So I bought my wife a Nook for Valentine’s Day.   She still buys paper books and they’re stacking up all over the place.  For someone who hates clutter, I figured having a single half inch thick device to hold her books might be appreciates.  I think the jury may still be out on that.

Anyway, I myself own a Kindle2 and a Sony PRS-300 (Pocket Reader) having traded in my Sony PRS-500 late last year instead of upgrading it to support the new ePub format.  So, as is probably obvious, I am an early adopter of eReaders as well as a proponent.  The Kindle2 and PRS-300 each have their pros and cons for buying and reading ebooks, but I’m not going to be going into those here.

I do want to provide my early thoughts on the Nook, though, after having set it up for my wife.  The very first impression was that it was quite difficult to get it out of its packing.    Once that was accomplished, though, the big thing I noticed was the color screen.  There is an interaction between the e-Ink and color screens that takes a little getting used.   Also, the soft keyboard on the color screen has smallish keys, though being an iPhone user it wasn’t too much of a stretch.  The biggest impression was twofold: 1 – It feels a little sluggish.  Performance could be better.  2. It’s HEAVY.  The Kindle2 and PRS-300 are both very light devices, but the Nook has considerably more heft.  It probably weighs similar to a decent-sized hardcover book.

We haven’t purchased any books on it yet.  I expect that the experience should actually be better than Kindle2 due to the color screen.  The Sony purchase experience is only thru the PC software since it has no wifi or wireless radio, so it will clearly be better than that.

UPDATE @ 8:39pm

Purchased first book on Nook. “Food Rules” by Michael Pollan, in case you were curious. Again, performance issues continue to mar the overall user experience.  The nook feels like it should be snappier, probably because most color screen UI’s are snappier.  I am accustomed to slowish refresh rates on the e-Ink displays, but I expect that hi rez color displays are snappy.  The fact that the book buying experience is a mesh of the two probably contributes to the overall feeling of sluggishness.  However, once I found a book I wanted to buy, the purchase experience was pain free and simple.  I think if B&N improves the firmware to the point where the color UX feels snappy, the whole thing will come together more.

Now, I need to stop using my wife’s Valentine’s Day present. 

So the webosphere 2.0 has been buzzing about the Stewart takedown of Jim Cramer and CNBC. If you haven’t seen it, then I can’t help you.

Anyway. What’s interesting about all the buzz is not that a “comedian” actually put Cramer on the hotseat – after all, Stewart took down Crossfire a few years ago – no, the interesting thing has been the media reaction to it.

I’ve read article after article about how this was how ‘journalism should be done’ and that it journalists should ‘take note of this’ and how this was the canonical example of tough investigative journalism.

Huh?  This is news? This is a revelation to hundreds – maybe thousands – of print and tv journalists in this country and around the world?

You’d think the 24hr news cycle would foster a greater need for investigative journalism, if only to fill all the on-air time for the tv people and to find the really juicy stories first for the print guys.  But it’s not a motivating variable because news is a for-profit venture and megacorps hold the purse strings. And what passes as “news” these days is primarily a pick-your-bias editorializing a la The Huffington Post or Fox News or maybe an investigative piece on some local, state, or federal government agency or a corporation already hobbled by scandal.  BFD.  That’s a day late and a dollar short.

Stewart/Cramer was great entertainment.  And maybe it was journalism a bit, too.  But I’m willing to bet that Jon would love to be out of this kind of business.  All of us should be, too.

Dan Lyons calls out CNBC’s Jim Goldman for being played by the Apple spin machine.  Gets banned from CNBC.  NBC cable news channels have been a piece of work recently.

Amazing what you let go of online…..

I had every intention of entering a post into the “StuffWhitePeopleLike” contest in order to win a copy of the book and to also have a post featured on the site.  But they closed the contest at the beginning of Friday rather than the end of Friday, so I was unable to submit an entry.  I have to be honest and say that I may not have had time to pull it together regardless, but I like to think I could’ve.  I had several ideas ruminating in my head on this one. Some of these included:

1. Montessori preschools
2. Moby
3. Going to Late Night/24hr Restaurants in Ethnic (non-white) Neighborhoods
4. Exotic Hot Sauce
5. Adoption (but not of white kids)

I felt like I had a couple of thoughts on these that might elicit a chuckle or two, but the one that I had finally settled on was this:

Being a “Foodie”

White people are obsessed with food, though most of them don’t have the personal time, energy, or skill to make themselves a great meal on a daily basis.  Keep in mind that white people also hate corporations, so relying on those awful corporate purveyors of fat, calories, and over-sized portions is anathema to the typical advanced white person.  No McDonald’s, TGI Fridays, Applebee’s or KFC for Taite, Amanda, and the kids tonight (NOTE: For some reason, though, In-N-Out burger is exempt from this scorn because… well…. because the burgers have lettuce in them.  Or something.  Who knows?) !  No, none of that kind of food for the advanced white person because they are likely to be “Foodies.”

Foodies like to believe they have an advanced palate and that food is more than just nourishment, it is an experience.  They obsess over the minutiae of food preparation by world-class chefs and marvel over all steps of the food preparation and presentation process so that they can appreciate the holistic experience of consuming extremely expensive food.  However, many foodies are quick to point out that the “Foodie Experience” is not solely about consuming very expensive food. 

Foodies will invariably point to street food in exotic countries as part of the foodie experience, largely because there’s no multi-national corporation backing the local fast/street food.  And the fact that you can eat at a cart and not get sick – without even needing to pass a health inspection! – means that the raw ingredients used MUST be fresh and, therefore, good for you (many of these foodies will overlook the amount of carbs consumed from a noodle street cart in Tokyo, but will peel off the bun as if it were a soiled diaper from a hamburger purchased in America).  Another bonus of the street cart experience is that the foodie also feels like they’re really helping out the poor street vendor when they hand over a few coins to them and utter the few words of thanks they learned from their Fodor’s Guide.  If the white person comes back multiple times to eat at the same cart, they will feel like they’ve somehow bonded with the poor local and that the street vendor will remember them for the rest of his/her life because of the shared experience of eating some noodles or other exotic local delicacy.  It’s truly a win-win situation.

But a foodie cannot eat of street food to the exclusion of other food experiences, so it’s off to the white linen tablecloth establishments eventually.  Foodies can smell a corporation a mile away (again, turning a blind eye to the fact that ALL restaurants are corporations, just not big multi-national conglomerations), so even though a place might have flavorful food, there will always be something slightly off at the place that serves not only Thai but also Korean and Japanese fusion at the same time.  Those are places that are fine, if you’re “just slummin’ it” but those are never places one goes to have a Foodie Experience.

When engaging a white person you suspect may be a foodie, you should casually test the waters by mentioning a local sushi establishment as one of your favorites.  Be sure to know the name of the one with the least amount of seating and the highest per-roll cost.  That is typically a safe bet.  If the white person’s eyes light up and they start going on about the “rice preparation being the key” and so forth, then you know you’ve hit a foodie.  At that point, you should casually mention how you prefer the omikase since you “trust the sushi chef implicitly” and let on your distaste for fancy rolls with non-traditional ingredients.  From there, you can launch into the local donut shop “that has no parking but is so worth it anyway” and then move on to the 5-star restaurants in your local city.  At this point, the white person will have a tremendous amount of respect for your taste and intelligence and will likely invite you out to a “tasting” at some point in the future.

Snark.  *Snort*

These are bands who might’ve started in the 70’s and also may have lived on in the 90’s, but were really part of the 80’s Metal-outside-the-mainstream-but-getting-closer zeitgeist.  At least, IMHO.

• Judas Priest
• Iron Maiden
• Quiet Riot
• Motley Crue
• Metallica

Metallica is interestingly unique as they actually did break through and became quite mainstream successes.  You can almost lump Motley Crue into that category as well, but I think Tommy Lee and Vince Neil became famous for other things besides the band.

Yours truly,

Former 80’s metalhead

• K.I.T.T. – Knight Industries sure did make themselves a nice Trans Am.
• The Batmobile – Even though this show was campy and very tongue-in-cheek, it sported the coolest car on TV for a long time.
• Optimus Prime – Really all of the transformers, but Optimus went from a huge 18-wheeler to a huge robot with a big gun.  Plus he had that great voice.
• George Jetson’s Briefcase Spacecar – Oh the parking hassles such a car would solve.
• The Mach V – Speed’s Mach V still stands out as stylish and functional!

• Spectreman – The bad guys were talking apes.  One of them had blonde hair.
• Starblazers – How cool was the space battleship Yamato anyway?  Plus, all of the characters had groovy 70’s hair and were impossibly thin.
• Space Giants – A family of robots:  Goldar, Silvar, and Gam.  Silvar was one lucky lady, I guess.  And who didn’t want a friend who could turn into a rocket?
• Ultraman – This show was better than Spectreman.  The robot guy was cooler looking and the storyline was less hokey than the other show.
• Macross/Robotech – The king of space opera anime.