My Kindle Has Arrived

I am so very excited, as my Kindle 2 from Amazon has arrived today. Right off the bat, I uploaded the 30 e-books that I got for free of the Internet, of old classics whose copyrights have expired. I have also test-run the Amazon.com purchase system to allow me to buy actual books off of their website, and my first purchase was Neil Stevenson's Snow Crash.

Jake took a quick look at the Kindle, and found the free e-book of the King James Version of the bible. He tried to page through the opening copyrights and such, and it froze up. Locked up hard. I was so embarrassed. I tried a few tricks to get it to come back to life, but to no avail. I eventually connected it through the USB cable, and deleted some of the books off of the Kindle through my computer. After that, nothing was readable. Never fear, a factory reset got everything back into working order again.

Apparently, My Kindle 2 is some sort of heathen that has no interest in reading the Bible. Well I should cross it off my list too. There's no telling what weird things in there I'll start believing if I read it.

One of the other cool features I unlocked was being able to upload pictures to the Kindle. I uploaded a few of the pictures the family took when we visited Geneva a few weeks ago to visit the American Market there. I should write about that afternoon, too.

Another arrival in the mail shipment from America is my replacement Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000. I have been stuck using a stupid QWERTZ keyboard, Switzerland style for the past few weeks. Of course, I convinced Windows that it was actually a QWERTY keyboard instead, so I didn't have to get thrown off by the parenthesis being shift-7 and shift-8 instead of shift-9 and shift-0. So long as I didn't actually look at the QWERTZ keyboard, it felt like a typical keyboard that we Americans are used to. EXCEPT: The \ key is in the wrong place. and so is the / key. Maddening! I would have to stretch my left pinky waaaay over to the left to get to the shift key, and sometimes, if I didn't stretch far enough, I got the / key instead. When hitting the Enter key, if I didn't stretch my right pinky finger waaaaay over to the right, I would get an extra \ where a linebreak should be. Maddening!