just an asterisk

So your colleagues showed up at your desk with a bottle of beer or a Starbucks gift card or a little box with a bow and you’ve managed to suppress the BUT I DIDN’T GET YOU ANYTHING! for about the 10th time in one day.  Sigh… This is the holiday season in an office and although you love that people make the effort, you may feel a little overwhelmed buying even more presents (and for people you barely know outside of work).  The good news is that it’s completely avoidable.  You can arrive ready and not break the bank in the process.  The trick is to give everyone a custom tailored version of… the same thing.  This year, the price of digital media is so low, that I recommend a flash drive with portable apps.

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What’s the point of having a blog if you can’t get on your soapbox once in a while and talk about your passions?  I’ve decided to add a segment called future post – the things that I’d love to see as upgrades to existing products or as a new trend/device of the future.

The device that has occupied my daydreams for the last two months is my Kindle2.  As I’ve already posted, it has become my travel companion and to have my personal library instantly accessible is a luxury that I’m not sure I could give up.  Here are six things that I’d like to see on the Kindle in future: Read more »

I received a Kindle 2 for Christmas – or rather 2 and ½ months later, when Amazon announced its second reading device, updated my order and shipped. If you’ve never heard of the kindle, check out this quick video introduction.

There has been a flurry of articles recently by new kindle owners, desperate to reinforce the permanence of paper and to cynically point out that the new Kindle still isn’t perfect. The Just an Asterisk perspective? Well the first thing I downloaded to read was Malcolm Gladwell’s new book “Outliers”, in which he describes an outlaw that was “just dumb enough to be fearless, just bright enough to be dangerous and a dead shot”. I think we can describe the Kindle with the same terms. Read more »