Succumbing to my geek inclinations, I ordered an Amazon Kindle 2 over the weekend. Since they were only accepting preorders, and were giving the impression supplies might not be adequate, I didn’t expect to see it immediately. I was wrong. Santa Claus in Brown dropped it off at my doorstep Tuesday afternoon.

I enjoy reading, and purchased the Kindle to be able to have several books under thumb in an easily toteable package. Amazon seems to have taken a clue from Apple. The Kindle 2 arrived in pretty nice packaging with a minimalist instruction book. The device was already tied to my Amazon account, so it only took about two minutes before I was able to order a book and have it delivered wirelessly to the Kindle 2.

The screen is very good. It is a reflective LCD “e-paper” screen with very sharp text on a near white background. It does not have backlighting, which is a plus for battery life and also the ability to read in bright light. Navigating between pages is extremely easy and I enjoy the built-in dictionary. Simply moving the little cursor to the front of a word causes the definition of the word to pop up at the bottom of the screen.

The arrival of the Kindle 2 might finally signal the start of the tipping point towards e-books. The only thing holding it back is the price. It needs to cost about $150 less before it can really hit mass market. Even now though, Amazon is showing over 240,000 titles available in Kindle format. This has to be a huge no-brainer for publishers with its near-zero distribution cost.

What’s really impressed me most with my Kindle 2 has nothing to do with books. I’m a major news junkie and usually spend at least an hour in the evening catching up with all the news online. With the Kindle, I can subscribe to various news services and blogs, and have them wirelessly delivered to the Kindle every day. I tested it out on a trip to Starbucks today. I was great to sit there with my drink and read the latest headlines from the New York Times and my favorite political blogs. I think this will turn in to a killer feature once people start to discover it.

I’ve only had my Kindle 2 for 24 hours now, but I’ve already bumped into a few rough edges. First, the UI is steamlined around serial thinking, aka page turning. That works great for normal books, but if you like hopping around, it is a cumbersome interface. I’m also mixed on the little five-way joystick used for cursor navigation. Getting to the right word on the page is slow and annoying. Amazon really needs to come up with a touch screen.

On the software side, there are a couple things I would like to see. First would be integration with some sort of calendar. It would be nice to pop up a read-only view of my daily calendar. Some sort of Instant Message integration would be nice too, maybe a bridge to SMS with Whispernet, or to Twitter for the ADD. They could even do a Twitter or Facebook reader application. I wouldn’t care much about email or general web browsing on the Kindle 2. I’ve got better devices for that.

All an all, I’ve extremely impressed with my new little toy. This is a major step forward towards the perfect e-book device and while I’ll be impatiently awaiting the next revision, I’m going to really enjoy my Kindle 2.

I went down to my favorite camera store in Dallas this past weekend to checkout a possible new camera for my dad. After checking out the camera he was interested in, I spent some time handling the latest toys from Nikon. I shoot with a Nikon D300 right now, which is a fantastic camera, but like every APS-C sensor owner, I lust for a full-frame digital camera. The D700 is probably the best camera on the market right now straddling the pro-am divide. I’m sure I’ll get one eventually, but will probably wait for the next revision which should be due out this summer.

But the camera I really want is not even made (yet). Prior to going digital four years ago, I shot with a Nikon FM3a. It was a thing of beauty, both simple and reliable. I saw the writing on the wall for film and sold my Nikon kit to buy a Canon 10D. To this day, I still miss the handling of the FM3a. So Nikon, if you’re listening, here’s what you should do:

Use the FM3a body but gut it and replace with a 12MP full-frame sensor (same as on D700). Keep the all-manual setup (focus, exposure) and even use the lever for cocking the shutter/mirror. Sensor and viewfinder should run off 2 AA batteries, so that they can easily be replaced anywhere in the world. From the front, the camera should look the same as an FM3a. The back should be minimalist — basic buttons to review/delete images, format card, minor exposure tweaks. It should shoot the raw image format. What I want is the classic Nikon SLR feel in a digital format, similar in concept to the Leica M8.2.

Yes, I know Nikon would never build it, but an “FM3d” would be my dream camera.

The company I currently work at, MPower Open, is undergoing a seismic shift from a classic software company to an open brand. Since we’re small, part of the transformation includes a company-wide reading assignment of Kelly Mooney’s The Open Brand. While the book contains a lot of millennial/Gen-Y drivel, the key take away is that open brands are defined by their customers and online community, not the classical marketing department. Our migration to an open source platform offered as Software as a Service (SaaS) is just the first step.

The whole open brand concept is interesting. After reading the book, I’ve noticed most the brands I appreciate are open brands, in the sense they build community around themselves and listen to that community. There are also brands that pretend they’re open when they’re really not.

As an example of the latter, I put forth Maxpedition. They make pretty cool bags and supplanted Eagle Creek as my favorite bag maker. Eagle Creek used to make very nice, high quality bags, but in recent years has started to use extremely cheap materials. Driving up quarterly earnings apparently became more important than doing the right thing for their customers. I wouldn’t touch an Eagle Creek bag now.

Anyway, back to Maxpedition. I recently purchased one of their laptop bags. It is not on the same level of quality as the older Eagle Creek bags, but I liked the room, and the pockets. One problem with it is the shoulder strap. They really screwed it up. It does not have a non-slip surface, so I almost lost my laptop three times in the first day from having it slip off my shoulder.

Noticing that Maxpedition has a cutomer comments section on the product page, I left feedback saying I liked the bag but that the shoulder strap was flawed. Maxpedition violated the cardinal rule of open brands — they edited my feedback to omit the part about the strap and only including the positive stuff.

This is a company that does not get it. If you’re going to tread into open brand space, you have to be willing to take your lumps and feedback. Maxpedition has demonstrated their asshats who just don’t get it, and has lost a customer in me. I’d also encourage others to steer clear of them.

So I’m looking forward to digging deeper into what it means to be an open brand. There are also some great examples out there (Amazon) to model ourselves after. And if anyone knows of another good bag maker, let me know.

Yes, I have officially been booked. Facebooked that is. I’ve resisted signing up for Facebook until this weekend. I always considered it the hang-out for 20 somethings who finally figured out how uncool MySpace really is. One of my ex-military friends, who is the same age, mentioned there were a lot more of my former friends over on Facebook, so I decided to give it a try.

Within 24 hours, I had hooked up with almost a dozen friends I haven’t seen in over a decade, and serveral of them from even longer. The built-in chat feature is pretty cool, but is also no where near as realiable as a true IM client. I’d get communication errors fairly frequently.

It was really interesting to see the path a lot of my ex-military friends had taken. And also to see the families. We were all a bunch of dorks in our early 20s, and it is fun to see how most everyone had aged gracefully in to our 40s.

So yes, I’m booked. I’m looking forward to finding a few more old friends. But I still refuse to actively use Twitter. I’ll leave that to the ritalin crowd.

I was playing around with the Spring/ExtJS Template on my Ubuntu box and ran into a strange problem. On the Vista laptop, if I compile with IntelliJ or from the command line with Ant, the application works perfectly fine when I deploy it to Tomcat. On the Ubuntu box, the WAR file generated by IntelliJ worked fine, but the WAR file output of the Ant script puked and died.

It took about an hour of hair pulling to figure out what the problem is. In the original build.xml file, the compile task looked like this:

Notice I didn’t specify and of the compiler, source or debug options. On Sun’s JDK 1.6.0_12 for Windows, debug appears to be the default. The Spring annotation needs the debug information for mapping parameter names in views.

On Linux, the same JDK (Sun 1.6.0_12) behaves differently. It does not include the debug information by default. In order to make my Ant build file work, I changed the compile attributes to this:

Explicitly defining debug=”true” resolved the issue. This is the first time I’ve bumped in to a basic behavioral difference for Java across operating systems. The lesson learned is play it safe and always specify compiler values.

My charity for February is in recognition of the inauguration of President Barack Obama. I, along with millions of other Americans, watched his speech on television. One of the key chords he struck is that we are a nation of laws. This is in stark contrast to the prior eight years of a president who believes abducting people off the street, flying them to third-world hellholes, having them tortured and holding them without charge for years is somehow an American value.

I spent ten years in the United States Air Force in my younger days. Over five of those years were spent on flight status as a crew member aboard various special aircraft. Due to the nature of our missions,  I went through extensive survival training, including some less-than-pleasant courses dealing with detention by a hostile nation.

Anyone who has served as an aircrew member in the military should be able to unblinkingly tell you that waterboarding is torture, pure and simple. I find it sickening that our prior president, and his party, lacked the moral clarity to make the right call on something this obvious.

So to celebrate turning the page on a dark chapter in American history, I’m giving my $100 for February to an organization dedicated to stopping the abuses our own government was willing to perpetrate, Amnesty International.