http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/11/harpercollins-now-also-thumbing-nose-...

Book publishers have started establishing arbitrary delays in book releases to digital formats. Their hope is that maybe someone who doesn't want a hardcover of their stupid book and would prefer a 0 tree, 0 clutter version will run out and pay 60% more for a hardback so they can read Dan Brown's latest crap RIGHT THIS SECOND!

Let me explain how it actually works. You, the publisher pay a bunch of money to trot your author out on every talk show known to man. He ends up on the Daily Show with Jon Stuart, who I absolutely love. I see the book and have a passing interest. I go to amazon to get a kindle download. It's not there for 2 months.

2 months later I've forgotten you even exist, and I'm in the middle of this other great book I picked up when I went looking for yours.

As a reader, I've gone digital. Get used to it. Get over it. This means you don't have to spend money cutting down a tree, pulping it and gluing it together to deliver content to me. I don't want you to pulp those trees, and I don't want to store the pulped tree in my house. I'd like to save some money in exchange for you not having to pulp those trees. However, I'm still willing to pay a fair price for the content, which you are now allowed to infinitely distribute for nothing!

Things are shifting in the information economy. You can be fluid like the water or be worn away like the boulder.

How old are you and where were you when you got your driver's license?

I'm 31 years old and I grew up in a small town on the plains of Colorado. I got my drivers license after taking driver's ed in high school and passing a DMV test.

It was 1993. At the time, I only knew one or two people who had a cellphone. They hardly ever used them because minutes were very expensive. There was no such thing as texting. The town I lived in had no bike lanes, no roundabouts and GPS didn't exist. My first car with Anti-lock brakes was a 2001.

In the 16 years since I've had my license, I've never had another test. I've never had a refresh of the information I was taught in that one high school class. Most of my driver education since then has been handed to me as a carbon copy of a ticket from a cop.

Every year in America, 43,000 people die in automobile crashes. So on average, 118 people will die today. 1 or 2 will be a cyclist, and 11 of them will be pedestrians.

There are freak accidents, but I don't believe 43,000 people per year are dying in 'freak' accidents.

The cycling community is seeing a revolution in utility cycling. People are commuting more and more. Injuries and accidents are also on the rise. The motivation of the cycling community is to increase cyclist education and to encourage more people to ride. Every day my city planners are making more and more efforts to facilitate cycling. The problem is that the people they are educating don't have the ability to kill or injure others with their mistakes.

I have yet to hear a single proposal to continue the education of the people behind the wheel.

In this country you can go from 16 to 72, and take exactly one driving test. America had 48 states when your average 70 year old took his last driver's test.

Sparc International sent a cease and desist letter to my favorite hardware hackers SparkFun today.

This kind of stuff pisses me off. The boys and girls at sparkfun did a much better job of describing the lunacy of this proposal better than I can, so head over there to read the whole thing.

In this day and age, if you pull this kind of legal crap, and it clearly has no merit the whole internet just mocks you. Big corporations can't push mom and pops around silently anymore. I'm mostly blogging just to give Sparc International (a subsidiary of Sun Microsystems) bad press. They are clearly either assholes, idiots, or both.

Makezine asked for submissions on geekery day to day wear, so I heavily flickr'd my Murse in it's current iteration.

If you've ever been curious about what's going on in that thing dangling off my hip, this'll tell ya. ; )

I just did the math, I've been wearing that thing every day for 2 and a half years. Sure am glad I made it washable about half way through.

What follows is a small back and forth triggered by an email forward from my family. (which means if you want the timeline read it from bottom to top.)
I reposted it here because I want my friends to fact/sanity check my assertions and provide feedback.

I attached the resolution for ya all if you want to see it. Not much there, just that he wants congress critters to forgo their benefits program and instead enroll in the public option. To me, as Michelle and Thomas said, it kind of misses the point of the public option.

Carol, I can't imagine a situation where your insurance would change because insurance was being covered for others. That's like saying medicare is causing your blue cross rates to rise. They're different entities with their own bank accounts. As I understand it, the worst thing that would happen is your taxes could go up subsidizing the public insurance for people who couldn't pay their own way. A more likely outcome if all goes well. (who knows?) Is that your rates will drop as your insurance company is forced to compete with that public option.

Here's the problem as I see it. Emergency rooms are packed with people that have sniffles. Even worse, emergency rooms are packed with people who have problems that would have been a sniffle if they had access to a doctor, but since they didn't they waited a month and rolled into the ER with full blown pneumonia. Sniffle: $100 visit. Pneumonia treatment: $10,000 Guess which one the doctor, patient, and insurance company would probably prefer to deal with?

So.. If you can get that guy with the sniffle access to a doctor of any kind to take care of his sniffle, you save 9,900 in ER rubber gloves, hose, sheets, and all the other crap hospitals waste. ; ) (can you tell i just spent a week there recently?)

Hey all,
I'm getting asked for more pix of Gram from time to time, so I figured I'd point you all over to his rolling flickr set.

If you know what RSS is for, you can subscribe to the set here.

We're out!

Gram's last biliruben level was 12, so he's more or less out on no conditions. We can even hold him without the glowy blanket. (which was a hassle)

Sorry about the total lack of further updates.

Gram got out of the NICU the after about a day and a half. It was really nice to finally have him in our room. The fluid on the back of his head got absorbed in that time, but in the process he developed a case of early jaundice. As I understand it, the extra blood volume he had in that bump combined with normal baby start up stuff leaves a bunch of extra red blood cells to process.. etc. Additionally, it's more worrisome on younger kids than ones who have it a couple weeks out.
http://healthguide.howstuffworks.com/newborn-jaundice-dictionary.htm

So, anyway, they've been taking his blood twice a day for a few days. His bilirubin levels went from 6 to 17 in a couple days, which worried people enough that we weren't allowed to leave.

We were hoping to head out on friday night, to the point of packing and such, but then we got the 17 number, which was a bit of a punch in the gut.

So anyway, we're still here. The care at pvh is freaking top notch, but after 6 days of rotating friendly nurses, each of which is not up to speed on you situation your sense of humor starts to crack.

We just got word via a back channel that our current bilirubin level is a 12.. so, wish us luck, we're hoping we'll be sprung from this joint.

(this is our birth announcement email, reposted here for spreading on the intarwebs)

Nah, we’re just screwing with ya... we just like to make the grandparents gasp... ; )

His actual name is Gram Propst (we’re still working on middle names)
He’s 8lbs 4oz. and 20 inches long He was born at 6:53pm yesterday.

After laboring for literally days we checked into the hospital on Monday afternoon. They hooked Celeste up with an epidural that let her sleep through contractions, and things moved along from there. Celeste labored and pushed like a champ, but by the next afternoon our doc was convinced his huge noggin wasn’t going to fit, so they rolled her out for a C section.

So after a night’s sleep everybody’s fine. Celeste is doing better and better by the hour. Poor Gram is stuck in the NICU for 2 days while they test him for infection and track a big fluid bump on his head. They’re worried about blood clotting problems associated with it, but it’s seeming pretty clear he’s doing fine.

Celeste is going to get to go down and breast feed him this morning, so despite the separation we’re on track for normal new family stuff. : )

After the craziness of the last couple of days, there’s not much excitement happening here and not much to look at. We’ll most likely be in the hospital until the end of the day Friday and Gram could possibly be here for a bit longer. We're still pretty wiped out, so we're either sleeping, or being probed by hospital people. If you’d like to stop by, please email to check or just give us 24 to settle in.

Love,

--AB&C...&G!

I ordered a Dell Mini 9 online on 3 March 2009. I won't bother linking to Dell; don't bother going there.

See, they don't have any.

This didn't stop them from putting a huge "back to school" banner on the Japan website (school starts in April here), complete with a "Hurry! Sale ends tomorrow!" tagline.

Having read a lot about how easy it is to install MacOS on them, I thought it would be nice to have a tiny, low-powered, cheap laptop to carry around campus and take to conferences. Like the MacBook Air, but not a million billion dollars and requiring a dongle for ethernet and a dongle for video out (what good is an ultraportable laptop that requires you to carry a bunch of junk in order to use it???). And, reading that back just now, yeah, that would be cool.

For this reason, I ponied up my $400 or so (fully loaded--the most RAM and the biggest SSD drive) and prepared the materials needed to effect its transformation. The full amount was promptly deducted from my credit card.

Then it turned out that I wouldn't be getting the computer until after moving to my new place here in Kanagawa, so I needed to give them that address for shipping. But no worries. School didn't start until 8 April, and if I hadn't quite gotten all the Hackintosh bugs worked out yet by then, I could just use my MacBook.

Then the ship date was updated to 20 April.

...Ummm... Okay. This is not what I had in mind, but shortly after that is Golden Week, so I will have time to fix it up then and I can really start using it day-to-day after that, when the school year finally gets reallty underway and you don't have a public holiday every week (this sounds nice, but it's awful to try to plan a class like that).

The 20th came and went with no laptop. I checked the website.

15 May was the new date.