Events

My new Kindle arrived just now, only (let's see) about 30 hours after I ordered it. Amazon pre-registered it, so from opening the box to reading a book I'd previously purchased took less than two minutes. Add five minutes to hook it up to my home WiFi (complete with 26-byte WPA password), two minutes to go to amazon.com to change the thing's email address, fifteen seconds to buy the next book I want to read, and—I am not kidding—fifteen seconds to download it to the device. What does that come to? Less...

My Kindle 2 died last week. Its battery, drained of every last electron, could no longer provide even enough power to recharge. Two calls to Amazon customer service later, and I got an $89 credit towards the purchase of a Kindle 3, applied instantly to my account. I'll have the new one tomorrow, for about 1/4 what I paid for the original. Everybody wins: I get a good deal, they sell a new item. They even refunded the last Kindle book I bought, since I discovered the Kindle-bricking when I tried to...

Via Sullivan, I remember: "I remember which party wants to 'take our country back,' and which one wants to take it forward." Vote.

This is cool: Across New York, there are USB drives embedded in walls, buildings and curbs. The idea is to create an anonymous, offline file-sharing network in public space. The drives are completely public and anyone can plug in to drop and download files. Seriously, you can plug the USB drive into your laptop. ... It's part of an art project called "Dead Drops" by Aram Bartholl and I have to say, it's pretty awesomely creative. I mean, if I saw a USB stick stick out of a random wall, I'd be dying to...

Nice game. Peter Sagal joked about it last weekend, though: "The two mayors made the usual gentleman's bet before the series. If Texas wins, they get to secede from the Union. If San Francsico wins, the have to secede from the union."

I'm two away from finishing the most entertaining series of books I've ever read, the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett. I mention this because the one I finished yesterday, Making Money, contained two of the funniest lines I've ever read: There is a time in a thoughtless man's life when his six-pack becomes a keg.... And: "One of my predecessors used to have people torn apart by wild tortoises. It was not a quick death. In context, they're even funnier.

Sullivan finds an attack ad from an earlier election showing what a return to the civility of the founding fathers might look like

Reader DW pointed me toward this blog, a salve to the tortured OCD mind: I love the blog's design, too. Very...neat.

The Daily WTF links to a set of 30 CVs created by graphic designers: Check out the rest.

Doonesbury turned 40 today. NPR reports: Created in the throes of '60s and '70s counterculture, Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury comic strip blurred the lines between comics and the editorial pages, and produced some of the most memorable cartoon characters ever sketched. Trudeau developed Doonesbury around three foundational characters — everyman Mike Doonesbury, football quarterback B.D. and campus radical Mark Slackmeyer. They represented the center, the right, and the left, Trudeau says. Six weeks after...