Mattazuma's Revenge

Kindle App for the iPhone - My Review

I've been using the Kindle application for the iPhone for a few weeks.  Overall, it's a great way buy books quickly.  The iPhone screen is very legible and 'flicking' between pages works very well.  I read on it for four hours straight and I didn't have any eyestrain issues.

It's a very "release 1.0" product, though.  Currently, buying books using the phone is a pain.  When we were flying home from California last week I wanted to buy Outliers, an excellent book by Malcolm Gladwell.  We had just sat down on the plane so I had around 15 minutes to get the book before I had to turn off my phone.  The first thing I did was fire up the Amazon iPhone App.

It's there, but you can't buy it.  Next, I went to Amazon's site using Safari.  The default when you go to amazon is to use the special iPhone version of the site.  Here's what I found when I searched for "outliers kindle".

Here it says it isn't available.  At this point I was about to give up, but on a whim I went to the regular version of the site and navigated to the Kindle store.

Ta Da! I found it with around 5 minutes to spare.  What is really cool is after you buy the Kindle book, the application can download the whole book (over 3G) in less than a minute. 

I bet the iPhone 3.0 software + a Kindle software update will fix all of the book buying issues, but for now it's a pain.

Here's one thing you won't see on a Kindle, book covers in color!

The Chelsea Handler book was for Jonnell.  Really.  Although she did reference Outliers on her show last week, which impressed me.

When I was reading the Outliers book, which I heartily recommend, I found a couple of bugs and/or annoyances I hope they can fix.

So, when there is a table of text the app uses scroll arrows to go across the table.  Here's an example:

There are two problems.  First, the arrows don't work all of the time.  I'd say around 20% of the time they didn't work.  The larger problem was some text was lost on the top of the next page.  Here's the page after this table:

There was supposed to be a new paragraph starting at the top of the page, but it appears that at least one line was cut off.  It isn't at the end of the table when you scroll over, either.

Another problem is with footnotes.  Outliers has a couple dozen of them.  I think you are supposed to tap the link and you jump to the footnote but none of the links worked.  I did find all of the footnotes at the end of the text.

One thing they may not be able to fix are the resolution of graphics.  Here's an example:

These are pretty hard to read on the iPhone, it would be nice to be able to click on them and have them zoom to either fill the whole screen or even larger so you could pan around the illustration.

The Kindle App for the iPhone is going to be great.  Right now it is very good.  I'm going to keep buying books for it.  Once the bugs are fixed, I think this will give the 'real' Kindle a run for its money.  And if Apple made an iPhone like device with a bigger screen...

Sonoma Beer Mini-tour

As I said in my previous post, the other two places I wanted to go to were the Lagunitas Brewery and the Russian River Brewpub.  The first place we got to visit was the Lagunitas Brewery in Petaluma, California.

Lagunitas

Lagunitas has tastings and tours every weekday at 3PM.  Their bar where the tastings are held is in a loft above the bottling floor.  There are some unique items in the loft.

It's a Barbie chandelier.  No idea why it's there.  Here's their fridge:

On the upper left corner there is a ticket someone brought in where they got ticketed for drinking Lagunitas while riding their motorcycle.

The beer tastings are great, you get to try half a dozen of their best beers.  My current favorite is their new Pale Ale.

Ok, on to the tour.  They have recently replaced and enlarged the brewery, which is probably why we can get almost all of their beers in Chicago now.  Honestly, these picture weren't that interesting, so here are a few other things they had there.

I want to know where in Chicago these kegs are going.

I hadn't heard of beer being aged in wine casks before I saw these:

I'd love to try that beer.

I was hoping to get this as a souvenir, but they wouldn't sell it to me.

Russian River Brewpub

We hit the Russian River Brewpub on Sunday night.  The brewpub is located in downtown Santa Rosa.  We got there a little after 8PM, and to our amazement, the place was totally packed.  There was a great band playing, and we were really lucky to get a table in the back.

The band was great, they played swing music, the blues and some straight rockers too.  Lots of people were dancing as well.

But I was here for their beers.  The guys at beerschool.com repeatedly have said how good Russian River beer was.  Here's the sampler I got.

And yeah, I was on Twitter when she was taking the picture. 

Here's the list of 'regular' (not Belgian) beers they had on tap that night.

I had all of these in my sampler.  Only $0.50 per sample, I thought it was a great deal.  I ended up getting a pint of the Blind Pig IPA, I really liked it a lot.  Although all of the beers were good.

Here are the Belgians:

I'll try these the next time I'm out there!

One last picture, here's the back room where they age their casks:

One last thing, here's a little video of the outside of the Lagunitas Brewery, showing their people hard at work.

Outside Lagunitas Brewery from Matt Volk on Vimeo.

My Visit to the TWiT Cottage

We went to Northern California last week on vacation and there were only three places I really had to visit. They were the Lagunitas Brewery, the Russian River Brewpub and the studio (aka the TWiT Cottage) where Leo Laporte records all of the podcasts & live video on his twit.tv network.  I'll talk more about the brewery and brewpub on a later post.

The location of the studio isn't listed on his website, but from listening to six hours of his podcasts per week, I knew (or at least hoped) he didn't mind having the occasional visitor.  I found the place via a Google search and we got there around 2PM.

After hanging out in the 'green room' by the entrance for around five minutes Leo popped out of his studio to get a drink and we said hi.  Leo was very nice, he invited us back into his studio and we watched him record one of his shows for a while.  His studio is a 15' x 15' room and it has around a dozen monitors in it.

Here's a video I took of the studio:

At The TWiT Cottage from Matt Volk on Vimeo.

We hung out for 15 minutes and then we had to go. On the way out we met Dane, Leo's assistant, who we spoke with for a little while. He gave us a couple of Brain Toniqs, which, to my amazement, is a rather good energy drink.

Beer Wars - The Movie

I just stumbled upon what looks to be a pretty cool new movie about the craft brewing business.  It's called "Beer Wars" and here's the trailer:

They are having some sort of premiere screening on April 16 with a round table discussion afterwords.  I guess it's going to be a HD broadcast to the theaters, like what the Metropolitan Opera is doing.  If I'm in town on the 16th I'm going to check it out.

My Messy Desk - The Video

Jonnell was nice enought to buy me a Mino Flip HD video camera for my birthday.  It takes pretty amazing video for something that is smaller than my iPhone.

Here's a little video I took of my messy desk.  To see the video in HD (well 1280x720) you'll have to go to Vimeo's site, but even here I think it looks amazing for a $200 camera.

My Messy Desk - Mino HD Demo from Matt Volk on Vimeo.

Me & A Fish

Well, I went back to Florida and all I got was this picture of myself and a whole fried fish.

Yeah, I'm rockin' the full Blago hair helmet.

FYI - I'm actually posting regularly on the Twitter.  Follow me @MattVolk