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I have started to use my iPhone for reading at school with the Amazon Kindle app, and I read my Kindle at home. This way I don’t have to bring another piece of electronic equipment that might get lost or stolen to school each day. I must say the page syncing and ability to read my current book on either device is amazing. I have just completed my second book and plowing right along in my third. Amazon has defintely got this e-reading thing down to perfection. Any of those out there that enjoy reading, this combo of iPhone and Kindle is the most amazing thing ever to happen to books. I think we will begin to see many more ebooks emerging far more quickly than print books in the future. This is already starting to happen with limited edition or multipart book releases where the parts are released for the Kindle every month or few weeks while the whole book might not be published for several months. So bravo to Amazon for creating something so amazing.

Having used my Core2Duo machine now for watching several films I can safely say this is a much better way to go. I haven’t gotten everything dialed in in terms of the install yet, but viewing wise it is simply amazing. No more dropped frames using only a 2.2GHz Core2Duo and integrated Intel graphics. I have the system running off of a compact flash card for heat and power reasons and that is working well also short of a small journaling issue that causes the system to keep pinging the compact flash card rather intensely. I will have to figure out what the exact problem is, probably will switch to a non-journaled filesystem with a fresh install. I also started thinking about possibly trying to get some Windows games running on that system, maybe a big race car game of some kind. I think I’d like to see that on a big TV.

School work is coming in quite quickly so far. I have several large things due in the next week. I will have to keep up on that to ensure it doesn’t get out of control. Overall I think I could learn a lot this quarter in terms of more about how things work in the computer. There are still a lot of things I want to learn that were never touched upon at school that really kinda disappoints me seeing how this is my last quarter and all. Everything that is taught relates so specifically to logic and basic algorithms. I feel like I could write you some advanced logic at a command line interface and that about sums up my college education. We never addressed GUI design or implementation, graphics using OpenGL or Direct3D, and no wireless communications. I look through for code examples on how to do these things and am dumbstruck at all these crazy objects and constants that go into setting up these lines of communications and really wish someone had a clear explanation of what is going on. We also never discussed media storage, retrieval, or usage. I don’t even know how to setup a Java app for playing an MP3. It seems quite strange that school would focus so much on the basics and leave us coming out into a media centric world with no knowledge on how those things work.

Well that’s enough ranting for one night. Still lots of things I want to do, but don’t know how. Quite the frustrating position to be in.