Review: Kindle DX

My kindle came in about 2 week ago. (And it felt a little bit like Christmas.)

I was determined to try out the device right away and see if I can find any fatal flaws that would convince me to return it. So instead of doing any work, I spent most of the day at my desk reading. It’s interesting, because you actually look semi-professional when you’re reading from a Kindle. People see a fancy device and they assume you’re deep in thought reading something scientific when in reality I was reading: this. I actually wanted the first book I read on the device to be Ender’s Game, one of my all time favorites. But for reasons unknown it wasn’t for sell as an e-book on Amazon. First Meetings was a pretty good alternative though. I’ve never read it before, and it was short, so I actually had time to get some work in after I was done reading it.

I knew for sure though that the first book on the Kindle had to be something Sci-Fi. There’s something that just feels right with reading about a futuristic world while holding a device that two decade ago would’ve easily been classified as something belonging only in that world. In fact, both the shape and the size of the Kindle look exactly like the little portable monitors straight out of Star Trek.

I guess I’m digressing, this is suppose to be a review! Let’s give this another shot.

First and foremost, the E-Ink screen is exactly what it’s cracked up to be. It’s not print, but it looks pretty damn close. In fact, when the Kindle first arrived it came with a protective plastic over on its screen with the Amazon logo covering most of the screen. Up until I pulled it off, I was absolutely convinced that the logo was something printed on that layer of plastic. I had known about E-Ink’s ability to keep an image on the screen indefinitely once it’s set, but it still came as a surprise. Year of CRT and LCD screen usage had ingrained in me the idea of no power = blank screen.

As far as reading goes, the screen made a huge difference in regards to how long I was able to read for.  On the laptop screen, the best I can do is maybe half an hour before my eyes start getting tired and I have to go get some food or a drink. With the Kindle, I’m pretty confident I can go on for as long as I would be able to with a book(6-7 hours). The lack of glare and backlight really does put less stress on the eyes. In addition, you don’t really realize how much you shift your body while reading, until you’re forced in front of a monitor. Having a light weight device that you can move around with, increases the comfort several folds.

Overall, the interface is pretty friendly. There’s a home button that you push to access your books, or you can push the menu button to access specific function(like the web or settings).  There’s a build in dictionary that displays the word when you move the cursor over a word, but it doesn’t work for pdf files. The web function is slow, limited, and kind of clunky, but I was able to send a few emails out from it just fine. I also looked up a few words on wikipedia. To be honest, I wasn’t really expecting all that much from a free service.

All in all, I believe it was a worthwhile purchase. I had to prepare a presentation for last Friday and if nothing else, it was nice to just have a second screen to read my references from, rather than a stack of papers I had to fumble through. If you’re considering buying a E-Book reader just to read books though, I probably wouldn’t recommend the DX. The bigger screen is definitely not needed(unless you have eye sight problems) and the smaller Kindles are more light weight and easier to bring along.  Although with the recent release of the Nook, I’m not sure a Kindle is even the best e-book anymore for casual reading.

The Nook offers a larger selection of books, and the touchscreen interface(below the e-ink screen) is probably more smooth than the keypad on the Kindle. The only thing you really lose is the ability to access the internet. In the end it comes down to what you believe the device will be used for.  For me the large screen and free internet were deal breakers, but I can see how a lot of people might not care about them at all.

Once Upon a Midnight Dreary

For the past week here it’s been raining  pretty much non-stop. In addition, the temperature’s been dropping pretty regularly. Together this made what most experts in field call “lousy weather.” On top of being cold and wet all the time, I think the general atmosphere is giving me what resembles seasonal depression. All I felt like doing today was crank up the heat, wrap myself in a blanket and watch lousy shows on Hulu. (Un)Fortunately, an exam on Monday and an upcoming paper submission gave such thoughts a quick demise.

In all honesty, I should be used to this kind of weather. I suffered through 4 years of it in Ithaca. But for some reason it just feels different. Back in Ithaca, when it used to be cold outside, it always made the inside feel more cozy. Maybe the humility here causes the cold to penetrate through your clothes, or maybe the buildings in Ithaca were just better suited to deal with this kind of climate.

I think it also has to do with the presence of people. Compared to Hopkins, Cornell was way crowed. It had a bigger campus, but there were also a ton more people. In addition, the campus was focused enough that a large majority of the people had to go through the same areas in order to get to where they wanted to go. In the end, this meant that if you’re walking around campus, you’re bound to have several people around you. Here at Hopkins, the campus is essentially desolate during the weekends. I didn’t see a single student today on my way to my lab. Even during the week, if it’s not in between classes, the most I’ll see is maybe 4-5 people(in a 15 minute walk).

I don’t know what it is about having people around that makes the cold so much more bearable. I don’t think it’s solely just that we’re all giving off body heat. There’s something more psychological about it. Imagine yourself going down a large street in the middle of winter(it can even be snowing if you want). There’s definitely a different feel if the street is entirely empty, as opposed to filled with people hustling in and out of stores. Perhaps being in solitude enhances your perception of your surrounds, or maybe on some level there is a degree of pack/tribal endurance that makes you less aware of the cold when you’re surround by other. Regardless of which, I definitely miss it here at Hopkins.

I also miss having a particular friend(lets call him Maniel Desa) complain about the cold every other night. It was like music to my ears and always warmed my heart.

On a side note, I can totally see now why Baltimore was such a awesome influence for Edgar Allan Poe.

What’s Your First Thought?

So I just got an email from Cornell that had this image embedded at the top:

What’s your first thought?

Let me tell you mine(and I’m really hoping I’m not the only one that thought this):

So first of all, the word “cyber” is such a 1990’s word, it came with the internet boom and presumably left with the dot-com burst. In recent times, I think the only time I’ve really heard the word used is in the context of  ”Cybering” (SFW as far as I can tell, no pictures). And even then, it’s usually in reference to some of the more ridiculous(and sometimes funny) stuff people do with their World of Warcraft characters.

So the title by itself already gave me a pause.

Now if it was only the title, then I would just laugh it off and chuck it to a very male tendency to see sex in everything. But seriously… “A program of Cornell’s Adult University?” Why does the word “adult” need to be in there? Since when has there been children attending Cornell? The only time I’ve ever heard the world “adult” used as an adjective is either A.) you are talking to small children or B.) in the context of adult movies and adult magazines.

So what was my first thought when I saw this?

“Cornell is promoting an online “escort” service?”

Okay, now you can feel free to call me crazy behind my back.

Min-y Thought: Depression

Sometimes when I’m feeling down, I go online and look up symptoms for chronic depression. Most of the time it cheers me up to  know that I’m not chronically depressed.

Turns out I’m just a little Emo. =P

Prize

The big news for today is that Dr. Carol W. Greider, a professor in the JHU Medical School is the co-winner  for the Nobel Prize in Medicine this year. It’s hard to be doing work related to medicine(or I guess academia in general), and to not consider the prestige associated with winning the field’s most coveted award. Of course for most it’s just a pipe dream. The work Dr. Greider was given the prize for was related to research she did over 25 years ago as a graduate student. That means to win the prize, you literally have to wait a third of your life to see what impact your research has had on the world. On top of that, you are competing with every discovery ever made in your field for the past half century or so.

All in all, this puts your chances of winning a Nobel at slightly less than winning the lottery. The difference, of course, is that rather than $1 tickets, your entry fees are major discoveries and  journal papers.

It’s All in the Hands

Lately my electronic piano at home has been collecting all sorts of dust. Ever since I’ve found out that the Mattin’s Center has practice rooms with grand pianos that I can use for free, there just hasn’t been any motivation to play on a fake one. Playing on a grand piano is just that awesome. When I was a kid, the only time I really got to play on them were once a week during my lessons at my teacher’s house.  This makes  a few weeks ago the first time I’ve played on one in like 4-5 years.

It’s kind of hard to describe why grand pianos are so much better than standard pianos. It’s just something about their sound that makes the music sound more complete. It’s interesting, because it isn’t until you start playing pieces on one that you start realizing what was and wasn’t written with one in mind. While most pieces sound better on them, there are certain ones(classical pieces in particular) that just jump to a new level aesthetically.

On a related note, the Mattin’s Center is pretty interesting by itself. It’s kind of the artsy part of campus, so every once in a while you will see people performing in the open square at the center. Walking out from the practice rooms, I’ve seen people break dancing, or doing interpretive theater. Last night, some dude was twirling flaming batons (I can’t imagine that being school approved).

I’m sure this kind of stuff happened all the time at Cornell, but I spent most of my time in the Engineering quad, so the chances of me running into it was pretty low. I guess that’s one advantage to having a small campus– a little bit more exposure to the people from different schools.

Kindle DX

Every year I tend to only make one big purchase early in the year. It’s not intentional, but that’s how it ends up working out. This year it was a HD monitor (a laptop last year,  and a piano the year before). At the moment the big contenders for next year is a PS3 or a Kindle DX. Up until about 2 weeks ago, the PS3 was reigning essentially unchallenged. With the recent price cut, the combined appeal of a Blu-Ray player along with some potentially great games coming out next year had me pretty much sold. I had every intention of getting one once I’m done with my qualifiers next January. That is, until I inadvertently saw the well placed ad for the Kindle DX on Amazon while I was looking for some books.

Doing some quick research, I found out that new iteration of the Amazon E-Book pretty much eliminated all of my major concerns with the original Kindle: the screen size, and the in-ability to read pdf’s direction. You see, the main appeal of the getting an E-Book is two folds.  First is, naturally, the ability to have all my books in a convenient 1 pound screen, and to get a slight discount on books, since most e-books are cheaper than their paper counterpart. However this by itself isn’t really enough to justify buying the device. It would take me literally years of book buying to break even on that kind of a purchase.

The second reason (and really the main reason) is that having an E-book would mean that I will no longer have to deal with the metric ton of journal papers that clutter my workspace. For some reason, I just can’t read papers on my laptop. It has to do with the glare, plus the uncomfortable sitting position that makes what is usually a difficult read near unbearable. So I end up printing out everything I need. The problem of course is that as time goes by, these things stack up in a way that makes it hard for me to find what I need when I need it, and I tend to  forget if I printed things out already, which lead to reprinting, which leads to a bigger stack, and the problem escalates.

The problem with the original Kindle was that the screen was way too small to read any kind of journal paper, without some excessive panning and zooming(if that was even possible). Also, any pdf you wanted to put on the device first had to be sent to Amazon to be converted before you can upload it. This equated to a pain that just wasn’t worth the time. The DX fixes both these problems, by first letting you upload pdfs directly via USB, and also having a much larger screen which you can flip horizontally so that you’re reading a zoomed up version of the top half of the page.

On top of all that, Amazon covers free 3G wireless access for browsing very basic websites. This means that whenever I have coverage, I can visit Gmail and Wikipedia, which are really the only two sites I miss without the internet at home.

Overall, I’m pretty set on getting a E-Book, the only doubt I’m having at the moment is whether I should go with the DX, or wait for reviews on the new generation of the Sony Reader. The new Reader comes at a lower price tag, but at the cost of being smaller. However the real appeal is the the touch screen which would make highlighting and jotting down notes on papers infinitely easer. The only problem is that the Reader’s 3G connection can only be used to download books, so no email and web browsing, which I’m pretty sure is a deal breaker for me.

Thoughts?

Scary

So this happened earlier today:

http://gizmodo.com/5359797/student-kills-intruder-with-samurai-sword-after-playstation-laptops-stolen

I actually heard about it first from an email from the Dean in the morning, but I guess it didn’t really register until I got linked the article just a few moments ago.

It’s weird, because when you read about these kind of things, you usually just shrug it off. In this case, I would’ve probably even found it a bit amusing that there was a samurai sword involved.

However, when something like this happens 3-4 blocks from where you live, the first thing on your mind is usually: “Wow, that could’ve been me” and in this case “and I don’t own a sword.”

Having lived here for a year without much mishap, the fact that Baltimore isn’t a very safe place has kind of slipped into the back of my mind. The truth is that while Hopkins is much safer than the surrounding area, the grime of the city still spills through on frequent occasion. Robberies occur pretty often, and there has a been a few cases of students being murdered in recent years. This isn’t like Ithaca where serious crime happens to student 3-4 times a year.

Lately I haven’t been getting back home from the lab until pretty late into the night. I guess this was a grim reminder that I probably shouldn’t be doing things like that. It also makes me glad I moved to the 9th floor of an apartment complex.

Home Improvement

These days I seem to be all about self improvement. I don’t know why, but I constantly feel like I should be doing something better. Maybe I just have too much free time without the internet at home, or maybe it’s some primal instinct to raise my self worth, like a magpie enriching his nest with an assortment of shiny objects.

Regardless the reason, the big problem with the whole ordeal is that I have absolutely no resolve to keep anything going longer than I feel like it. I.E. the minute I lose interest, whatever it is I was doing will be dropped and something new will fill its place. As a result, I end up cycling through a number of activities, keeping none longer than a month or two.

From what I can tell, these activities can be generalized into three main groups: Fitness(various exercises) , Arts(reading, sketching, piano), and Health(food, hygiene, sleep schedule).

For the past few weeks, I’ve been stuck in the last category. As a result, I’ve been trying to eat salads more regularly, and lay off the fried/junk food. I also started using mouthwash at night. I don’t know what they put in that stuff, but I honestly can’t taste anything for half a day afterwards(including breakfast the next morning).

Thinking about it, I really should be able to improve all three categories above simultaneously, but whenever I try, I just end up dropping all three. I guess being able to do one is better than none. My hope is that as time goes on, I’ll just slowly incorporate each into my permanent lifestyle. Or maybe I’ll just go back to playing video games and eating potato chips all day.

We’ll see I guess.

Eternal Dusk

Now that I live on the 9th floor(as oppose to the basement), I get to look out my window every once in a while and gaze at the evening sky.  What I notice is that, even in the middle of the night, the skyline in Baltimore is always filled with an orange taint– presumably from the rampant street lights that flood the city. When you’ve spent most of your life in small cities like Logan, UT, and Ithaca, NY,  you don’t really encounter a whole lot of light pollution. Being able to see the sky is just one of those things you kind of take for grant.

Sometime, in brief moments like those, I’m given a tiny glimpse at both the absurdity and the significance of our existence. When we live our lives doing the things that drive us (our basic needs, our happiness, our sense of responsibility), we rarely take a step back and truly look  at what’s around us, and the amazing improbability of our existence. We are but small insignificant combinations of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen (and various other elements) reacting on a floating piece of rock, but yet we’ve bent the world around us. We’ve raised structures hundreds of thousands times our mass. We’ve launched collections of matter into and out of the orbit of the earth(and soon the sun).  We’ve split atoms, things too small to even detect with light. All of this we’ve done in less than 100 years; less than 40 millionth the age of the planet.

The probability of any one of these things happening through pure random physical phenomenas  is virtually impossible. But yet it’s happened, through some random stroke of luck, we came into existence, and everyday we are performing tasks and changing the universe in ways that should in all theory never happen at all.

So here I am, wearing my clothes, banging my fingers against an array of plastic buttons, realizing just how insignificant I am compared to the universe. But yet I feel grand. My life may not be the most important, nor the most exciting, but the very fact that I am alive already makes me more interesting than 99.9999…% of the universe. The very fact I exist and am capable of understanding my existence, makes me one of the most amazing phenomenons in the universe.

I think I might just got out and buy myself a gold star.