Oh, and the Kindle is due to arrive. I've decided to give it a real try over these next several weeks: read at least one book, subscribe to a magazine (The Atlantic), follow a blog (The Huffington Post) and see if I can make it work. I spent a whole lot of my life searching through book stores and reading most anything that caught my attention, something that's slacked off this last couple of decades. Maybe a reader (for some inexplicable reason) will turn that around? I'm as interesting as anyone in playing with the latest gadget, but is this more than a gadget? Is this a planetary shift? We'll see, maybe, here in Oakland.

Later. An half an hour's walk around the neighborhood to get my walking in wondering if the UPS truck would arrive in my absence. I've obviously hyped myself up on this Kindle, I don't remember worrying too much if I were here or not here when some of the more exotic camera gear was arriving in the past. If it doesn't come today, it will come tomorrow, doesn't matter how many amazing megapixels residing inside. Is this Kindle just that? Hype? Probably. Something to get the blood flowing on a Thursday I guess.

Oh, two additional friends were introduced to the financial crisis this week. One taking a twenty percent pay cut (now coming into the office four days a week) and the other out the door, thank you very much. Hard to support a mortgage without income or savings I would suspect. You can suggest they might have been better prepared, saved for a bad year, but that's too easy. I didn't have a nickel (or a mortgage) at their age.

And what have you learned from this?

Gather ye Kindles while ye may.

Later still. The item itself.