Dan Weinreb’s blog

I rarely post about day-to-day events, but this is an exception.  My family is travelling out west.  My wife Cheryl, and my son Adam (almost 18, going into his senior year of high school), are first going to Seattle so that Adam can attend residential Cybercamp for two weeks.  We had planned to do this at Bentley College, as we did for the last two years, but the parent organization (Giant Campus) has shut down about half of the Cybercamps across the USA this year due to lack of signups.  (Presumably this is due to the recession.)  Adam very much wants to stay on his promotion track (counselor in training, etc) so that he can be a counselor next summer.  Cheryl spent a long time researching alternatives, and this one works the best.

Cheryl and I spent all day yesterday getting her and Adam all set to leave.  At noon, Cheryl said that she wanted a netbook to bring, so I went to Staples, bought one, and spent hours removing bloatware, and putting in a new firewall, anti-virus too, and the apps she needs.  They left this morning at 4:00 AM for their 6:00 AM flight (she scheduled it, so don’t blame me).  Adam is doing two weeks of Cybercamp, and Cheryl is having a good time and picking Adam up for the weekend a week from now (Cybercamp ends Friday afternoon and resumes Sunday).

I’ll be here through Thursday (8/6).  On Friday (8/7) I have a 7:00 AM flight to San Jose.  I’ll be staying at Bill York’s house for a week.  Then Cheryl and Adam will fly down from Seattle on Sat (8/15), and we’ll see friends around S.F., the Bay Area in general, and Santa Cruz.  We’ll all see the Hearst Castle for the first time, and we’ll be staying in San Luis Obispo (at the Madonna Inn, although they didn’t give us one of the best special rooms).  We’re also signed up for the special nighttime tour of Alcatraz (Cheryl and I did the regular tour about 20 years ago).  We have a long list of places to visit, some of which we’ll get to, including the Computer Museum, the Intel Museum, and the Winchester Mystery House (Cheryl and Adam have already been there, but Adam very much wants to go back and show me).

We will be back on the evening of Tuesday 8/25.  Adam’s first day of school is Thursday 8/27.

To my friends in California, I want to see every one of you, but I don’t think I’ll manage to pull that off.  If you would like to get together and have not already communicated with me about it, please send me email so we can try to work out a meeting.  See you soon!

For those of you who got the “Change in status” mail from LinkedIn: no, I have not changed jobs.  When I do an angel investment, I create a new “Current Job” item so that I’ll turn up in LinkedIn queries by company. LinkedIn does not provide a way to control the order in which these items appear; it’s sorted by how recently you added the item.  I could remove and re-add ITA Software, but I’m not entirely sure that there would not be some undesirable effect.  I’ll say more in a subsequent post about how I use LinkedIn.

This summer, my family went to Ecuador.  On the Galapogos cruise, you have a very tight budget for luggage.  Normally we bring lots of books on vacation, but this time there was no way.  The Kindle was the obvious solution.  I bought one, we tried it, and we got a second one.  There were three of us including my son, Adam (age 17), so there was some contention; fortunately we did bring a few print books.

My wife, Cheryl, although she uses PC’s all the time, generally hates gadgets.  But she loves the Kindle and uses it very heavily, even now that we’re back.  I like it a lot too, and if I had time to read more books (argh!) I’d use it a lot too.

The eInk technology is amazing.  It’s far easier to read a book on a Kindle than on a computer screen.  You can control the font size.  Those of us old enough to need reading glasses, and to forget where we put them (sigh), can read fine with the large type size.  You can’t change the font, but I don’t care. You can plug in earphones, and there’s also a tiny speaker.

About half of the new or new-ish books that I go to buy are available for the Kindle.  When they are, that’s what I buy.  Kindle books from Amazon are also less expensive.  I typically pay $10.  You can get a rather extensive free sample of the book, to see if you like it.

You can get quite a few out-of-copyright books in Kindle format from various sources on the web.  I have the complete works of Herman Melville.  Cheryl, who is an English major specializing in 19th century fiction, has quite a lot more.  It’s all entirely free.

There’s plenty of memory, and I put in an SD card so there’s now vast amounts of memory, in effect, since an eBook is pretty small.  You can also download audio (Cheryl sometimes uses this), which takes a bit more space, but with the SD card, there’s no space limit in practice.

It can go for a long time without charging.  We only had to recharge every five days or so; obviously this depends on how much you use it.  The user interface is good, although not perfect: the buttons for moving forward and back are nice and big, but they are so big that you can’t always grasp the device the way you’d like to.  But it’s not a big problem.  If you’re eating at a table, the Kindle takes a lot less space than a hardcover or trade paperback book, and you don’t need to hold the pages open.  After the vacation, We both got nice third-party cases (Tuff-luv) that let you stand up the Kindle like a desktop photograph frame, but that’s not necessary.

You can annotate text; the keyboard is small and there isn’t any word processing (much like the Notes application in the iPhone), but for its purpose it’s OK.  You buy books from the Kindle Store over the “Whispernet”, which is actually the Sprint cell phone network, but you do not pay anything for this (no “data plan”, no subscription charges at all).  It works very well.  There’s a dictionary so you can look up words you don’t know.  There’s a “search” function, although unfortunately is searches all your books; there’s no option to just search one of them.

There are three “experimental” feature:

1. Basic web browser. It’s pretty basic, all right, but you can do some useful things in it, if you really don’t have any other way to get to the web.
2. Ask Kindle NowNow. Itlets you send any question to Amazon, where someone will do their best to answer it and send you back an answer.  Their operators just do web searches, and are supposed to get back to you in ten minutes.  I have not tried it.
3. Play music while you read. Copy MP3 files to the Kindle.  I haven’t tried this either, since I don’t listen to music while I read, but I’m confident that it works.

To transfer files to the Kindle (if you’re not just using the store), you plug a cable into it.  The other end is a normal USB. The Kindle appears as a device with three directories: books, audio books, and MP3′s. You just copy in the usual way. It’s very simple.

The Kindle does not support PDF directly.  However, there are ways to read PDF files:

1. You can send email with attachments to <yourself>*free.kindle.com to be converted and emailed back to your computer at the email address associated with your Amazon account.  Then you can do a USB transfer.  Or, they’ll send it straight to your Kindle for ten cents.
2. MobiSoft’s “MobiPocket Creator” converts PDF, Word, HTML, and plain ASCII to Kindle format, and does all sorts of other cool things.  It’s free. I haven’t gotten around to trying it yet.  See .  You need Windows, and Internet Explorer 7 beta 3.  When you install it, click on “publisher edition (for advanced users)”.  It’s not clear how well it works for very complex PostScript, or for PDF files with things like scanned pages.  Google “Kindle PDF” for even more on this topic.  There’s an application called “Stanza” for the Mac.

Objections I’ve Heard
Here are some objections I’ve heard raised about the Kindle, and my opinions.

• It’s not “open”; that is, you can’t program it. The Kindle is not a computer.  It’s an appliance.  I can’t reprogram my digital watch either.  This just does not bother me.
• eInk can’t be backlit, so it’s hard to read in dim light or the dark. That’s true, although it’s also true of ordinary books.  It would be nice if they could improve this somehow.
• It’s hard to share a copy of a book, other than by sharing the reader. Actually you can move a book to the SD card, and move that to another Kindle.  It’s not hard.
• Pictures do not render well. That’s true.  What’s more, at least one book we read was supposed to have a map that would have helped the reader understand the book, and the map was entirely missing.
• You might lose your Kindle, and it’s not cheap to replace, although you do get all your data (books, your own annotations) back from Amazon.  That’s true, just as it is of my notebook computer.  This complaint really has to do with the whole concept of ebooks versus print books, not the Kindle specifically.

And Also

I am not a real Kindle expert; I don’t read the blogs or anything.  There’s a great deal more information available at Amazon and many web sites.  One good one is “Top 25 Kindle Tips“.

I have not tried the Sony reader or any other book reader.  There are rumors about a second-generation Kindle coming out, but I don’t know anything about it.

Summary: It’s excellent.

I just returned from a two-week vacation in Ecuador, visiting the rain forest and the Galapagos.  There’s a lot you can read on the web about visiting Ecuador, so I won’t repeat any of that.  Here are some of my own experiences and hints.

The trip was booked by REI and they did a great job.  They were very helpful and informative, and all of their recommendations were good.

In Quito (the capital of Ecuador, where we spent a few days), we stayed at a hotel called Hotel de la Rabida. We loved it.  It’s small and has pleasant, cozy public spaces.  The rooms are very clean and functional, the food is good, the people are helpful, and the owners are very friendly. In the USA, we often are faced with the choice between a cheap chain motel, and a super-expensive business hotel; this is the kind of place we’re always looking for.

We spent several days at La Selva Jungle Lodge in the rain forest.  It’s as advertised: great!  Our guide has a degree in Ecotourism and has been doing it for nine years.  He was very friendly and helpful.  He spotted all kinds of animals and birds, and explained a lot about all the life in the jungle.  Our best sighting was of an armadillo, which was very exciting.  They’re rarely seen, particularly since they’re usually nocturnal.  We also visited a site where parrots and parakeets come to eat clay (scientists aren’t totally certain why they do that), and it was amazing to see hundreds (perhaps a thousand) of them warily and very gradually come down from the trees to where the clay is.

The rainforest is hot and very, very humid.  (We were there during the dry season.)  I had trouble sleeping.  I also had some sickness that I attribute to a reaction to Malarone, an anti-malaria medicine.  (Although my wife and son did fine on both scores.)  When I was there, I was told that there haven’t been any malaria cases in many years, so the Malarone wasn’t really needed.

Despite the economic problems in Ecuador of the past decade, the capital city of Quito looked to me as if it’s in very good shape.  It’s very clean, the roads are in excellent repair, there’s all kinds of business, and some very nice public sculpture, indicating a good amount of municipal care. We found the Ecuadoran people — not just the tourist-industry people but even those we just ran into — to be pleasant, and forgiving about our ignorance of Spanish. The only troublesome thing was that there were a lot of police and security guards around, with guns and bullet-proof vests. The area we were in didn’t look dangerous, but we were told not to talk around after dark.

Before I left, I heard varying reports about the water temperature around the Galapagos islands, and whether wetsuits were needed for snorkeling.  Most of us turned out to need full wetsuits.  The cruise boat I was on provided these, so it was no problem.  Once a sea lion decided to play with me, swimming straight at me and veering off at the last moment (twice), which was very cool.  A giant sea turtle swam below me, only about a foot down!  We also saw small sharks and, of course, lots of very pretty tropical fish.

We were very happy to see that The Galapagos National Park is being quite careful about taking care of the islands. These days there are a lot of visitors, and it’s important to make sure that they don’t disturb or harm things.  There are lots and lots of good rules: no food, no touching the animals, and so on. Visitors are always in small groups led by official natuarlists, who make sure that the rules are followed. Explicit paths are everywhere, to make sure you don’t trample nests and such.  The Ecuadorans are working hard to be good stewards, eradicate introduced species (every one of which damages the ecology), and do good science to understand the plants and animals better.  (Obviously they have a strong economic motivation here, as tourism is one of their major industries, but thery’re doing well by doing good.)

The cruise operation was run by Ecovertura (also see the very accurate review in the New York Times), and the guides were very helpful, friendly, and experienced.

The only really annoying part of the trip was going home.  Our flight had six legs (takeoff and landings)!  (This is mainly because the international part and the national part are set up separately.)  I’m not able to sleep on redeyes, and at the moment I have been awake for over 36 hours.  But it was worth it.