Travis and Michelle Fitzgerald's blog

I’ve had my Kindle for about three months now, so it’s time for a review! I’ve posted a couple of comments on Facebook but I hadn’t really organized my thoughts yet. This started out as one post but I realized as I typed that I have a lot to say. Right now there are four parts: Reading, New Content, Features, and Human Factors. So…let the review begin…

I just got a Kindle (e-book reader). Pretty cool! Nice screen (e-ink rocks), light weight, easy to use. But I’ve found the hardest thing is figuring out what books to buy for it! There’s a great temptation to run out and buy all my favorite books for it, but…I already have those books. Do I really need them in another format? Not at the moment. I think the books I’m most likely to buy for the Kindle are the sort of books I would borrow or get out of the library - Dan Brown sort of novels that are fun to read, but don’t really tempt me to re-read over and over. Hmm. Must think about whether I want to spend ~$10 for them now.

I hope a digital library is coming sometime soon. I would pay $1 or so to check out a book for two weeks. I already know Amazon can go in and delete whatever they want to off the Kindle (witness that issue a few months back where they’d sold a book they didn’t have the rights to, so they deleted it from everyone’s devices with a refund). Doesn’t seem a far stretch to checking things out.

So, all that being said…I’m still going to run out and buy some of my favorite books, just because it’s so cool! And there’s also a neat feature that I can email PDFs, HTMLs, Word documents, and things to Amazon and they’ll send them back in the right format to put on the Kindle. Baen Books has a bunch of free books in HTML…this ought to be fun.

~Michelle

The faithful Suburban has finally returned from the body shop. The dents are gone, it is rust-free, and it’s sporting a new, shiny, finish. It looks good!

However…you get what you pay for. This work was relatively cheap for such a large vehicle.

Since I got it home, I have found several instances of sloppiness and poor work done by the body shop. The owner(s) are very nice, and have promised to fix anything we think is wrong with it, and I plan on taking them up on it. We’ll see what becomes of that.

In the meantime, I need to get started on the interior. It needs a new dash (or major work to the old one), new upholstery on all of the seats, and a heavy scrubbing of the carpet throughout.

The following pictures don’t really do it justice. If you want to see it in person, come on by!

Well, the storm track keeps moving south, so we may be alright. We’ll see.

In order to properly distract you, I will show you what I did this past weekend. Michelle’s Sunfire has had a couple of small cosmetic problems for a long time. We think the damage occurred when her car was shipped from Michigan to Houston many years ago. The damage didn’t bother her that much, but it’s been bugging me for a while. So I decided to take it upon myself to fix it (with her blessing, of course).

Here is the before and after picture of the repair to her driver’s side mirror. Notice the cracks in the first picture.

And here is the before and after picture of the replacement of the passenger side rear brake light cover thing.

I also replaced the power antenna on my Trans Am, but the pictures can’t really show the repair, so I didn’t bother taking pictures.

Next up, we need to replace the “Michigan Engineering” decal in the rear window of Michelle’s car. The sun seems to have melted it and it looks bad. Anybody know where we can get a new decal (with the same text)? I can’t find it online.

-Travis