The gist of the story, Macmillan insisted that Amazon.com start charging between $12.99 and $14.99 for the Kindle versions of Macmillan’s books. Amazon has generally charged $9.99 or less, and wanted to keep it that way. Amazon stuck to their guns for a couple of days, going so far as pulling all Macmillan publications from Amazon.com. Well, today Amazon caved, and Macmillan’s new release Kindle books are now between $12.99 and $14.99. On the bright side, Macmillan promises that older books will reduce in price, to the $6.99 range. How good of them!

I for one bought Kindle books because they were cheaper than their hard-backed counterparts. All other things being equal, I’d prefer the physical book to the electronic one. So, when I’m not saving anything by buying the Kindle version, it’s not likely I will be buying the Kindle version.

You can bet that very soon other publishers will follow suit, and all new Kindle books will be roughly the same price as their paper equivalents. This is 100% due to the greed of the publishers. Electronic books are cheap to produce. Much much cheaper than paper books. There is no logical reason to raise the price of electronic books, and frankly, even $9.99 was more than they should have been.

What’s truly unfortunate is that this is Apple’s fault. They are entering into similar deals with publishers (to sell books in the $15 range), and publishers are undoubtedly playing this card against Amazon. “Do what we tell you, or we’ll enter an exclusive deal with Apple.” Amazon’s hands are tied, and we, the readers, lose.

Sorry Apple, sorry Amazon, I don’t intend on buying any ebooks as long as their cost is comparable to the physical book. Here the publishers win, because they know that we’re all suckers for new releases, and they’ll get their $15 one way or another. Ass holes!

Most of my problems with the iPad can be solved with software updates, and (you read it here first) will be solved by Apple before, or shortly after launch. The most glaring of which is the very iPhone-like home screen and “springboard”. Apple doesn’t do ugly, and the 4 x 4 icon arrangement with about an inch of padding around each icon is about the ugliest thing I’ve ever spied. This is a placeholder so they could get developers working on iPad software with the iPhone OS 3.2 SDK. The long-term home screen will NOT look like THIS!

​

My other problems are decidedly hardware based, and I expect them to be fixed in 2.0. First, as you can see above, the bevel around the iPad screen is huge. It can be about 75% of that size, no problem, and probably will be in the next version.

Second, I’m VERY surprised that there is no camera. It doesn’t make sense. I’m sure there is some kind of technical reason for this that will be solved for version 2.0

Third, there doesn't appear to be a compass or GPS.  While these aren't entirely necessary for the most likely use (sitting on your couch cold chillin') it would be a nice to have for any location-based functions.

Finally, there’s no way (currently) to either use the iPad as an external display, or use an external display with the iPad. This might be solved with an adapter, but how cool would it be to use the iPad as a 2nd display for your laptop?

Of course, I could always play the “get 1.0 and then get 2.0 and give 1.0 to my wife” trick. It always works.

These books were Christmas gifts for my son. He’d been getting into Christopher Moore, one of my favorite authors, so I thought I’d get him a couple of books to feed his addiction. Unfortunately, they were the same two books that I had bought him 6 months ago. The exact same books. Oops!

I still had the Books A Million bag handy, so when we were headed out December 26, I grabbed the books, and the bag, and stopped by Books A Million with the intention of exchanging the books for 2 more books by the same author. No problem, right? Wrong!

When I got to the counter, both sets of books in hand, the mousy woman first told me that the only way I could exchange the books was if I was a Discount Card holder. I explained that I was, but that I had let my membership lapse. So she said, “Well, then, I don’t think we can do the exchange. Do you have a receipt?” I said, “I can probably dig it up if I have to, but no, I don’t have it with me. It’s an even exchange, if that makes a difference.”

She told me, “Oh, no, I’m going to have to get the manager. I don’t think we can exchange them without a receipt.” So she called her manager and I waited semi-patiently. While we were waiting, I said, “You know, I know it’s not your policy, but having a policy like this is libel to drive customers away. It seems like with price already being a compelling reason to turn to Amazon, you would at least have better customer service.” She replied with, “We’re not worried about that, we beat out Amazon 5 to 1”. She didn’t elaborate on that, but that’s about the time they lost me.

The manager came to the register and confirmed that, indeed, they would not, could not, take an exchange without the receipt. “The machine won’t even let us do anything without a receipt!” I said, “I can go home and dig up the receipt if it’s really necessary, but am not real happy about doing that, given the weather.” He said, “Well, I’m afraid that’s what you’re going to have to do. Well, I guess if you remember the exact date and time that you bought the books, I could probably look them up, but it might take me a couple of hours to find your receipt in our system.”

Not wanting to wait around for 2 hours, gambling on the off chance that I may guess the correct date and time of my purchase, I headed home and dug up my receipt.

I then returned the books, with receipt in hand, and got a full refund, and ordered the replacement books from Amazon.com right there from the Books A Million register.

Oh, and if you live in the Joplin area and need some books, give me a holler. I may be able to add your order to mine and get you free shipping from Amazon.com. Anything to help put another nail in Books A Million’s coffin.

It won’t be an easy blog post for me, as it will require actually writing tests, which goes against my nature. This old dog, however, is ready to learn some new tricks.

We're very proud of what we did with this app.  Check it out at the iTunes App Store.

I originally realized that BorrowMe had finally be released when checking out AppShopper, a site that makes it much easier to keep up on what's new in the AppStore (Thanks, Pedro!)  Here's the link to BorrowMe on that site:

http://appshopper.com/lifestyle/borrowme

I’ll admit, I had some very high expectations for this book. The samples on Erica Sadun’s web site offered a peek into what to expect. Not only does the book meet my expectations, but it impossibly exceeds them.

The first surprise was the first chapter, a great primer for iPhone development. I wish I had this in my hands when I first started doing iPhone development, as chapter one explains some key concepts important to understanding iPhone development. The first chapter alone is worth the price of admission for those new to iPhone development.

The rest of the book is filled with examples of how to accomplish magic in all aspects of iPhone development. Some that you would figure out yourself given enough time, but most true gems. And a few with non-public API calls (use at your own risk).

Check it, out! You won’t regret it.

It’s not so much the bailout. While I would personally rather the government didn’t spend our hard-earned tax dollars to bail out some fat cats that made some bad decisions, I admit that my knowledge of all things economic is pretty limited, and trust that the “experts” will make the right choice. So, while I don’t want it, I could tolerate the bailout.

What I can’t tolerate is all of the earmarks the shoved into this thing. If this bill was so important, and so urgent, why the hell couldn’t our friends in congress just write a bill that did just what it was set out to do; bail out the banks. Instead it’s filled full of crap such as (and I’m not making this up!):

• $6 million for producers of kids’ wooden arrows. (Unless those arrows are going to be used to punish the fat cats, they have nothing to do with the bank crisis!)
• $192 million to Puerto Rican and Virgin Island rum producers! (I’m thinking that this “crisis” probably has those that drink drinking a lot more rum these days, so this one was truly unnecessary. The rum producers will be making a killing anyway, along with the tobacco industry and the beer industry.)
• Some undisclosed amount to...wool research! (Sounds a little dirty)
• $128 million to auto-racing tracks. (Um...why? As big as NASCAR is these days, I’m thinking they can afford to make their own damned tracks!)
• $33 million to companies operating in American Samoa. (Hey, cool!...no...wait...not so cool, but certainly better than rum or auto racing)
• $10 million to small- to medium-buget film and television producers. (I’m not sure what kind of movies $10 million can produce, but my guess is that we just purchased a stock in the porn industry.)
• $233 million as...get this...tax benefits for fishermen who’s livelihoods suffered as a result of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. (This was clearly a way of buying the vote of Alaska Rep. Don Young. I wish I could get a break for my suffering of 20 years ago! As a starving college student, life really sucked about then. I consumed roughly $192 million worth of rum, too, hmmm...it’s all coming back to haunt me now...I definitely need $233 million for my suffering.)
• $3.8 billion (with a B) for health care provisions that force insurance companies to provide mental-health treatment coverage. (While I see a connection between mental health and this bill, I don’t think this bill is the appropriate place for this.)

Why the hell do we let this happen? How can we prevent it?

For those of you that are supposed to be representing us in Washington, shame on you.

(source: NY Post, via Drudge)

Not to toot my own horn, but toot toot, I have an app available!  MPG

I've also launched a new site to support my iPhone apps.  iPhoneCodeMonkey.com.

Check it out!

• Get stuck behind a driver going 5 to 10 miles per hour under the speed limit.
• Be in line at a fast food drive-thru with full car lengths between each car in front of you.
• Be stopped at a stop light with the guy in front of the line two full car lengths short of the stoplight.
• Narrowly avert an accident with someone driving diagonally across the parking lot.
• Narrowly avert an accident with someone drifting happily across the double-yellow line.
• Have someone smile at you and wave you in to traffic that you are trying to merge into.

So you would think it would be really hard to drive in any way that would get these people into a frenzy. Well, I’ve discovered it, and it’s called hypermiling.

In short, hypermiling is a way of driving that increases your miles per gallon. There are all kinds of techniques to make this happen, and most of them seem pretty logical. Stuff like not accelerating too fast, keeping at the speed limit, taking advantage of gravity and coasting down hills. You can find several articles and tips on Google.

Slow acceleration and going at or below the speed limit are great ways to piss off even the most patient driver.

Using this technique, I managed to get 21.5 miles per gallon out of my minivan, which when driving normally gets 18 MPG. I am hypermiling on my Civic this week, and don’t yet know what kind of results I will get, but I’ve used somewhere between 1/8 and 1/4 of a tank of gas, and have gone about 100 miles. It looks like I will be getting between 35 and 40 MPG, where I normally get 28 to 32.

Here’s to saving a few bucks.

The fever I gots is the photography bug. I guess that makes me a...

shutterbug |ˈ sh ətərˌbəg|
noun informal
an enthusiastic amateur photographer.

It started with a trip to Hawaii where I took a boatload of pictures. Then one of my co-workers had to go and point me to HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography. WOW!

So, I’ve decided I’m going to start up yet another hobby, photography. As near as I can figure, it’s going to be one of the costliest hobbies I’ve ever taken on. Much to my surprise, when I brought the idea up to my wife, she didn’t complain about the cost, instead she said, “Oh, you’d be good at that, and would really enjoy it. That would really be good for you.”

So, wish me luck. Should be an interesting ride.