The Half Baked Lunatic

I bought my wife the new Kindle, from Amazon, for her birthday last week.  I really love the whole idea of eBooks – the Kindle is quite portable (about the size of a regular book) with a gorgeous high resolution surface that is really easy to read. Plus, you can do cool things like set multiple bookmarks, change font size, store hundreds of books at one time, and download new books wirelessly from almost anywhere in the world. It even has “text to speech” built in so it can read to you! Wow. It really is very, very, very cool technology. But there’s one thing that still bugs me ... we read a lot, my wife and I both go through a few books a month. So it’s quite likely we could spend a few hundred dollars (or more) on a library of Kindle books over the next couple of years. But what guarantee do we have that we will still be able to read them in ten years?  What happens if our Kindle device breaks, and there is no replacement?  Or what if the best device on the market in ten years happens to be a product from another company, which isn’t compatible with our library of Kindle eBooks? This isn’t just an issue with the Amazon Kindle, it’s an endemic More...

We finally moved in to our house two weeks ago (after living in a temporary apartment for the past three months) and we’re busy exploring our new neighborhood. We live up on a hill, just southeast of downtown Basel, in a nice and quiet residential neighborhood. At the bottom of the hill, just three tram stops away (or about a ten minute walk) there’s an eclectic commercial district with stores, restaurants, and a huge outdoor ice skating rink that we just discovered last weekend. I was down the hill the other day and had passed by a Thai restaurant that looked pretty good, so last night I suggested to the family that we give it a try. We haven’t eaten out since we moved, and I’ve been wanting to try out some of the local joints. On the way to the restaurant, we went down a block we hadn’t been down before, and discovered a large group of industrial buildings with a bunch of establishments – an incredible arena with eight huge rock climbing walls, a local theater (live stage), a dinner show, a circus school (not kidding), and a few bars – all mixed in with some light industrial and manufacturing businesses. On our way out on the other end of the complex, right across the street from the Thai restaurant we were planning to go to, we saw an intriguing More...