Of course, this happens right after I pick up an HD-DVD player! One of the quotes in this article is pretty dire: “We expect HD DVD to ‘die’ a quick death.” I don’t know if that’s going to happen. I think a lot of people picked up HD-DVD players for Christmas, and I don’t think they’ll be looking to throw them out just yet. At least, I’m not looking to throw mine out! There are still a fair number of titles out on HD-DVD, so I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to get a bit of use out of my player over the next couple of years. I guess it may go the way of my laser disc player by, say, 2010, though, huh?
Year: 2008
Spider-Man
I dropped Amazing Spider-Man a year or two ago, so I haven’t been following all the stuff leading up to the “One More Day” story. I’ve read a bunch of the online reaction to the conclusion to this story though. This article at Newsarama sums up some of the conflict between JMS and Joe Quesada on the matter. I don’t think that I’d be happy with either of their approaches to this story. It doesn’t really seem like a story they needed to tell at all. I do agree with JMS that Joe Q genuinely cares about the character, and is doing what he thinks is right. I’m actually wondering if they’re going to undo this whole thing at some point and just go back to Peter and MJ being married. The whole point of the story might be to set up an arc that ends with the whole retcon being undone. That might be interesting.
Either way, I have to admit that I’m not really much interested in the Marvel Universe right now. I did enjoy Civil War, for the most part, but I wasn’t too happy with some of the character changes made during the course of that event.
e-book readers and related topics
I blogged about the Sony Reader a couple of months back. The Amazon Kindle is out now too. One of the things I didn’t like about the Sony Reader was the lack of technical books. I did a little searching on Amazon, and they definitely seem to have a better supply of programming books available than Sony. The pricing on them isn’t great though. For instance, ASP.NET 2.0 Unleashed is $36 on Amazon for the dead tree version, and $32 for the Kindle version. That book is almost 2000 pages, and weighs 6 pounds, so I can understand why the physical version costs so much, but I think they should really be able to deliver the electronic version at a significantly lower price. Leaving that aside for now, it’s still pretty compelling to switch from having a big pile of 2000 page, 6 pound books to having a single device weighing less than one pound holding multiple books. And I still think the idea of a partnership with Safari would be great, but I guess that’s too much to ask for at this point.
There have been some interesting reactions to the Kindle, from people like Scoble and Mossberg. One thing that concerns me is that both of those guys have pointed out some interface problems that make the device a little frustrating to use.
Cory Doctorow pointed out a few negatives on a post on BoingBoing, and talked about it a bit during an episode of TWiT from a few weeks back. His big problem is basically the DRM and TOS stuff. I don’t necessarily mind DRM, if it’s done well, and if I can trust that the company behind it will be supporting the system for a while. In other words, I don’t have a big problem with iTunes DRM, but I don’t really trust that anyone else’s DRM is going to be around long enough to make it worth my while to invest any money in it. Of course, I’d rather just not have *any* DRM, but that just doesn’t seem feasible right now. I know we’re getting there on music, but it doesn’t look like we’re anywhere near there on books yet.
I really like the wireless purchase and delivery system on the Kindle. That seems much better than the Sony system. I think that if they can get some of the interface kinks ironed out in the next iteration of the hardware, bring down book prices a bit, and maybe bring the price of the device itself down, then I’ll be ready to take the plunge and get one.
Happy New Year
I didn’t do much today, aside from watching football. I’m not making any major resolutions this year either. I did make all the arrangements to go to WonderCon today though. As usual, I wasn’t really sure I wanted to go this year, but a few things convinced me to go again. Basically, a good guest lineup, plus a general desire to get out of New Jersey for a few days. And a chance to see the Chinese New Year Parade again!
I haven’t really done much reflection on 2007. Normally, I would get kind of reflective on New Year’s Day, but I haven’t really been in that frame of mind. Well, just for the heck of it, here are some things I’ve done in 2007:
Books and comics I’ve read and liked:
- Absolute Watchmen
- Nextwave
- David Allen’s Getting Things Done and Ready for Anything (though I haven’t finished RFA yet)
- the first two Jasper Fforde “Thursday Next” novels
- a couple of Jim Butcher “Harry Dresden” novels
Movies & TV shows I’ve enjoyed:
- Paprika (my favorite movie of the year, for whatever that’s worth)
- Once
- Ratatouille
- The Simpsons Movie
- Rise: Blood Hunter (okay, not exactly high-brow, but fun)
- Torchwood
- Life on Mars
- Heroes
Music I’ve liked:
- Wilco – Sky Blue Sky
- Ryan Adams – Easy Tiger
- Paul McCartney – Memory Almost Full
- Pizzicato Five – Made in USA (from 1994, but I’d never heard it until this year)
- Derek and the Dominoes – Layla (I only just got around to buying this CD in 2007)
Pointless stuff I’ve spent money on:
- new couch
- iPod Touch
- TomTom One LE GPS
- Dell Inspiron laptop
- MacBook
- Microsoft Office 2007
- Motorola SLVR
- 19″ widescreen LG monitor
- Toshiba HD-DVD player
Things I didn’t get around to doing:
- buying a new car (the old one’s still working, but maybe not for much longer)
- checking out the new Greek and Roman galleries at the Met
- visiting the new Morimoto restaurant in NYC
Well, that’s just a bunch of random lists off the top of my head. I guess the two big things that happened in 2007 for me were the office move my company did (from Edison to Somerset), and my mostly successful implementation of GTD.