I’m currently reading The Prince, by Niccolò Machiavelli. It’s brilliant. Every time I read a classic I get the feeling one hour of classic is worth about a year browsing for “good” content on the Internet.

More. Classics.

How many times do I have to learn this before I dedicate myself fully to this task?

/lame

Also, I’d like to see Niccolo do a season of survivor. I think he’d own. I also bet he and Sun Tzu would have enjoyed each other’s company.

::

I’m about to consume a massive amount of Steven Pinker’s stuff–starting with this one. ::

If you haven’t heard of Safari Books Online it’s basically a massive collection of the most popular technical books (over 12,000) that you can access, search, and read online. It’s a phenomenal service, but you have to pay for it as a monthly subscription.

It’s arguably worth paying for, which many of my friends do, but yesterday I learned that if you live in California and have a library card you get access to the service at no cost. The whole library. Free. Just for living in California.

I know there are many horror stories around how California spends tax money, but this is a clear mark in the “well spent” category.

Setup

1. Get a library card from your local county library.
2. Go to your county library’s website, e.g. sfpl.org or aclibrary.org, etc.
3. Find a link for e-books and click on the link to Safari Books or Safari Tech Books.




4. Enter your library card information when prompted.
5. That’s it! Enjoy the entire Safari Online Library.

::

So I bought a Kindle.

I’ve been avoiding this purchase for quite some time, for a number of reasons:

1. Proprietary format: I don’t like the idea of my books being in Amazon format–a format that could change at some point in the future and make all my purchases obsolete.
2. The next iPad: I’d much rather have a Kindle on my future iPad (I avoided buying the first iPad because I want an e-ink-like experience on it). Once that comes I’m not sure why I’d have a dedicated Kindle vs. having a soft Kindle on the iPad.

Ultimately these were overcome by three things:

• I’m learning more and more that big companies that have a strong hold on marketshare are the standard, so waiting around for a high-quality, free, open standard that does what Amazon does is kind of stupid. And I am not interested in hacking an iPad to run Linux and some open-sourced project for reading all my books for free. I’ll take experience over openness most days.

• I can use the Kindle to hold a bunch of PDF versions of my favorite technical books, most notably The Web Application Hacker’s Handbook, so that I don’t have to carry them with me when I travel. Plus they’re greppable now. Bonus. This benefit will go away once I have an iPad, of course, but the e-ink-quality iPad will be second or third gen, so I’m holding out.

• The Kindle is just too cheap. For less than $200 I can get a ton of benefit while waiting for the iPad that will eventually replace it. Plus, I anticipate it being trivially easy to sell my Kindle once I don’t want it anymore.

Any Kindle owners out there that care to comment on how they’ve enjoyed (or not) theirs? Mine arrives today; can’t wait. ::

Yeah, the whole thing–all 30,000 books. Stellar news. Let’s hope it’s true.

Random w/ Tim and Kevin – Ep3 from Glenn McElhose on Vimeo.

Some to add to the list there…definitely. ::