Unshelved by Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum
comic strip overdue media

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Getting a good start to the day

I've put away dishes, re-potted an orchid, fed the fish, eaten breakfast, chatted with someone from Australia, and I'm about to get ready for work. Apparently where he lives it's almost midnight. :) That has been a challenge we've had in playing the Cthulhu game--figuring out the time differential when gallivanting around the world. It was awful during the Antarctic adventure. I think after awhile the game master was close to rolling a luck roll to see if phone calls woke anyone up in the middle of the night.

Today is rainy and quite a bit cooler than yesterday. I have a lot to do in the latter part of the week (a meeting, a doctor's appointment, a webcast), but today is light for the library gig, although the data entry should be busy because of a large clinic census.

I'm curious to know if my co-workers who pre-ordered Kindle Fire tablets got them yesterday--some people did, and we have an Amazon warehouse in town. One of them was very excited when I told them they were shipping early. :)

I really looked at them to see if they are for me, and I decided that what I would really like is a device coming out tomorrow from T-Mobile called a SpringBoard. Like the Kindle Fire, it is a 7" tablet running a version of Android (in this case, it's Honeycomb). Unlike the Kindle Fire, it has two cameras and has 4G connectivity in addition to wi-fi (meaning it requires a data plan, but also meaning I could watch a Netflix show or be on the Internet on the bus, whereas a Kindle Fire would mean I'd have to put a wireless router in at home, and could only use the streaming and Internet services there or out where there's a public network, which I'm not around much). The exact price hasn't been released; I've seen one subdomain page on T-Mobile's site at $179.99, but I was told by T-Mobile that was a sub-contractor's price and not their official one, which won't be known until it launches.

One good thing I could do with it is use it to finish cataloguing the collection at work and at home, because the cameras are autofocus (my phone's isn't, and so it does well with QR codes but not regular bar codes). But mainly it would be for fun and productivity. But I can't get it until at least the 1st. I'm finally caught up from the book club fiasco, but I have two doctors' appointments and some medicine to get on top of my normal bills, and those are more important. So I'll try to delay gratification for a little while, and thankfully we're not too far away from the time my flexible spending account starts up again, as far as medical bills go. January would be absolutely great for getting it, as a major bill is paid off then, so no more monthly payments of $200, but I'd like to get it before T-Mobile is gobbled up by AT&T so I can get a real unlimited plan for the connection, and I think January is when that is decided. We'll see. But I'm not going to cut out necessities to get a gadget, and there's the trip to Chicago coming up in December as well, so while it's definitely on my wish list, it may or may not materialise soon.

1 comment:

LaurenceBrown said...

Every day in life is a good day to start a new things and explore new stuff.