelevant. When I rant about music, it is in such vague terms, and I love it. It is so easy to get lost in conversation about music.

Performance and Composition go hand in hand. As an art, it is akin to speech, in that there are great orators, and crappy orators. There are those that can barely speak their own language, and those that can confound the senses with their words. Orthogonal to that concept is the value of content that is performed or spoken. The same capacity for profound statements exists at all levels, and by all speakers. I've thought about this since childhood, and, most of my musings on the subject are not rooted in science and linguistics so much as observation and vague parallels that I draw when I'm in the depths of a performance or writing session. I'm sure that I'll continue researching the research out there, and blog about this topic in the future. Read More... so that, if ever we meet, you and I, we can discuss the analogy to our heart's content.

Software

In 2001, while pursuing my Music Degree, I decided that my triumph-over-adversity schtick wouldn't be appealing if I lived my upcoming years as a poor musician (I had a memorable, but shitty childhood, which should have led to a life of misery and acquiesance of the perils and punishments of poverty. Instead, I persevered against all odds due to the immense size of my head and enclosed brain. Even though there are smarter people with smaller heads out there, mine saved my ass!). I enrolled in the Computer Science program at Northern Illinois University and carved out my path from there. Immediately,  I realized that software was awesome and a true marvel of human accomplishment. It was truly multidisciplinary. Game development, in particular, was incredibly dense with calculus, numerical computation, and physics. Try writing a Ray-Tracer from scratch and you will understand!

Fast forward to the present. I'm a Rails Developer at ThePoint.com. Groupon.thepoint.com, the commercial arm of the application, is growing HUGE. The idea works! Kudos to Andrew Mason, for grasping and selling social media/marketing and web-powered collective-action in a way that no one has before and Ken Pelletier for making the system come to life through technology (Damn, that was a mouthful, why does everything web-related have to be this syllabic monstrosity).

My knowledge of physical sciences is about an order of magnitude more developed than my awareness and familiarity with problems plaguing society, our economy, and the world at large. Doing my part to develop something that allows people and businesses to fix their own problems is really the perfect task for me.

Anyway , one thing that I've noticed in all of my time developing software, is that everyone loses sight of the big picture at some point (myself, wholeheartedly included). There is ALWAYS a business goal that sits outside of your current task. There is ALWAYS complexity in any solution or system, which is waiting to sprawl and grow. The Laws of Thermodynamics (specifically the second, which I love to use to explain a point about natural decay) doesn't actually apply to thoughts and organizational systems (unless you count neural decay and bit-rot). I'll argue that its principles can still be unscientifically applied to thoughts, development strategies, and code. Our solar-powered ordering of all things earthly allows us to temporarily reverse the tide of this entropic tangle. People need to be aware that elegance, beauty, perfection, systemic-integrity (like ensuring some dogmatic principle is adhered to within the full-stack of a software application) are all pointless if they lower the value of your software due unmaintainability or just make the entire operation needlessly complex. ANY stakeholder, developer, or employee can make an assessment about an operation being more complex than it needs to be to perform a function. Being aware of all of this, in concrete terms, is a difficult task for any programmer. There are those of us, who want more than nibbles of wisdom from our daily lives and excerpts from the Pragmatic Programmers books, but less than a full analysis of current paradigms and complexity-managing processes. I want to discover these things. Blogging about what I find sounds like fun and something of value to those of like mind. I can probably rant about binding entropy in life, music, software, and just about anything, ad-inifinitum, so I'll just leave it at that.

I believe that my current job, and my current band, both represent a wonderful reversal of entropy. I have turned countless McD's cheeseburgers into some great music, and some great code.  Over the following months, time-permitting, I'll talk about the nitty-gritty of my findings in an interleaved fashion.  For now, check out my blog-links for links to my band, Mindwarp Chamber, my music, or my sites and applications!