To be honest, I have almost no experience with applications running in a shared hosting environment. Most of my clients completely control their web servers, and it is much, much easier to support.

But I do have one customer whose app is on a shared server. Previously it was on a fairly crappy hosting company, but recently they made the switch to HostGator. I think HostGator is probably pretty good, but it is challenging for someone like me who has not had to deal with restrictions on some of the server settings.

When we upgraded their app to ASP.NET 4.0, we started seeing session time-outs at 5 minutes. This application involves entering financial data from tax forms, and the users are generally new to the app. Five minutes simply wasn’t enough time for many users to find and enter their information. As it turns out, the problem was the Idle Time setting for the application pool – it was set to 5 minutes, and it wasn’t an option to change it. Crap.

After some research, it appeared to me that if we switched from InProc sessions to a SQL server session server, we could avoid this problem. I made the change to my test server, and it seemed like the app pool Idle time was no longer affecting session state. (Of note: the SQL Session State Server scripts want to create a SQL Server job, which isn’t possible in shared hosting either. I found this post useful for getting around this.)

Then we implemented the same change on the production site. Users were still getting knocked out of the system when they were inactive for more than 5 minutes. What?! I was pretty annoyed.

Then I ran across this StackOverflow answer, and I was able to solve the problem. It also explained why it was working on my test server and not on the live server – the test server had a <machineKey> section in the web.config, but the live server did not. So the problem was actually not session itself, but an expiring forms authentication ticket.

I hope this helps the next guy. I had a lot of problems finding explicit answers via my Google-fu about how to solve shared hosting limitations with ASP.NET session state.

If you follow me on Twitter at all, you know I adore She’s Geeky. She’s Geeky is an unconference that just wrapped up its second time coming to the Twin Cities. Because I got so much out of last year’s event, I worked hard to convince colleagues and friends that they should come this year. I was mostly unsuccessful, except that I brought my 13 year old niece on day two (and she was immediately hooked!)

Having attended both days this year, I want to see if I can express more clearly why She’s Geeky is such a useful event to me, and why you should consider attending next year.

Geeky careers can be isolating

This is true on different levels. For example, some jobs themselves are naturally isolating, like my freelance programming job. Women who work at geeky jobs are often the only woman in their group/project/department, which can be isolating in a different way. And if your job involves interacting with non-geeky people, then you may feel alone and isolated in still another way.

She’s Geeky helps to combat that by helping you to connect with people who you have some commonalities with.

Have the conversations YOU want

How many times have you attended a conference and wished they had a session on a particular topic? Or have you attended conferences where the most valuable part of the event was the conversations you had between sessions, not the session itself?

At She’s Geeky, if you want to have a session about a topic, you suggest it. If others want to talk about it too, they’ll show up. Even if you know nothing about the topic, you can suggest the topic as a question or explain that you are hoping to learn more about it. I attended a session on setting pricing for web work, because the session convener was looking for advice, and I felt I could contribute something to that discussion. I ran a session on trying to get more women speakers at tech events, and got some good feedback about what might work or not work. This was very valuable to me.

The conversations are safer also. One of the sessions I attended this year was on imposter syndrome, the problem many of us have that we fear we just frauds, and that someone will soon figure out that we are frauds. This problem is not specific to women, but is more frequently held by women, and women deal with it in a different way. If a man feels insecure, he will often puff himself up more. When women feel insecure, they tend to apologize. This is a session probably would not have happened in a mixed gender situation. I think many women wouldn’t have been comfortable admitting that feeling in front of men.

You ARE geeky enough

Sometimes when I try to convince women to attend She’s Geeky, they tell me they aren’t geeky enough. FYI: you are probably are. Look, there were conversations at She’s Geeky this year on manga, digital art, and video games. These are all topics I have no interest in. That doesn’t mean I’m not a geek. There were also sessions on dealing with failure, starting a business, and management tips for new managers. Do those sound too geeky for you?

My point is: the conversations that happen are what YOU want and need. It is okay if you don’t like Star Trek, or don’t have the periodic table memorized. Really. You’ll still fit in.

Are segregated events a bad idea?

I’ll admit, before attending She’s Geeky for the first time last year, I was a bit suspicious of events that only included women. I personally have little interest in sitting around talking about how “oppressed” women are, or whatever. And I’ve heard it argued that women-only events are ultimately bad for women, because they are segregating themselves. Honestly: would we be comfortable with a “He’s geeky” event?

Good question.

Here’s my answer: Guys probably don’t need a He’s Geeky event, because as a significant majority in STEM fields, they don’t experience the challenges of being in the minority. So a He’s geeky event would feel like guys trying to exclude women for no good reason. But turn it around: my guess is that there are very few male elementary school teachers and nurses. They probably have unique concerns from their female counterparts in their fields. They might need a “He Teaches” or “He Nurses” event, and that would be completely understandable to me. I would think: good for them.

Further, I want to make something clear: to my great relief, none of my She’s Geeky experiences have been women trashing men in any way. There have been frank discussions about gender differences, and certainly some conversations about whether some of those differences originate via nature or nurture, but this isn’t a hen party. It isn’t gossipy or whiny. And it is usually practical discussions. How can I solve X problem? How should I handle Y situation? How can I make Z better?

Summary

Thanks to the sponsors and volunteers who made She’s Geeky 2011 happen. It was a great success. I can’t wait until next year!

The famous Michael Arrington post about women in tech and several of the comments and blog responses have been rolling around in my brain all day. There were some thoughtful insights as well as some really stupid responses on all sides of the argument.

I don’t know if the reasons are nature or nurture. Personally, I don’t feel like I’ve been the victim of discrimination. And I don’t think we will ever see 50/50 gender representation in tech fields and that really doesn’t bother me. I like to educate girls about the opportunities available in technology, because I think young women eliminate tech from their career options for false reasons, like that they won’t be able to interact with humans or that they will spend every day completely at a computer.

But here’s what I do know: I really don’t want any “help”. Men trying to “help” women get noticed because they think women can’t do it on their own. Men holding special recruiting drives to find more female speakers. Men trying to be more “inclusive”.

Ick.

Doesn’t it feel condescending and yucky? It sure does to me.

If I’m writing something useful and smart, someone will find it. If they don’t, perhaps it is because I’m not promoting it very well. I certainly don’t want any charity promotion from someone. If you think it is good, then tell people. If not, ignore it. Fine by me.

Small addendum: Women who complain that people who disagree with them on the internet are “raping” them DO NOT SPEAK FOR ME, and in fact make me ashamed to be female. Really. (Even if you are being called filthy names or threatened, it is not the same thing AT ALL, and makes you sound like an idiot.)

Here’s an example of how I screwed something up because I didn’t really think through HOW something worked. I’ve got a table of street addresses that currently has two columns for latitude and longitude values stored as doubles. Since I’m working with SQL Server 2008,I decided I wanted to create a new column for storing the data as a Geography data type so that I could perform some spatial functions on it.

So first I had to write the query to update this new column. And this is where I made my mistake:

update tblAddress 
set CenterPoint = (geography::Parse('POINT(' + str(longitude) + ' ' + str(latitude) + ')'))
where Not latitude is null

Do you see it? I thought that rather than using the CONVERT function, I would just use STR to turn the longitude and latitude values into strings. Unfortunately, using STR as I used it rounded my values to integers. Not that useful when we are talking about values that look like this: 44.9072249

The result was that all my addresses (which are pretty much in the Twin Cities) had the same value in the new Geography column. Oops.

Just thought I’d share for the next guy. (Yeah, probably a waste of time because none of YOU would ever do anything so lame.)

I found the instructions on this site worked very well for increasing my VM boot disk size:

http://d3planet.com/rtfb/2009/09/21/increase-vmware-workstation-virtual-disk-size/

Most important thing for me: the diskpart command worked for me with a Windows Server 2008 VM. It did NOT work for me to attach the drive to another VM, as when I tried to boot my original VM again the virtual disk was hosed. As I recall, this is a problem I’ve had in the past.

This worked great for me last week:

http://extended64.com/blogs/rhoffman/archive/2009/06/11/shrink-sql-server-2008-database-log-file-script.aspx

This is a quick reminder for how to handle Pivotal timestamp fields when updating data via an active form. (These are not timestamp fields in SQL, but are identified as timestamp fields within Pivotal itself.)

In order to set a value properly, the date/time information must be formatted using this syntax:

Format(Data, “yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ss.000”)

Today’s Pivotal lesson relates to saving data via an Active Form from a .NET application. I’m updating an existing app, so I didn’t have to write any of the XML plumbing to communicate with Pivotal.

However, the table I’m trying to update has a field type not used in the rest of the app. Within Pivotal, this table field is defined as type “Choice Display 40”. As near as I can tell, this is just a hard coded list of choices. The list is basically an integer value with a text description. The integer value is what is stored in the field, so I assumed this is what I needed to pass to the Active Form.

However, this is not true. Instead, I must pass the text description, and it saves the correct integer value in the database. Weird.

From my vantage point, this is unfortunate, because I can’t figure out where these choices are stored in the database, and so I have to hard code them in my app. Now, if the text is renamed it could completely mess up the app. And since it doesn’t generate an error, that also means users won’t know. Yuck.

But at least I know why it wasn’t saving before.

Since our family is filled with technologists (one programmer, one technology strategist, one IT worker and podcaster, and one online video performer), it can be a bit interesting to see what everyone gets for Christmas. We’ve had our share of cell phones and laptops, plus lots of technology peripherals in our holiday festivities. Usually I’m less likely to get a gadget than the rest of the family, but this year I received two tech gadgets from Loren for Christmas. The first is a new Garmin nüvi 1200 GPS. I’ve never had my own GPS before, but I’ve used Loren’s a few times very successfully. We are big fans of Garmin, and this looks like another winner.

The second gadget was something I had never heard of before. It is a Parrot Minikit Slim. What is it, you ask? First, some back story:

I used to own a Palm Treo, which I was relatively happy with. I used a wired headset with it for hands-free driving, which I really liked. I had tried a Bluetooth headset, but I often heard that the sound quality wasn’t that good, so I ignored it in favor of the wired headset.

A while back, I upgraded to a Palm Treo Pro. Unfortunately, my wired headset no longer worked, because they switched to a 3.5mm headphone jack instead of the previous 2.5mm jack. Ugh. I looked but hadn’t been successful in finding a new wired headset with the correct size, and was unenthusiastic about returning to a Bluetooth headset.

Enter the Parrot Minikit Slim. The device is a Bluetooth hands free car kit that provides built-in voice dialing and a high quality speaker phone. I was skeptical about the sound quality, as I drive a Honda Element which is not a quiet vehicle. But my preliminary tests allowed me to successfully voice dial, and Loren said the sound quality on the speaker phone was pretty good.

I’m looking forward to getting a lot of use out of it. The big problem I find with it right now: it is too easy to accidentally call a wrong number because I can’t remember how to use it. It basically has 2 buttons and a jog wheel, which sounds easy but isn’t really, since the buttons mean different things depending on the context. But I’m sure I’ll get the hang of it eventually.

Did you get anything cool for Christmas?

This morning I ran across two programmer posts that I found particularly interesting.

Comments and Tasks in Visual Studio

This post includes a list of the author’s task list tokens and how they are used. Adding my own tokens is something I’ve always considered doing but haven’t. Plus since the author is a solo developer, he calls out how some tokens are more useful for his approach as a solo-ist. As a fellow solo developer I found this illuminating.

How I use OneNote

This post does an excellent job of explaining how the author uses OneNote for development and debugging. Some of this is my process as well, although I don’t use it for tracking history on all bugs, just those that are particularly complicated to resolve.

I just have to share a picture of the Lenovo w700ds that Loren was working on this week for a customer. “Laptop” isn’t really the right word, as it seems unlikely that most people will try to balance this 11 pound monstrosity on their laps. It does sport an interesting auxiliary display, but good gracious this thing is gi-normous!

I hope the recipient of this laptop gets a rolling bag for it. I don’t think she’ll want to sling it over her shoulder. This assumes she is planning on taking it places; and of course if she isn’t, the big question is: why bother getting a laptop, when a desktop computer would have been more affordable?

Once again I was stuck on something with Pivotal, and it turned out security was the answer.

I have an app server rule that attempts to run a Pivotal query and checks for the returned results. Everything was working perfectly, except that the query never returned any results from my code. As it turns out, my user didn’t have the correct permissions for the table, so while the query would run without errors, it never returned any results.

A CDC employee suggested that I try this line of code immediately prior to running the GetRecordset function:

dataAccess.PermissionIgnored = true;

(dataAccess is the instance of the Appserver rule.)

If results are returned after trying this, then the problem is with the permissions. Obviously the right approach is to fix the permissions and not use this everywhere, but it did help me verify that the issues was related to security.

Tonight was trying to install an upgrade for my customer. In the process, we discovered a stored procedure that I couldn’t move to the new database because it referenced fields that no longer existed. The question is: was it still being used?

I searched for it in VS.NET – no luck. But perhaps it was being referenced from another stored procedure.

That’s when I was reminded of the first coding zone of suck. How could I search through all these stored procedures, other than to script them to my computer and search the files. Lame.

(There used to be a tool that did this. I can’t find it now. People are welcome to remind me. But by the way, I shouldn’t need a special tool.  Ugh.)

Then I thought…well perhaps it used to be referenced in an older version of the code, but we stopped using it and forgot to delete the stored procedure. So maybe I could just search Vault, my handy-dandy source code control software.

Nope. The second zone of suck. Vault does not support searching the code like this. (It doesn’t really surprise me. That would be a tricky thing, since Vault only stores the deltas. But it still sucks.)

Dear “SEO Company” (any of those who have left a message for me on my site),

Thank you so much for your kind offer to help me increase traffic to my site. I’m so glad you contacted me, as I’ve been DESPERATE to improve my search engine rankings. (In fact, how did you even find me with such low rankings?!)

I have a few questions before we get started:

1) Your email address is a generic gmail account. At first I was kind of surprised you didn’t have your own domain account, but now I’m thinking it is brilliant. Why, lots of people must think you work directly for Google. Plus you are saving a few bucks in the process. Should I do the same thing and get rid of my branded email address?

2) Your note says you have “helped a lot of businesses thrive in this market”. Which market do you mean? (I’m sure you meant to include it. I certainly don’t imagine that you were spamming me with generic marketing text, right?)

3) Your note said when I contact you I should make sure to “include my company’s website address (mandatory) and or phone number”. But since you filled out my contact form, don’t you already have my website address? Plus, if it is mandatory, why say “and or”? (You’re right…I’m just nitpicking.)

4) I’m thinking there is no point in giving you my phone number anyway. You didn’t include your phone number, so I’ll bet you don’t have a phone.

5) You don’t seem to have a website of your own, or at least you didn’t leave a company name OR a website URL for me to check. That makes me think that perhaps websites are old news anyway. You clearly don’t think they are worth the time and effort, or you’d have one yourself! So perhaps I just just forget the website and SEO altogether.

Thanks again for your swell message. I can’t wait to meet you and learn all about your amazing skills.

Avonelle

I have to confess something: I don’t like asking for help. I like to figure things out for myself. Plus asking for help means making yourself vulnerable. You have to say “I am ignorant in some way”. I’m not a big fan of broadcasting my ignorance (at least not in so direct a manner.)

I. Really. Hate. It.

But on occasion I will use the magic of the internets to ask a question. Last week I posted a question on a popular freelancing forum. Before I posted my question, I searched for the answer both on Google and within that forum. I was basically looking for recommendations for software with a certain specific set of features.

The first responder basically pointed me to a search of that forum. The search results did not in any way address my specific requirements. They weren’t rude exactly, but the implications were clear: Don’t bother us with questions about stuff we’ve already discussed.

I’ve seen this a lot on forums. The regulars get cranky when people ask similar questions over and over again. In some cases these regulars can get combative and downright nasty.

What I found annoying was that I tried very hard to express my specific requirements (which the responder ignored in favor of pointing me at generic options), and also that I had clearly stated that I had already done some preliminary searches. My goal was just to see if anyone had any suggestions of products I had missed. But obviously to him my request said “newbie”, and decided to respond using his standard “do a search” response.

So when people talk about the value of participating in the “community”, I want to gouge my eyes out. While I’m sure there are places that are warm and fuzzy, there are also just as many places that are snotty and rude.  All you need are a couple of regulars (trolls or otherwise) to make everyone else feel unwelcome.

I’m not suggesting that everyone has to be all cuddly. In fact, I find cuddly (or “me too-ism”) just as pointless. And I’ve got a thick skin, so it isn’t like I’ve been huddled in a fetal position this week trying to get over it. No biggie, really.

I just think that occasionally the “community” could try not to be such complete jerks. M’kay?

For day #3 of my retreat, I decided to go east along the Wobegon trail towards St. Joseph. This is a section I’ve ridden before, both last Sunday as well as a few times previously. My recollection even from a few days ago was that it was a pleasant stretch of trail punctuated by some cities and other stuff to look at. In fact, I recalled it as quite interesting, and a stark contrast to the more dull ride on Monday. 

As it turns out, my memory is completely flawed. Today’s ride was just as boring as Monday’s. It was (again) very straight and flat. I only encountered one town (as I gave up after 13 miles), and there were almost no riders.

What is funny about this to me is that this isn’t how I remembered that part of the ride at all. I thought there were many more towns, and that there was a lot more to see.

I can only conclude that a trail is more interesting when there are other people riding on it. Today it was quite empty – I encountered less than 10 other riders. I did stop for a few minutes to chat with a rider who was sitting on the trail. Apparently he had bonked. His son had gone up the trail to meet his wife at a crossing who was going to bring in a vehicle to extract him and his bike. So we spoke for a while until they arrived. But that was the most interesting part of the day.

In fact, the ride was so dull I didn’t even take pictures. Lame.

Actually I shouldn’t complain. I like trail riding and this week has been fun. But it has definitely given me an appreciation for the road riding I do at home. I’ll bet riding these trails as the leaves turn will be beautiful to look at, although given the proximity of the trees it will probably mean more leaves and branches on the trails themselves, making it a more tricky ride.

The weather looks good for tomorrow so I may get one more ride in before I head home.

My luck continues to hold as today’s weather was just as beautiful as yesterday’s. So I was able to ride another part of the Wobegon Trail. Today’s section took me from Albany to Holdingford, which was a lovely little town with a sweet little rest area on the trail with bathrooms and a place to park.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I first want to say that today’s route, while only having 1 town instead of two, was actually more interesting. You might recall that I described yesterday’s ride as dull (mind numbingly boring is probably a better description.) But today’s route included things like curves! And even some hills! Yes, I know. I ride a recumbent, and so usually I hate hills, but after yesterday’s ride was so flat and straight, I actually appreciated the variety of today’s trail. Also it wasn’t near any roads, which meant that it actually sounded like nature. Yesterday’s ride included a lot of nature visually, but you could always hear the cars and semis nearby. Today I mainly heard crickets.

It was really good that the route included more interesting things to look at, because Holdingford was 10 miles away from Albany. But it was a fun ride. The early part of the ride wound around trees and farms. There were creeks and a few drop offs. And I saw some pretty farm houses and some cows. I took a picture but it didn’t come out. (I wonder if these are the same cows from yesterday?)

When I got to Holdingford, I was in for a treat. You ride into the town by going through a covered bridge.

You cross a few streets, and then you find yourself in this nice little park. There was a family eating some lunch there. And a bunch of older female cyclists looking at a big map of the trail and discussing their next move. I didn’t encounter them again, so I’m not sure what happened to them.

Oh, and there is this really fun-looking wooden train:

I’ll bet that is really popular with the kids.

I rode a few miles out of Holdingford to see what was next, but never really encountered anything else. Since I didn’t see any signs telling me how far away the next town was, I finally gave up and returned to my hotel. That was probably the smart move anyway, because if I have a major mechanical problem with my bike, I’m not exactly sure how I’ll get back. It isn’t like you can throw the ‘bent in your typical 4 door sedan.

Like yesterday’s ride, encountered very few other riders. In total, I think I saw less than riders during my 28 mile ride. I assume that this is because it isn’t the weekend, and also because there isn’t a darn thing between these towns besides farms and woods. So perhaps most people don’t have a big desire to ride them all the time. Which of course begs the question: why were these trails created in the first place? Oh, here’s a bit of history on it.

Today was the first full day of my retreat. Oh, I didn’t mention that I was going on retreat, did I? Long story short: I haven’t had a break that was longer than 1 day or two for more than 3 years. (And it is difficult for me to count 3 years ago, since that was when I took 6 weeks off to care for my dying father.) So I’m taking 4 whole days off to read, relax, and ride my bike.

The location I selected for my retreat is Albany Minnesota, a little town about 90 miles west of St. Paul. It happens to be on the Lake Wobegon bike trail, so I thought it would provide for some easy biking. I did a 20 mile ride yesterday evening after I arrived, heading east towards St. Cloud. I’ve ridden that section before when I’ve come for the Tour of the Saints bike ride, and it is lovely. In fact, I prefer the trail to the actual Tour of the Saints route, mainly because I am wimpy and don’t like a lot of hills. Today I decided to head west to try out some of the trail that I’ve never attempted before.

Let me just say that those 26 miles (13 each way) are probably the most boring I have ever ridden. Yes. Most. Boring. Evah.

That isn’t actually a complaint. One of the problems with riding from my house is that I have to avoid traffic, construction, and the occasional hazard. But this section of trail had nothing on it. In fact, the whole trail pretty much looked like this:

No bends, relatively flat, weeds, trees, and farmland. Oh, and the interstate. The trail runs along I-94, so especially during the first leg of the ride there was a lot of car noise.

There were two towns I encountered during my ride. The first was Freeport, which has a lovely water tower with a smiley face on it. Unfortunately my picture didn’t come out, but you can see a picture of it here on the town’s website.  (Apparently their catch phrase is: “The city with a smile”, which explains the smiley face.)

It also has this cool stone marker for the trail:

And it has this interesting bicycle flower holder:

But the best thing Freeport has is this sign:

Actually that sign has nothing to do with Freeport except that it is outside the town, and actually refers to a “veterinary outlet store” in the next town. But really – how often do you see a sign like that?! I had to snap a picture.

The next town is Melrose. Melrose appeared to me to be a little bigger than Freeport. Certainly the water tower was bigger (take my word for it):

There was also a tank near the water tower. Unfortunately the picture didn’t turn out. (Hey, I’m a crummy photographer I know, but it was my crappy cell phone camera, so cut me a little slack.) I didn’t get a chance to find out what the tank was doing there.

It appeared that the trail went on for miles and miles and miles. And actually I think it does, but I decided not to test out this theory and instead came back to Albany.

Not a particularly hard problem to solve, but just making a note here because some of the DevExpress site appeared to be down today. Long story short: my customer was getting this error after installing a new version of our ASP.NET application. The error is because I upgraded the controls from the last build. The DevExpress controls include the version number in the name, so when they are updated you get new DLLs in your /bin folder. The install I sent to him only had the new controls, but since he installed it over a previous build it had both the old DLLs and the new ones, causing the error.

I don’t anticipate upgrading those controls all that frequently, but hopefully I’ll remember to tell him to delete the /bin folder before installing.

I love to read. I like all sorts of books – both fiction and non-fiction. On the fiction side of things, I’m a big fan of several different classics (Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte are some of my favorite authors), plus more modern authors like John Grisham and Tom Clancy. On the non-fiction side of things, I get a kick out of programming books, plus historical books and biographies.

Unfortunately I’ve never been disciplined enough to make good use of our local library, so the books are piling up around here. And I hate to get rid of books – I often re-read books I truly love. If things keeping going as they are, pretty soon the books will take over the house!

So it will be no surprise that I’ve had a lot of interest in the Kindle. Last week I finally took the plunge and purchased a one. (At least I waited until the price was under $300.) I also purchased my first book for it, and grabbed several free books. Here are some initial thoughts, in no particular order:

• The text is easy to read, but I’m glad I have the ability to change the font size.
• The user interface is pretty good. It is rare that I can’t figure out what to do.
• Text to speech is a nice novelty feature, but I doubt I’ll use it much.
• It doesn’t seem to like connecting to my Vista 64x desktop machine. It connects fine to my Vista 32x laptop though.
• Every time I run into a book I can’t get on the Kindle I am annoyed.
• Every time I run into a book that is more than $10 on the Kindle I am sad.
• Being able to zoom in on tables and images is a good feature, but it doesn’t do enough. So far in my experience, even with the zoom feature I still can’t read the text in most tables. That sucks. It also may limit the usefulness of the Kindle for technical books.
• There should be a Kindle reader for my computer. That would help me work around the tables/figures zoom problem.
• After working with OneNote and a tablet PC for several years, it is painful to add notes/annotations via the cursor/keyboard interface on the Kindle instead of via a pen. I doubt I’ll use that feature much at all (which is too bad).
• It is really easy to order a books directly from the Kindle. Almost too easy. (Clearly they’ve spent more time on the UI to spend more money than on other features.)
• It should have come with some kind of cover, even a cheap one. I won’t be putting it into any bags until after I’ve got something to protect it.
• I’ll bet is great when you travel. It makes me almost wish I traveled more.
• Pay to subscribe to blogs?! Uh, no thank you.

You might be surprised that I don’t really have a strong opinion about the latest Kindle controversy, where users who purchased a book from Amazon eventually had the book removed from their Kindles with the purchase price refunded. The concern by many is the notion that Amazon shouldn’t have the right to delete content from a person’s Kindle. (As it turned out, the content in this case should never have been sold; the publisher did not have the rights to publish the material.) I’m not particularly worried about this issue, because I seriously doubt that it will happen again due to the negative publicity. And even if it did, my guess is that it would be a fairly rare occurrence.

Overall I’m finding my Kindle experience to be fun and interesting.