consumption & current reading.

for... er, the winter-gift-giving-holidays, he bought me a sony ebook reader ("touch edition" - i'd link to sony, but it's a terrible flash page). i says "holidays" because he went out and bought it something like 2 weeks before christmas, brought it home, wrapped it, and then decided i should open it two days later because he wasn't patient enought to wait until christmas. so call it my hannukah gift.

anyway. i had done some of the research and opted for the sony mostly because i spent $40 printing pdfs of journal articles for one of my papers last semester and decided that not only was the price ridiculous, but killing the trees was as well. the kindle and the nook (which wasn't out yet at the time) are both geared toward reading actual books, whereas i was going to use mine for research. and ironically, the sony was actually the most open model, handling pdfs natively (drm and no drm), word docs given word installed on the same machine, undrm-ed epub files, rentable-from-public-libraries epubs, drmed epubs, and all of google books.

it's been pretty nice, actually. i've been reading pdfs and word docs either downloaded for research or from my professors on the train on the way to class. the screen is a little glare-y, as most reviews note, but adjusting the angle slightly away from a direct light source solves the problem. i like the touchscreen, and i love being able to make notes and underline things with the included stylus.

i have also discovered that the sony ebook store carries all of jim butcher's stuff. i've been reading his dresden files for a couple years now, but he started another series recently. i broke down today and bought one. it was a surprisingly painless experience: choose the book, enter payment info into the sony reader software, and it downloads automatically. then, similar to the ipod, it authorizes your reader for the drm and transfers it over usb. i would, of course, prefer to have non-drm options, but i realize that's not terribly realistic yet, although it may be coming. i do have 12 un-drmed ebooks i got from tor's promotion a few years ago, which was an apparent success financially speaking. but since i have a sony reader, i might as well encourage more publishers to opt for sony's store over, say, amazon.

divide by zero.

so coke has come out with new "portion controlled" 7.5oz cans. this makes sense for the high-fructose-corn-syrup-impregnated beverages.

but they've also come out with 7.5oz cans of diet coke and coke zero. how do i know? we got a free 8-pack of the coke zero cans yesterday due to a supermarket promotion.

now. a 12oz can of coke zero is 0 calories. a 7.5oz can of coke zero is... yes. 0 calories. so why go through the effort of "portion controlling" a zero-calorie beverage? we switched to coke zero a while ago, because it does taste more like real coke than diet coke (ew).

but i'm a little confused by the purpose of this product. unless it's for people like me, who can barely finish a 12oz can of coke (unless i'm deydrated or eating something salty). but given the whole no-calorie thing, what would prompt me to stop buying cases of 12 12oz cans, and instead buy 8 7.5oz cans? the financial difference is miniscule. the calorie difference is nonexistant. why did they bother?