Reading by Kindle light

For the second time this week, we lost power. It was earlier in the evening this time, about 5:30. We listened for our neighbor's generator. Sure enough, the low hum was rolling across the cove.
Ours is such an exciting life. Friday evenings are anchored by several PBS shows (Newshour, Beat the Press, This Old House) plus a couple of items on DVR. As a half hour became an hour, we set ourselves up for a different time.
We heard the sounds of the Northern toads in the swamp, a long, low call offered to potential mates. We had a round of checkers. Sandra won two of three. We had our supper on the deck by the sauna and lingered until the black flies and early mosquitoes drove us away.
The dark filled the house and eventually the outdoors. We could see our neighbor's flag, waving in an easterly breeze. The hour became two. We read for a while, Sandra on her iPad, me on the Kindle. At nine, we went to bed.
I'm usually awake a couple of times during the night, for an hour or two each time. I woke at midnight, read for a while, went back to sleep, and got up again shortly before three.
National Grid, our electric company, has a website that let's you check on the status of outages in an area. Cell phone coverage at the camp is faint, barely 1 bar.

(National Grid uses Amazon Web Services, AWS, to handle its outage map.)
Sitting by the window and with the phone high, I waited and eventually collected enough bits from the sky to get to the website and learn about the state of things.

As I was reviewing the information, the WiFi signal icon came on. Odd. I looked at the floor and noticed that the lights on one of the power strips was on. The power was restored an hour earlier than estimated.
Dunno what happened. My guess is that a transformer blew out, affecting a small part of a small town. I stayed up for a while longer, drifting off at first light.

Why is Amazon a Mac hater?

Amazon offers a publishing service that delivers blog content to Kindles and kindred e-readers. The subscription costs $.99/month, one-third of which goes to Amazon.
I set up an account and will make this stream o' bits available through the Kindle channel. (If anyone subscribes, I will donate my proceeds to charity. I'm interested in the publishing process, not in making money.)
One annoying hitch, however, is that, when I go to the publisher's page to log in to my account, I'm greeted with this warning.

Internet Explorer isn't available and you really have to dig to find Firefox versions older than the current  (17.0) release.
It turns out that the message is benign. Safari and Chrome, the two browsers that I have installed on my Mac, work ok.

3+1 things about the tablet wars

Apple doesn't have to worry too much about the Kindle Fire or Nook Color or their kin. The people who buy a tablet based on price will still wish that they'd bought an iPad.  The people who buy a Nook have a specific reason for doing so and most will be happy with their choice. Apple would not have reached them anyway.

The people who buy iPads (iPad buyers are exactly who you think they are, but with pets (infographic) | VentureBeat), may not know quite why they did. Or, they probably knew exactly why they bought one, but are embarrassed to give the real answer. (Sort of like saying you bought Playboy for the interviews.)

Apple has managed the near-impossible: they became the generic name for a type of product while retaining their distinct intellectual property rights. (See their series of brutal take-down suits in Europe and Australia  over the Samsung Galaxy. Nilay Patel explains it all in Apple sues Samsung: a complete lawsuit analysis on The Verge.) Apple won the music player (iPod), integrated monitor-system (iMac), and ultra-ultra notebook computer (MacBook).

1. The iPad still defines the terms of engagement. It's iPad vs. not-iPad, even when it isn't. When Jeff Bezos announced the Kindle Fire, he didn't mention the iPad at all. He didn't have to and shouldn't have.


2. Retail strength trumps specs. Barnes and Noble makes better systems than Amazon, but Amazon can and will deliver anything to you effortlessly.
   Buying books and magazines on the Nook and iPad has been a confusing and unsatisfying experience. Amazon figured out how to do that a dozen years ago and no one else is close.


3. When the battle moves to the Cloud, Amazon may be able to get the upper hand. Apple's never done really well with Internet services. iTunes works because they control the start and end of the pipe and there's no chance to get lost.  Their servers rarely handle peak loads well.
   I think that Google should buy Barnes and Noble. Then it would be a fair fight between the Kindle and the Nook.

+1
None of these is a social product. Social media is glued onto each product like an afterthought. Apple doesn't know how to do social. (Remember Ping?)  The promised deep integration of Twitter is nowhere to be found in iOS5. Amazon doesn't even have the native Android Twitter client in its app store. The Nook leaves a bag of tools on the table and says, "Here, you do it."

By the way, there are plenty of tablet comparisons and reviews out there. You don't need one more from me.This one is pretty good: A human review of the Kindle Fire – Marco.org, as is the venerable CR: Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet: How the specs compare.

My own experience is that I pre-ordered a Kindle Fire, received it on Wednesday and boxed it up for return yesterday morning. I have a Nook that's now running CyanogenMod. Much of the time, I bring my iPad to meetings instead of my laptop.

For the next year and probably two, Apple will own and define the tablet market. One of these companies still has to figure  out a coherent social strategy for tablets. If Google doesn't buy B&N, Facebook should consider it make a serious social tablet.