this is sippey.typepad.com

cleaning out the browser tabs

It's about time I blog about all the open tabs in my browser, just so I can clear my head and get on with my life.

• They're making a movie version of The Road. Nuclear apocalypse! Cannibalism! With a charming young child actor!

OK, that was the only open tab...and blogging it isn't making me feel any better. After all, I doubt that even Viggo Mortensen can play it bleak enough to do justice to this line:

When your dreams are of some world that never was or of some world that never will be and you are happy again than you will have given up. Do you understand? And you can't give up. I won't let you.

Hooray for Hollywood!

is your dog a werewolf?

Moving on from the runaway children of Beautiful Children (deep cleansing breaths, wash hands well with scalding hot water, hug kids one extra time before bed) to the three roving packs of werewolves in Toby Barlow's new novel-in-verse Sharp Teeth. I seem to have missed the cultural pivot point when books began to have full blown flash-intro websites with viral video, but check out this little ditty, which will help you determine once and for all if your dog is a werewolf.

beautiful children

Just finished Beautiful Children. Though there are stretches of great prose, I couldn't find my way into any sort of a plot arc, other than what Ponyboy wants to do to Cheri, and the slow and obvious disintegration of Lorraine. I didn't believe any of the characters...only its setting; the book itself is a lot like Las Vegas -- well marketed, seems like it'd be a lot of fun, pretty on the surface and leaves you feeling empty.

a quick note to the kindle team

Dear Kindle team,

I just finished a week of travel with a new Kindle, and I'm well into reading my third book on it. So far so good -- the screen is very readable, even for long stretches of time; I don't have a problem with the next page / prev page button placement; the little e-ink flash when you turn pages isn't that annoying; and the battery life is great.

The UI for finding and buying books is pretty good, and it will be interesting to watch how you use the limited screen real estate and UI controls as a merchandising advantage as more and more titles come online. I can't imagine using the device for browsing the web or reading email -- the screen refresh is fast enough for reading books, but not for skimming web content.  And while I wish the keyboard were virtual (I only use it when searching the store), I get why it's there and appreciate the tradeoff decision re. price & touchscreen.

A key feature of the device is a simple and elegant way to highlight and clip sections of text -- and once you get the hang of it you find yourself doing it all the time. When reading real books I'm always marking pages or making notes in the margin; the Kindle makes this a quick click and scroll action. But I was surprised to learn that these highlights stay on the device, and don't sync up to your Amazon account. (You can download them with the included USB cable, but who wants to do that?)

So here's the feature request that must be on your roadmap: send my clippings back up into the cloud, where I can copy and paste them for future use. Bonus points for giving me the opportunity to connect my Kindle account to my blog, and have the service automatically post new clips via Atom or MetaWeblog. Extra bonus points for illustrating those with a cover thumbnail, and embedding my Associates code in the URL back to the store.

Best,
Michael

pattern recognition

So I'm making my way through The Black Swan; highly recommended. IAONAN (I Am Obviously Not A Neuroscientist), but Taleb's argument that our brains just aren't wired for outliers seems to be the flip side (in a good way) of Jeff Hawkins' descriptions of conscious thought in On Intelligence. Our brains are constantly doing pattern recognition, looking for how things fit...and being (quite literally) surprised when they don't. (And "click" went my brain.)  Plus, I haven't come across more descriptive terms than "mediocristan" and "extremistan." Perfect.

a picture, 1000 words, etc.

  Ten Best Books 
  Originally uploaded by msippey

I followed a link from somewhere today to The New York Times list of The 10 Best Books of 2007,  and was completely floored by the photo illustration that accompanied the piece.  It was pretty much perfect: of course, these are the ten best books of 2007. These ones, right here.  The ones arranged here ready to be put up on your shelf.

If you knew the spines, the text of the piece was pretty much irrelevant -- paragraph long descriptions of each of the titles. And while I admit that I live so far inside baseball that I'm buried under the mound, the simplicity of the photo felt like the perfect antidote to the past couple of weeks of Kindlemania. These are the 10 worth owning...in hardback.

kids these days, part 769

From Slate's review of Steve Martin's new book comes this depressing tidbit:  "According to the census bureau, roughly 40 percent of the American populace was born after 1981, which means that Steve Martin has not been a stand-up comedian in their lifetime."

This was the review's lede. I had to simply stop reading; it was just too depressing. I have no idea whether or not they thought the book was any good.

kindle motivations

So while the tech types commence with the time honored tradition of eating of their young, a couple of notes on why I want a Kindle.  Maybe not this Kindle, but a Kindle.

• My house has too much crap in it. Six years ago or so I ripped my whole CD collection, and on the rare occurrence when I actually buy a CD now, it gets ripped and then stored.  We used to have furniture dedicated to storing CDs -- no more.
• The books I keep on the shelf I keep for a reason.  I love books. Addicted to them, almost. About a year ago I went through a massive purge of the collection I'd been hoarding since the mid-80s and kept maybe 20% of them, tops.  I kept the favorites, the ones that changed how I see the world, and the great editions. These fill the shelves at home; the rest of them found new homes.
• Most of the books I'm reading now don't actually deserve to a permanent home on the shelves. This is sad, but true. I'm still reading great books, but after going through the experience of selling / donating the vast majority of my collection I'm much pickier about what ends up in our home permanently. And there are still too many for the shelves we have.
• All the other media I consume is getting lighter. You can make all the value judgments around this that you want, but the experience of buying and consuming all nine of Beethoven's symphonies is exactly the same as buying and consuming the latest Britney single or the latest espisode of Weeds: click, download, play. I'm spoiled by that experience and I want the same with books.

So those are all the rational reasons.  The slightly less rational reason is that a Kindle will let me hide my habits.  Kindle will let me buy and read books without having to worry about where they're gonna get shelved after the fact...or how they'll be perceived while I'm reading them.  Just imagine -- I could finally indulge my long-standing curiosity about romance novels and devour 10 or 12 of them in a row without having a single one show up in my bookshelf or in my bookbag. On the outside, it looks like I'm catching up on the latest in linguistic pshychology, while on the inside I'm enjoying the latest bodice-ripper from J.R. Ward. And no one but me -- and Amazon, and all of the trusted third parties my purchase history is shared with -- has to know.

dashing kindle

Anil writes the blog post I wanted to write[1] about Kindle.[2]

[1] But didn't get to it today; how the hell did he?
[2] NB: this post is filed under "Books" and not "Business" or "Software."

at least book tours at airports cut down on cab expenses

Kottke (and Buzzfeed! and the New York Times!) on virtual book tours, which would have been the more appropriate option for the guy hawking his September 11 historical fiction / conspiracy theory tome at McCarran Interational Airport in Las Vegas last week. He was walking up to people and handing out these glossy bookmarks that must have cost him a buck a pop, the poor guy.