Observations on the Barnes and Noble Nook
I have more than a dozen books and several dozen technical PDF books on my Nook at this time. I’ve been using the product for about a month.
If you are considering buying a Nook here are some things to think about:
- Barnes and Noble isn’t doing a good job making store employees into Nook evangelists. At my local store in Chattanooga they could care less about Nooks or Nook accessories.
- Barnes and Noble keeps promising different dates for Nook and Nook items to be carried in stores. I’ve been waiting to look at and touch covers for my Nook for 60 days. This is frustrating.
- Nook software continues to improve. The last update took me to version 1.20. Pages turn more “naturally” now and the Nook itself powers up and down a bit quicker.
- Sometimes while holding the Nook, pages change by themselves or the color navigation screen lights up and kicks me out of my book. This is due to oversensitivity of the controls.
Buying books is a fairly simple process but there are not enough technical books available yet for the Nook. Additionally, I’m used to Amazon’s web site telling me about the kind of books I want to buy. Barnes and Noble’s site keeps pushing garbage I don’t want to read. It is insulting to be directed towards Twilight novels when I am absolutely not and never will be a part of the demographic that wants to read about glittery morally upright vampires who enjoy dating humans and attending high school prom even though they are hundreds of years old.
Get your degree in nanoscience
(Nanowerk News) NanoProfessor, a division of NanoInk, Inc.® focused on nanotechnology education, is pleased to announce that its NanoProfessor Nanoscience Education Program is currently underway at Dakota County Technical College (DCTC), in Rosemount, Minn. Once completed, students enrolled in the DCTC program, will possess the knowledge and hands-on experience needed to pursue a career in the high-tech world of nanotechnology. DCTC offers a 2-year AAS Degree in Nanoscience and was the first 2-year technical college to offer a multi-disciplinary nanoscience AAS degree. The NanoProfessor program will provide in depth experimental opportunities for students in the first semester of the program. Comparable hands-on nanotechnology education programs have traditionally only been available at large, prestigious 4-year universities with graduate programs.“Nanotechnology is a growing aspect of virtually every industry in Minnesota, the U.S. and the world, and it will require a workforce that has a fundamental knowledge of nanotechnology and the hands-on skills to complete the nanotech-oriented jobs of today and the future. Exclusivity to an education in nanotechnology is not the answer,” said Deb Newberry, director of the Nanoscience Technology Program at DCTC. “Together with NanoProfessor, Dakota County Technical College is helping meet this demand by creating opportunities for our students that previously they could only dream about.”(Nanowerk News) NanoProfessor, a division of NanoInk, Inc.® focused on nanotechnology education, is pleased to announce that its NanoProfessor Nanoscience Education Program is currently underway at Dakota County Technical College (DCTC), in Rosemount, Minn. Once completed, students enrolled in the DCTC program, will possess the knowledge and hands-on experience needed to pursue a career in the high-tech world of nanotechnology. DCTC offers a 2-year AAS Degree in Nanoscience and was the first 2-year technical college to offer a multi-disciplinary nanoscience AAS degree. The NanoProfessor program will provide in depth experimental opportunities for students in the first semester of the program. Comparable hands-on nanotechnology education programs have traditionally only been available at large, prestigious 4-year universities with graduate programs.”Nanotechnology is a growing aspect of virtually every industry in Minnesota, the U.S. and the world, and it will require a workforce that has a fundamental knowledge of nanotechnology and the hands-on skills to complete the nanotech-oriented jobs of today and the future. Exclusivity to an education in nanotechnology is not the answer,” said Deb Newberry, director of the Nanoscience Technology Program at DCTC. “Together with NanoProfessor, Dakota County Technical College is helping meet this demand by creating opportunities for our students that previously they could only dream about.”
I probably will have to wait until after I get a doctorate in management of information systems to expand my formal education into this fascinating field but eventually, I believe I will attend a similar program, even if I have to wait until I am retired to do so.
In the mean time, if you are young and wondering what career to pursue, read this:
By 2015, the National Science Foundation has projected that the world will require a skilled workforce of more than two million nanotechnologists. The field of nanotechnology is already pioneering breakthroughs and innovations in the areas of energy, medicine and electronics, which will have a profound impact on lives in the 21st century.
If you want to be involved in what will be one of the most exciting and controversial as well as life changing fields in human history, think about nanotechnology.
Choosing between Kindle and Nook
This is my first post from an iPhone. I didn’t think I’d ever do this type of blogging but what the heck. Malleable is good. Availability maybe not so much.
Do I want a Kindle or do I want a Nook? Barnes and Noble seems to be making a great entry into the field of e-readers. The Kindle has been around longer. The Nook looks like it takes all the best the Kindle has to offer and improves it slightly. The libraries of books available to both devices are huge. Prices of the books are similar. Both devices can download periodicals and other third party content. Neither of these devices really goes too far beyond being a good reader while stuck in an aluminium tube in the sky but they are worth getting to know. Chances are we’ll soon be using them to blog, twit, text and prepare keynote addresses. I wonder how many years it will be before I can dump all my devices in exchange for just one device – a connected everywhere all-in-one portable phone, entertainment, reading and storage device. Probably not that many.
A painful learning process with Ubuntu, virtual servers and the inner workings of Wordpress
I have been keeping this blog since 2004. I’ve written well over 1,000 entries including a year of blogging from Baghdad, Iraq. This blog has become a combination diary, political screed and memory lane for me. Needless to say, I’ve been extremely irritated that the blog crashes every other day. I’ve switched hosting providers three times now trying to get the issue corrected. Finally, I decided enough was enough.
After countless hours of troubleshooting my conclusion was that CPanel on CentOS is what has been causing my Wordpress blog crashes.
I bit the bullet and created an Ubuntu virtual server using the LAMP stack at my hosting provider VPS.net. After two weeks of trial and error learning, I’ve migrated my entire blog from a CPanel managed environment to one where I am controlling everything using FTP (Filezilla) and SSH (putty).
I’ve had numerous problems with Apache mod_rewrite, setting up an FTP server from a command line and so on. For others who might be trying to setup and install their own Wordpress instance or migrate an existing Wordpress blog at the most basic levels, here are some links I think you may find useful.
Useful links for setting up or migrating Wordpress to an Ubuntu server
HOWTO : Create a FTP server with user access (proftpd) – Ubuntu Forums
How to set up a mail server on a GNU / Linux system
Migrate Wordpress to a new server or directory | Richard Castera
Moving WordPress « WordPress Codex
Editing wp-config.php « WordPress Codex
WordPress SuperCache-Plus plugin | The Murmatrons
Cultural change and the U.S. Army are compatible after all
One of my biggest frustrations with military life is that old standby answer I always get when I ask why we are doing something I think is dumb – “We’ve always done it that way. Shut up and do it.” Welcome to new paradigms.
“For a couple hundred years, the Army has been writing doctrine in a particular way, and for a couple months, we have been doing it online in this wiki,” said Col. Charles J. Burnett, the director of the Army’s Battle Command Knowledge System. “The only ones who could write doctrine were the select few. Now, imagine the challenge in accepting that anybody can go on the wiki and make a change — that is a big challenge, culturally.”
In recent years, collaborative projects like the Firefox Internet browser or Wikipedia pages have flourished with the growth of the Internet, showing the power of thousands of contributors pulling together.
Not surprisingly, top-down, centralized institutions have resisted such tools, fearing the loss of control that comes with empowering anyone along the chain of command to contribute.
Yet the Army seems willing to accept some loss of control. Under the three-month pilot program, the current version of each guide can be edited by anyone around the world who has been issued the ID card that allows access to the Army Internet system. About 200 other highly practical field manuals that will be renamed Army Tactics, Techniques and Procedures, or A.T.T.P., will be candidates for wikification.
As is true with Wikipedia, those changes will appear immediately on the site, though there is a team assigned to each manual to review new edits. Unlike Wikipedia, however, there will be no anonymous contributors.
Many in the Army have been suspicious about the idea, questioning if each soldier — specialist or not — should have an equal right to create doctrine, Colonel Burnett said.
“We’ve gotten the whole gamut of responses from black to white,” he said, “ ‘The best thing since sliced bread’ to ‘the craziest idea I have ever heard.’ ”
The colonel said that he was hopeful that by reaching out to the 140,000 members of the Army’s online forums, he would be tapping the kind of people who would be comfortable collaborating on the Web.
“Our motto is, ‘If you ever thought what would I do if the Army let me write doctrine, now is your chance,’ ” he said.
Technology inevitably changes everything. Hopefully, in the Army, that will mean we think on our feet more effectively and value our soldiers more for their minds than we have in the past. Warfighting has never been more of a mental game than it currently is and that trend will only continue.
