Nook Simple Touch: (almost) six-month review

So, I’ve had this thing for a few months now, and it turns out I’m using it way more than I thought I would. I love traveling with it – it beats the heck out of carrying a book around. I take it camping, too.

I made my own screensaver with a bunch of images I converted to greyscale in The GiMP.

I also use it to store my current knitting pattern; just export it to .pdf and load it on there!

Annoyances:
– the ‘home’ button (the little ‘n’ at the bottom) was already getting a bit beat up at the one-month mark, and I also scratched the screen pretty quickly, because I just threw it in my handbag without a cover. Don’t do that.
– powering it completely off and back on frequently (e.g., for the required “please fasten your seatbelts and extinguish all portable electronics”) seems to suck out the power.
– I can’t resize images in the books, at least I can’t figure out how to do it. This is a drag when I read books with photos or maps.

Finding books is still a problem. I don’t like purchasing a lot of books (even though they’re not physically on the shelves, it’s like I can feel the clutter) and the options through my library are not yet wonderful. library2go (aka Overdrive) still has a sucky website, and the .pdfs I get from ebrary don’t transfer to my nook correctly: all I get is the copyright page, over and over.

Other than that, :thumbsup: from me. Would purchase again.

PgOpen Recap

Another year, another excellent conference. This go-round was even better than last year’s.

There were lots of new folks at the conference this year; welcome to the community!

I made it to most of the talks I’d planned to, and of course came away with lot of ideas for things I want to try at home, such as the examples from Jon Erdman’s lightning talk about pgdump -Fc.

My fave was Dimitri Fontaine’s Large Scale MySQL Migration, because I like the ‘war stories’. (I would not have been surprised if he’d said “…and then some alligators tried to eat us!”) Denish Patel’s lightning talk was hilarious, and I am looking forward to messing around with the pg_stat_plans extension Greg Smith & Peter Geoghegen discussed during Query Logging and Workload Analysis.

I was half-drafted/half-volunteered to be on the conference committee for next year. We’ll strive to uphold the fine level of conference to which you’ve become accustomed. (If you attended this year’s conference, don’t forget to fill out the survey!)

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P.S. Thanks to Greg Smith for leveraging his frequent-flyer powers for good, and getting me on a different flight when I missed mine. This really shows the “community” part of the Postgres Community.