Tech From an E-booker’s Viewpoint

My Nokia arrived two days after I sent it on Aug 17.  As of Aug 20th, it is awaiting parts.  Speaking of Nokias, David Rothman  has some great tips on configuring your settings in FBreader on his Teleread blog. This is not just must read stuff, but must keep info for enhancing your reading experience. We need more stuff like this for the Nokia tablets in general.  I am not good at learning new software and I rely heavily on help files.  I really like tutorials that are easy to understand and don’t take things for granted.  There are some great applications for both the N770 and N800, but very little documentation in the form of help.  I end up just poking around and through trial and error I manage to learn a few things.  The problem is that I forget or I am not sure what I did to get something to work.  As a result I am not utilizing my N800 to its full potential.

Yesterday was not good. I have never taken a course at a community college before and it is a definite culture shock.  The instructors talk to students like they’re in kindergarten. The class is 90 minutes and 75 of those minutes were spent on rules and expectations.  These same topics were covered in the syllabus that was handed out.  My experience has been that after five minutes of administrative stuff, you jump right into the subject. Then there were the complaints of having to write a ten page paper due at the end of the course. Should have known better since many of the students were dreading the two page written assignments. I am bored to tears already.  At any rate, I can see my small experiment already hitting a snag.  The material for the first half of the course isn’t available as digital text.  My first reading assignment is excerpts from The Narrative of Cabeza de Vaca.  I did find information about the narrative and even a read online version, but it is a different translation.  So I will have to buy the book.  So, I paid $130 for the course and the book costs $76.00 plus tax (8.25%).  Although it is paperback it weighs a ton (It’s an anthology).  What I really don’t get is that the book comes with a CD, an interactive CD (oooh).  The CD is supposedly filled with study aids, quizzes, and more information on the authors and stories, but it doesn’t have the one file that it needs.  You guess it.  The book itself. When I got to the school bookstore, they were out of the book. So now what?  I went to EBay and got 2 day delivery (total cost $68).  In the meantime, I’ll use an older edition I have at the house.  So why am I buying the book when it is only one edition newer than the one I have at home?  Because the instructor said it was mandatory.