Now I tell me...

Last week, our son dropped his MacBook, killing its screen. It's difficult for him to send packages from school, and he needed fairly quick turnaround, so last Friday, he had to schlep from Santa Cruz to the San Jose Apple Store to put it in for repair. It took him all day to get there and back, and of course it wasn't covered under warranty. He had them ship it back here, so he could use it while he was home for Thanksgiving.

Apple had great turnaround on the service. The repaired MacBook was delivered here on Tuesday. The painful part: it was an $800 fix to replace the broken LCD.

I happened to be looking around for something related to my own MacBook today, and ran across ScreenTek, who sell replacement LCD screens, and have excellent, step-by-step illustrated instructions on how to swap out the screen. Turns out that it's really not too scary a fix; all you need is a couple of Phillips screwdrivers. I figure I could do it in about an hour. The replacement screen can be purchased from them for $375. Saving $425 on the repair makes it worthwhile if your laptop is out of warranty, or suffers a non-covered failure.

And now, we're going to make Sean purchase laptop insurance from Safeware, too.

Happy (belated) Turkey Day!

To quote from my favorite piece of art on our walls:

“There are things you do because they feel right & they may make no sense & they may make no money & it may be the real reason we are here: to love each other & to eat each other's cooking & say it was good.”

We had a lovely dinner tonight with good friends, great food, no travel, and no stress. For those of you in the US, we hope that yours was equally enjoyable.

Time for a bet?

Dori says that she thinks the Amazon Kindle is a bomb, and she thinks that it will flop. Her argument is based mainly on its DRM. I think that it will succeed, become a big business segment for them, and will be the first of a new line. Neither of us has seen or touched one yet.

Frankly, I have a better track record on new consumer gadgets than she does. I think the benefit of being able to carry a ton of books with you, and get more at a moment's notice, is going to outweigh the device's negatives. And I don't think anyone but techies gives a crap about DRM, as long as it is not so restrictive that it prevents people from doing what they really want to do with the device. Bottom line case: will the DRM prevent people from carrying around a crapload of books and reading them on their own Kindle whenever they want? No.

I think of books that I buy every year, such as the Year's Best Science Fiction series. These are 650-page trade paperbacks, with lots of good shorter-length stories. Great content, and the stories are the right length for me to read in snatches throughout the day, but the book itself is kind of a pain to carry around. It's thick, it's heavy, it takes up too much space in my bag. Mostly, I only read these books at home, and that often leads to me not finishing them. Putting several years worth of these books in a Kindle and reading them anywhere is a pretty tempting prospect.

Yes, there are things about the Kindle that I think should change, and that I'd want to see changed before I put out my money for one. But they're in the details, not the concept. Most of them are easily changed by Amazon as they fine-tune the device and service to what the market really wants (like device and services pricing). Some of them are unknowns, such as the ability of the Kindle to eventually handle PDFs. But that's not essential, and my bet is that the Kindle makes it in the marketplace.