New Toy - It's a Kindle Fire.

 It arrived at the office at 4:12pm yesterday. Unfortunately, I left at 3:56pm. It was a surprise belated B-day gift from the Lovely Belle. So I've been playing with it all day. I'd been ruminating about getting one for a few months, and mentioned it when Belle asked what I wanted for my Birthday. Usually, my answer is "nothing, cars are all still running, everyone's healthy and happy for the most part, I'm good."

 I got the  Amazon Prime free trial. And yeah, I know it's not an I-pad, but whatev...I love this thing.

I read like a machine starting in grade school up until a few years ago. Then, one day, I put the book I was reading down and haven't read much other than blogs, news sites and automotive manuals since. Burnout from decades of non-stop reading I guess.

I think I've recovered now. I downloaded "Throw Them All Out" by Peter Schweizer, "The Federalist Papers", and the "Anti-Federalist Papers" today.  

This thing could be dangerous in my hands. Buying a book is way too quick and easy. I suspect Amazon will turn a profit off me in spite of the loss leader price on the Kindle.

I haven't used the web interface too much yet, but I tested out the video / movie streaming this evening and realized that my big screen lcd tv was a horrific waste of money. (I jest, but just a little).

I held the Kindle up in front of me and realized at half arm's length, the screen is the same image size as the big screen tv on the other side of the room. 

The storage capacity in the Fire seems a bit anemic at 8Gb, but with the Amazon cloud storage available I think I'm not going to have much of a problem.

Download speeds on it are PDQ. It doesn't have a 3G or 4G connection, but I have access to wi-fi just about anywhere I go. 

The two primary uses I saw for it were as an E-reader and a video/movie streamer. I doubt I'll do much web surfing on it. I've got a linux laptop that will just run circles around it. I'll probably upload my MP3 collection to it.  When bidness picks up again, and I'm traveling all over creation again, it will be a lifeboat on the long plane flights.

I think it's going to suit my purposes just fine.