The things of this week

I've managed to finish the things for this week, but only to the bare minimum at the moment.  I think I will need to spend some more time playing with them next week to understand the full potential, especially with Google Reader.  However, I enjoyed finding gadgets to put onto igoogle and ended up with rather a crowded page!  My favourite so far is 'Children's book of the day'.  It's just nice, and I like children's books.  I don't know how to add a screen shot to this blog to show it though?

I'm not sure how I feel about google reader and rss feeds: this is the part I need to look at more closely next week.  For some reason, I have never really taken to rss feeds; I quite like trawling through my favourite websites to find new things. However, from reading other people's blogs, it look like I have been missing out on a useful tool, so I will devote some more time to it and explore.

A quick update on the Kindle:  everything was going smoothly until Wednesday.  I was enchanted with being able to carry around lots of books without ruining my bag (I've lost several bags to carrying books around that were too heavy for them to cope with).  However, on Wednesday evening I was coming towards the end of a book, when disaster struck and the silly kindle froze!  I spent about 15 frustrating minutes trying everything I could think of to unfreeze it.  Eventually, instead of throwing it on the ground and stamping on it (as it deserved), I looked up the Amazon troubleshooting page and managed to solve the problem.  Apparently I had pressed some buttons too quickly and this had confused the kindle.  My print books never get confused when I turn pages too quickly.  Anyway, I have forgiven the kindle for this transgression, but I feel more wary of it than I did before.  If I go on holiday with the kindle, I think I will have to take at least one print book as well, just to be on the safe side.

Starting to blog

This is the very first blog I have ever written, partly because I've never found anything particularly compelling to write about before, and partly because I didn't know how.  So far, the experience of setting up the blog has gone smoothly and has been more simple than I thought (although I suspect there must be some sort of pitfalls I haven't noticed yet).  I may attempt to make the design more individual at some point, though at the moment I have no idea how to do this.  I'm hoping (optimistically/naively?) it will be intuitive.  At the moment I have kept everything as simple as possible, using default settings and such, until I feel at bit more confident about how the whole thing works.

In the meantime (on a non blog related topic), I have just ordered an Amazon Kindle and am interested to find out how much it will alter my reading habits.  I'm quite excited about it, at the same time as feeling treacherous and as if I have betrayed the good old printed book.  Even before it's arrived, I've been downloading books, and have become quite preoccupied with trying to think of books I want to read that will be available for free.  At the moment, I only want to download free books, as I feel a bit dubious about the permanence of an ebook.  I'd be dreadfully upset if my whole expensive personal library disappeared one day!  (This is probably an unjustified fear.)  My theory is that I will still read paper books most of the time (because I like them), but will use my kindle when I am travelling about.  I found a nice quotation which I think illustrates some of the advantages of a paper book over an ebook:

 
"A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog's ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins"  ~Charles Lamb, Last Essays of Elia, 1833

I hesitated slightly about the legality of including this quotation, but as the author died more than 70 years ago, I think it should be ok.

http://www.cla.co.uk/copyright_information/copyright_information/