Cranky Greg's View

Obama's Big Brother Government

What's scarier than Obama's Government taking over your computer?  Kimberly Guilfoyle's weird face!  Anyway, Glenn Beck explains this evil.

Microsoft Drones

Cranky Greg's been reading about Microsoft's new money-making, customer-gouging gimmick, Office 2010!!

Watch some of the videos hyping Office 2010 and then thank The Good Lord that you don't work for a big-ass corporation like Microsoft.  Cranky Greg would last about 2 minutes in an environment like that.

The Word video is pretty funny.  Most people use Word to create typical documents.  But Microsoft is doing its best to make it so complicated and annoying and cluttered.  Cranky Greg thinks that people often get caught up in all of the little graphics and fonts that they forget about the underlying message they are trying to convey.

It's like lawyers and PowerPoint.  Attorneys can go to classes to learn how to use PowerPoint.  "PowerPoint for Lawyers!  Win your next trial using PowerPoint!!"

Cranky Greg gets sick of lawyers that are tied to the PowerPoint teat.  They often forget the underlying point they are trying to make.  Many lawyers believe that if they put up a PowerPoint presentation they will win!

As if witnesses and other evidence don't mean anything.

Oh well.  Cranky Greg suggests that if you are having a bad day, watch the Microsoft videos by the Microsoft drones and be thankful you aren't one of them.

The Kindle

Cranky Greg left his Kindle at the office today, and he is irritated.  An evening without his Kindle!  Obama is spending Cranky's money and Cranky doesn't have his Kindle!

And tomorrow, Cranky Greg has the pleasure of hanging out at the courthouse waiting for a silly trial, with probably lots of downtime, which is what the Kindle is made for.

Anyway, here are some thoughts about the Kindle from Jacob Weisberg.

Kindle Review

Cranky Greg finally got a Kindle!  He's been wanting one since they first came out.  Cranky Greg is really impressed with it, for the most part.  Really, he loves it!

The screen is very easy to read.  It especially looks good under a florescent light that CG has on his office desk.  It looks good in the sun.  It looks good with a reading light attached to it.  Even photos look OK.

The biggest advantage of the Kindle is that you don't have to lug around a lot of books.  The Kindle is kinda like a bigger I-POD.  It's thin but has lots of memory and Amazon says it can store up to 1500 books!  There is, however, no slot for a memory card.  This will probably not be a big issue for the vast majority of Kindle users, especially since Amazon will let the Kindle owners download books they purchased at any time.  So if you do run out of space, you can delete books and download them again later if you want to.

There's on online dictionary which is handy, and a very rudimentary web browser that works fairly well with Wikipedia and other text-based web sites.

The purchasing of books is very easy, almost too easy.  Cranky accidentally purchased a book, but Amazon let him cancel the purchase right away.  That was cool.

Another nice feature is the ability to preview books.  There's a book about John Lennon that was recently published, and so Cranky downloaded the preview.  Cranky decided not to buy it after reading the tedious first couple of chapters.  That's a nice feature.

One thing Cranky really likes is the availability of classics at a discounted price.  Cranky bought The Federalist Papers for about 2 bucks.  And all of Mark Twain's writings for about 4 bucks.  And he also bought cheap versions of Thomas Paine's writings for about 2 bucks and The Wealth of Nations for a buck, etc....  Pretty damn cool if you ask Cranky Greg!

Cranky has several law books he consults on a regular basis.  These books come with CD's that contain Word files of the text.  With a Kindle, you can send these Word files to Amazon at your own special address (woo-hoo!) and a minute or two later they appear on your Kindle!  Worked great.  So now CG has all sorts of California civil procedure and torts stuff populating his Kindle.

You can subscribe to newspapers and magazines on the Kindle.  Regarding newspapers, well, they are pretty lame nowadays and they're all going out of business.  The good thing is that you can try a subscription for 14 days.  So Cranky is currently subscribing to The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.  The NYT costs about $14 per month, which is outrageous in digital format.  So Cranky will kill that subscription.  It is easy to read on the Kindle, once you get the hang of it, though.

The WSJ subscription is about $10 per month, and that is too expensive, also.  So even though Cranky likes to read the WSJ, he will not subscribe to it for $10 on a Kindle.  They need to drop their prices to under $5 per month, otherwise, the information is not worth it.

Cranky did subscribe to The New Yorker, and it's about $3 per month, which is well worth it.  The New Yorker cartoons are easy to read on the Kindle.

Readers can also subscribe to Newsweek and Time, but who wants to subscribe to them?  But they are cheap, less than 2 bucks a month.

Readers can also subscribe to certain columnists - like George WIll, for example, for a dollar a month.  That seems silly to CG!  Just wait until you get to your computer and read it on the Net.

Complaints:  Really, Cranky Greg only has one complaint, and that is that you can't organize the Kindle.  So all of your books and documents and subscriptions appear on one big list!  No sub-categories!

You can sort the list by author and "most recent first" and by title, but that really sucks, man.  Cranky already has over 80 items on his Kindle, and that translates into 9 pages of a list!  So those law books that Cranky uploaded to his Kindle show up as individual files.  There is no way to make folders for books, then newspapers, etc....

That is just so damn stupid.  It seems that a little software patch would solve that problem.  And this is the first thing that Cranky Greg noticed when he started downloading books and things.

Oh well.  All in all, Cranky Greg is very happy with his Kindle.

In a couple of months, he's gonna be a lot smarter, too!

Skypesaurus

Check out Leo Laporte's Skypesaurus.

Pretty cool!

Pandora

If you like music and you sit by your computer all day, you should try Pandora.

Commercial-free streaming music.  You can create your own stations.  It's like totally awesome, man!

Kindle 2.0

The Kindle 2.0 is on its way!

Prescience

Wow!  So the newspapers should have seen it coming....this story is from KRON in San Francisco in 1981.  Cranky Greg remembers moving from Dallas to Sacramento in 1988 and using StarText by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, which was on online service to access the Star-Telegram's news.  It was totally ASCII which meant that it was not a graphical interface.  CG used it in Dallas before he moved and thought it would be a great way to stay in touch with the goings-on in DFW.  CG had a 300 baud modem, and it would take about one minute to download an average article about the Dallas Cowboys, for example.  CG used to sit there and think it was the most amazing thing he ever saw!!  But CG stopped using after a month or two after he got to Sacramento after paying the outrageous long-distance bills!  Remember long distance?  Anyway, this KRON video is outstanding and it makes CG wonder why has the Star-Telegram and other newspapers that were apparently on the cutting edge in the early 1980's failed to deal with the Internet.  Probably because since then they were bought out by big-ass corporations with clueless management.

This is cool, too!!

Free Software

PC Mag's list of the best free software of 2009.

Good list.

Computer History

Cranky Greg saw this article on SFGATE about Douglas Englebart and his computer demo (known as "The Mother of All Demos") on December 9, 1968 in which he used a mouse, windows and hyperlinks.

Tomorrow afternoon at Stanford University, all the participants are getting back together to ruminate over their project which was groundbreaking and historically significant.

So guess where Cranky Greg's gonna be tomorrow afternoon?

Cranky Greg wants to see the guys who invented all the computer stuff we deal with every day.  In Cranky's view, it's kinda like getting to go to a Thomas Edison lecture.

Englebart and his group pre-date Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.