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. 

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.

Man, when your computer goes down, it really throws a wrench into your life if by “you” I mean “me” and people like me.  I have been without a reliable, stable since mid-August (I do not count this mini9 netbook I’m currently using since it’s not my main PC and does not contain even a franction of my files. Also: Outlook won’t run on it due to its SSD HDD), and I’ve been discombobulated without it.

I’m hoping to shoot the PC in the head (again) and give it a new nervous system (again).  I think its brain is fine.

Dear CyberpowerPC;

I purchased a PC from you in May of this year. I admit that I was purchasing as much for price as anything else. I bought a PC several years ago from your virtual clone IBuyPower and didn’t really have any problems.  In any case, I got what was a fairly high-end PC at the time.  When I got it, however, it had proven to be a fairly finicky beast.  It was generally reliable, but would occasionally reboot while playing a graphics-instensive PC game.  I wrote that off as a problem with the Nvidia 8800 GTX Superclocked.

However, right around mid-September, all hell broke lose.  The PC stopped POSTing the BIOS and was basically dead in the water.  I contacted your support line and they walked me through removing and re-inserting my RAM and ultimately decided that I had a bad stick of RAM and a bad motherboard.  I was issued an RMA for both and they were shipped.

It’s not my preference to do a mobo replacement myself on a new PC, but you don’t offer free shipping back to you (more on that later).

So I got the replacement mobo and replaced it, which wasn’t exactly my favorite weekend activity.

Still, no BIOS POST.

At this point, I had no choice but to return the unit.  And $120 later, it was on its way.  After a couple of weeks of it being gone, I was notified that you had once again replaced the motherboard, all 4GB of RAM, the graphics card, and the wireless card.  Holy cow!  WTF happened to the system!  I noted that practically everything but the hard drives were replaced.

Well, got it back and up and running with a fresh install of Vista and all seemed peachy for about a month.  And then, all of a sudden, I would get into a BSOD loop.  It wouldn’t boot.  Not even off the DVD most of the time.  Mind you, I had just got this back.  I managed to reinstall Vista finally, but it would start the BSOD cycle of death shortly thereafter.  This wasn’t a driver problem.

So I called your support line again.  Now, I didn’t mention earlier how difficult it is to actually SPEAK to someone in support.  It takes quite a bit of patience and persistence to finally get someone to pick up the phone.  When I finally got a hold of someone, I explained to him what was happening and that my investigations seemed to point to the HARD DRIVE(S) as the source of the problem.  But because this problem didn’t surface within the “2-3 week period” from getting my PC back, you will not pay for the shipping BACK to you to resolve this problem.

So once again, I am stuck with having to RMA the hard drives and replace them myself rather than send my PC back to you to get it taken care of.

Now, let me relate to you another OEM experience I am currently having.  I bought my wife an HP laptop in Dec. 2006.  You will note that it’s been exactly TWO YEARS since the purhcase.  Well, her laptop has been showing signs of GPU failure, most likely due to the bad Nvidia Mobile GPU’s that were used during the last couple of years.  Unfortunately for me, her laptop didn’t make it onto the “effected models” list for some crazy reason.  Well, I asked to speak with an escalation manager WHO TOOK CARE OF ME.  While he didn’t outright admit to it, he knew that my laptop was affected by this.  But he threw me a bone, and you know what?  This is what he did:

• He shipped my a box to ship the laptop in (NOTE: I threw away my Cyberpower box and asked you if you would ship my one AT MY EXPENSE, but you wouldn’t).
• He paid for ALL shipping back and forth
• HP is going to do the mobo replacement on the laptop FREE OF CHARGE

THIS is good customer service.  And I didn’t have to call back a zillion times and be on hold.  HE called ME….. TWICE.

All I want is for my half-year-old PC to work.  And by that, I mean boot reliably and stay up until I shutdown.  But you don’t seem to give a rat’s ass about it now that you made the sale.  Your service technician wouldn’t even give me the name/email of a manager.  Oh, and let me throw on my Microsoftie hat for moment and add that you are partially responsible for destroying the Windows brand.  For all the grief I give the “Genius Bar”, at least Apple trains its people to take care of their customers, which is far more than I can say about you.

So, thank you, CyberpowerPC.  I hope to eventually get over all my hardware woes with this computer. Rest assured, however, that when it comes time to buy a new machine sometime down the road, I will not hesitate to eliminate CyberPowerPC from the list of possible vendors given the poor customer service – and, frankly, quality – I’ve experienced with this machine.  I hope that the experience between now and when I get all my problems resolved can at least be tolerable.

Thank you,

Jim

P.S.  Also note that I have yet to have the motherboard charge credited back to me for the RMA.  I have to call Accounting to get that resolved.

P.P.S.  When I got the “repaired” machine back, you neglected to hook up the front ports.  So all the USB, headphone, microphone ports in the front do not work.  Sloppy.

I miss the late 90’s era Internet boom.  Not just because I miss my own stock options doubling in value every 12-18 months (God knows I miss that, especially these days what with 2 kids and all), but more because I miss all of the crazy insanity of the time.

Here are some of the companies I miss:

• HomeGrocer.com – I bought into the whole marketing schtick of the guy driving the big truck with the orange on it.  Amazon.com now has “AmazonFresh” which brings back some of the missed glory from this company. 
• Webvan.com (after they killed HomeGrocer.com) – Safeway and Albertson’s delivery are but a pale immitation of HomeGrocer and Webvan.
• Kozmo.com – I personally loved how you could order a SINGLE ODWALLA JUICE and get that delivered to you NO CHARGE in under an hour!  It was insane!  It was the most incredibly decadent service you could imagine, and it was real for a time.  I’m sure it scaled better in places like Chicago and NYC where people lived vertically rather than places like Seattle where people live more horizontally.
• Amazon.com – Yes, I know Amazon’s still around.  But somehow I miss the times where the future was questionable for that company.  Back then there was this seat-of-your-pants manic-ness about Amazon that somehow doesn’t exist today.  It’s a great ecommerce site.  I buy a higher percentage of goods from Amazon more than any other non-grocery retailer – web or bricks-n-mortar.  Now, AMZN is also a platform company.  There’s a great future in their EC2 and S3 platform play. 
• MyLacky.com – We didn’t use this company much, but being able to outsource things like dry cleaning pick-up and house cleaning was pretty nice.  If we had a dog, we might have even outsourced dog walking.  Problem was, that they were not hiring ‘cheap’ labor.  There was no way this business was going to scale.

I’m sure there’s a whole ton of other companies that I’ve already forgotten about that seemed to good to be true.  Of course, they were, I suppose.  There’s a few that are still around (e.g. Amazon, OpenTable, eBay, Netflix, Buy, etc.) and I suppose those brands that have made it this far are likely to be fairly solid by this point.  Still, I miss the 90’s.  Especially in the current days of doom and gloom.  Back then, it was small guys giving things away for free so they could survive.  These days, it’s the big guys giving things away for free so that they can kill off the rest.

Nerdgasm alert!  Hooking up Twitter to my blog.  Now I can spam the world in yet another fashion.  BTW, this is clearly the best part of actually writing a blog: fiddling with Wordpress itself.  Content is a means to an end. 

Boy, when I geek out on Wordpress, I go all in! Now publishing blog posts from my phone! Now I really have mo excuse not to post more.

Oy.  So much for my New Year’s Resolution (made early, no less).  Maybe because I didn’t make it on NYE, it doesn’t count as a resolution.

Anyway, nearly a year ago, I left Microsoft after 10 years and went to Adobe.  I wrote a whole long post about it back then that Wordpress somehow decided to eat.  Not sure why.  Fast forward to Februrary of this year (I’ve been saving up this story for nearly 2 months now).  I was down in San Jose at our nearly-annual/nearly-biennial Tech Summit, which is an internal conference for the company to gather together and see what we’re all doing.  It was pretty cool to see something like this.  Microsoft doesn’t do this sort of thing, but I suppose that would be a prohibitively mammoth undertaking to try and get everyone in the company together for a week long conference.  Never mind that everyone in the Seattle area would probably blow it off and go into the office instead.  Anyway, I digress.

One night during the conference, there was a dinner organized for all of Adobe’s Program Managers to take part in, if they so chose.  This dinner was at a hotel at a restaurant called Il Fornaio,which is one of those faux-upscale chain restaurants.  The food was oddly not terribly Italian.  Again, I digress.  The interesting thing that happened there was that there were several of us in the lobby area waiting to sign in and get our name tags identifying who we were.  While we were waiting, an older, distinguished looking gentleman stopped near us and asked us if we were Adobe employees (probably tipped off by the little Adobe sign on the table).  After nodding our heads, he then proclaimed loudly, “Love your products!”  We all proceeded to smile and mumble our thanks at his bon mots and the moment passed.  But for me, it was shocking.  I cannot remember the last time a non-relative or friend of mine indicated with any sort of genuineness that they loved any product made by Microsoft without any qualitative hedging (e.g. I love my Xbox360, but I’m on my 3rd after two RRoDs).

Which leads me to the second half of my story.  Only 1 week after returning from San Jose, I was at Costco shopping with my parents.  Since I have 10 years worth of Microsoft schwag, it’s not uncommon to find me wearing one of my many Microsoft-branded polar fleece tops, including the one that was the Windows Vista ship gift (valued at $1 from a Chinese textiles manufacturer).  On this particular Saturday at this particular Costco, I was indeed wearing said fleece.  During checkout as I was watching the register tape get depressingly longer, the ‘boxer’ (as opposed to the checker) looks at me and asks, “Hey, do you work at Microsoft?”  Generally, I answer this question truthfully when I don’t much care about explaining why me, an Adobe employee, would be wearing a Microsoft fleece.  But on occasions where I don’t feel like having a conversation about that, I just generally nod “yes” to kill the exchange, which is what I did on this occasion hoping that this is what would, indeed, happen.  Well, instead of leaving it at that, the boxer proceeded to chastise me for how expensive MS Office was and how she had to use Wordpad (which I had to guess given the hints she was trying to convey) since it was ‘free’ and how Wordpad printing was screwing up her letters.  Really not wanting to have this conversation, I mumbled some kind of apology and proceeded to cart out my overflowing Costco cart.

This, btw, is the kind of exchange I’m a little more used to when it comes to Microsoft products.  If I am not free product support for everything from Office to Windows to Money to some random app somebody downloaded from the Internet, I’m usually the target of some user’s ire over losing all their MP3’s in some computer crash (again, usually due to some random app they downloaded from the Internet).  This is generally the experience of most, if not all, Microsofties which is why the experience I had in San Jose was so totally shocking.

Ok, quick hits:

• Wii – thumbs up
• PS3 – jury’s still out
• Xbox 360 HD-DVD player – thumbs up
• Zune – thumbs down
• Xbox Live media downloads – could be thumbs up.  bandwidth problems and lackluster content selection make it “jury’s still out”.
• PSP game selection – still thumbs down.
• 2G Shuffle – thumbs up
• 2G Nano – thumbs up
• Gears of War – rocking exploding thumbs!
• Cingular Blackjack – thumbs up!
• Cingular 3125 – jury’s still out
• Samsung HP-S4273 – thumbs up!
• Comcast HD-DVR – still the worst piece of consumer electronics, in like, ever.  At least I’m still just renting it.

So, I got the aluminum Nano (no tuner or XM), and the Shuffle update was a surprise.  The updated iPod video was a disappointment and there was no phone.  I did buy Zuma for my 60GB iPod, which is somewhat entertaining.  It’s a little difficult to use the click-wheel as a game controller.  All told, this announcement was 3.5 Stars (out of 5).