I am digging Pixton.
Create cartoons on Pixton. Cool interface, fun to play with. Give it a try. I’m going to do a series on Sam.
Here’s my first one:
“Sam Goes on Holiday”
Page 72 of 125
I kid you not.
John Hodgson, PC in the Mac and PC ads. Lists 700 hobo names.
Listen to Hobo_Names.mp3
His website is equally hilarious:
http://www.areasofmyexpertise.com/
(Source: James Sherrett)
Just this morning I was complaining to James. “How heavy do you think my laptop is?”
He said, “About 6 pounds.”
Six pounds doesn’t sound like a lot, but after you’ve lugged it around on business trips and several blocks, 6 pounds feels like 60.
Then this morning Kiley send me this email with the quip: Can you handle it? This is going to push you two over the top …
TECHNOLOGY | January 15, 2008
Jobs Reveals Tiny New Laptop
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Apple chief executive Steve Jobs took the wraps off a super-slim new laptop, unveiling a personal computer less than an inch thick that turns on the moment it’s opened.
It’s 3 pounds, man!
Quote: From the Apple site:
MacBook Air is ultrathin, ultraportable, and ultra unlike anything else. But you don’t lose inches and pounds overnight. It’s the result of rethinking conventions. Of multiple wireless innovations. And of breakthrough design. With MacBook Air, mobile computing suddenly has a new standard.
Here are the features. It recognizes movements like the swish used on the iPhone.
Salivating …
The Annick Press house is a very cute house in Toronto. And in that house are two very smart women named Lisa and Alicia. In fact, there are many smart people in that house. And every day around 3:30 in the afternoon they get together and have tea and talk about their books and the interesting things that are going on with their authors, friends and other animals in the publishing world.
On what was surely a bright and sunny day in December, Lisa and Alicia launched a blog.
A blog!
It’s true. A very fine blog indeed.
The end.
(But not really the end because you can keep up with the story on the Tea Time at Annick Press blog.)
If you’re a book blogger or someone who is on the receiving end of publishers’ online marketing campaigns, this survey is for you.
GalleyCat posted yesterday that Publishing Trends is conducting the survey to find out more about how people are approached by publishers, if it is something that people enjoy and whether publishers should keep competing for attention this way or not.
I’m skeptical about how they are going to assess this but I haven’t taken the survey yet.
I heard very sad news yesterday. Raincoast Books, a Canadian publisher here in Vancouver, has closed its publishing department and laid off several staff members. Raincoast is continuing its distribution and wholesale services.
For a small industry, it is really disappointing to lose a Canadian-owned and operated program and my heart goes out to the staff laid off and to those still working in the company.
I wish Raincoast better finances for 2008, and I wish personal happiness and good fortunes to those incredible people let go.
According to Merriam-Webster’s online audience, w00t is the top word of 2007.
1. w00t (interjection)
expressing joy (it could be after a triumph, or for no reason at all); similar in use to the word “yay”
Facebook is in at #2.
(Blog was the #1 word for 2004.)
Wired magazine did an interesting round-up of e-book readers (old crappy ones not included).
The list includes:
Amazon Kindle
HanLin eReader V3
Sony Reader PRS-505
iRex Iliad
Bookeen Cybook Gen3
Seiko-Epson
Fujitsu
NUUT NP-601
Sony Reader apparently looks the nicest. iRex is powerful and practically an e-ink Tablet PC ($700). Bookeen, which I’d never heard of but was recently introduced to by Bruce Batchelor (thanks Bruce), is noted as the lightest and thinnest. Watch the Bookeen video to see how lithe it is. And the Seiko-Epson, Fujitsu and NUUT are not currently available in North America.
I predict that 2008 or early 2009, I’ll be using some device that lets me read ebooks and more. Maybe iPhone will come to Canada. Maybe there will be a fab new device developed that does everything I want. Maybe I’m crazy.
Fascinating article in The New Yorker on reading habits.
A recent study has shown a steep decline in literary reading among schoolchildren. No surprise. How do you fit reading into a busy schedule that involves TV, the internet, soccer practice, video games, homework and general nonchalance towards books?
Crain’s article starts with National Endowment Fund reports on the decline in reading, moves to neuroscience and a short history of the printed word and ends with the conclusion that a limited amount of tv can help academic scores but that overuse (and the general turn away from books and towards tv) will change (has already changed) the cultural landscape significantly and will alter our understanding of our world and each other.
It’s a long article but fascinating.
Quote:
There’s no reason to think that reading and writing are about to become extinct, but some sociologists speculate that reading books for pleasure will one day be the province of a special “reading class,” much as it was before the arrival of mass literacy, in the second half of the nineteenth century. They warn that it probably won’t regain the prestige of exclusivity; it may just become “an increasingly arcane hobby.” Such a shift would change the texture of society. If one person decides to watch “The Sopranos” rather than to read Leonardo Sciascia’s novella “To Each His Own,” the culture goes on largely as before, both viewer and reader are entertaining themselves while learning something about the Mafia in the bargain. But if, over time, many people choose television over books, then a nation’s conversation with itself is likely to change. A reader learns about the world and imagines it differently from the way a viewer does; according to some experimental psychologists, a reader and a viewer even think differently. If the eclipse of reading continues, the alteration is likely to matter in ways that aren’t foreseeable.
UPDATE:
More bad news on the reading frontlines. “Canadian book readers fall behind U.S.: poll” by Misty Harris, CanWest News Service, published: Tuesday, January 01, 2008
Read the article.
Quote: According to a new Ipsos Reid survey, which was commissioned by CanWest News Service and Global Television, nearly a third of adults (31 per cent) across the country didn’t read a single book for pleasure in all of 2007. The discouraging figure puts Canadians four points behind the U.S., where an identical poll last August showed 27 per cent of Americans hadn’t picked up a book in the previous 12 months.
The good news is that the 69 per cent of Canadians who were reading in 2007 did so voraciously, with the average person in that group having dug into 20 books over the course of the year. The same number was true for Americans who had read at least one title in the previous 12 months.
I know I shouldn’t doubt this but are 69% really (on average) reading 20 books? That seems really high.
I took the personality quiz on The Golden Compass site to determine my daemon. A daemon is your spirit protector. Mine is Elleron, a tiger.
You can determine whether this is a good daemon for me or not.
What do you think? Vote for whether this is a good match.