Dr.'s 3rd

I have used a whole lot of various small computer devices over the years. Went through a long run of PDAs, starting with remarkable HP 200LX, which was a calculator sized machine which opened to a keyboard and was a full IBM PC compatible, with 2MB of memory (640K for MS-DOS 5.0 and 1.44MB for a virtual HD). Ran Microsoft Word 5.0B and had Lotus 1-2-3 2.4 built-in ROM. Hoo-boy! Remember, this is back in the day when laptops were enormous things. (grin)

While I was in the hospital, at first I did very little webbing. Even SUMMER, the small Fujitsu U810 UMPC seemed heavy and awkward -- and hard to read with its small screen. But a gift card from the UCF allowed me to get an Amazon Kindle Fire HD (DW). No mouse to farble with and lightweight, the Kindle Fire HD was a godsend. Probably kept me sane during the Year Without a Summer. Mrs. Dr. Phil's original first generation Kindle Fire had been a very good unit, and this next generation was even better. I even wrote a 17,000 word story with just a stylus (DW) on it while in the hospital.

Kindles come from Amazon preset for the user. What's amusing is that when I set up my Amazon account A Very Long Time Ago, my default address was the Physics Dept. at WMU, so my address was listed as Dr. Philip Edward Kaldon. Which is why the Kindle Fire HD says in the upper lefthand corner that it's Dr.'s Kindle. (grin)

Then on 27 August 2014, I received Dr.'s 2nd Kindle (DW) -- a Certified Refurbished Kindle Fire HD 7", 32 GB - Includes Special Offers [Previous Generation]. The first Kindle Fire HD had worked so well, that I got a second one to use at the office, so I wouldn't have to carry it back and forth and run down its battery in the winter. Since I've been home for all of 2015 so far, I've been able to swap those two units as the other recharges. Handy.

So last week I picked up a 7th generation Kindle 6". This is the straight Kindle eReader, not a Fire tablet. And it's the base model without a backlight. Very small, very light, very simple. Also an OMOTON cover with auto-sleep. It was a fraction of the cost of the Amazon branded covers -- a real departure from the two covers for the Kindle Fire HDs I bought last year after they were priced as obsolete. (cheap-grin)

The Kindle was $79 -- I missed the $59 sale price by one day as I thought about whether to buy or not. Technically it didn't cost me anything, since we used some Discover rebate money on it.

Why buy an eReader when I already have two Kindle Fire HDs? Well, the Fire HD is a tablet -- and I tend to use a tablet like a real computer as much as possible. Email, Silk browser, PDFs, etc. Getting set up to do eReader versions of my Beta 1 novel took some work, but also reminded me that someone using a Kindle or a Nook, etc. can't just run to a webpage and download.

Also, much like why I don't have a smart phone -- I need a cell phone's battery to be there for emergency phone calls. I don't need to many MORE functions to spend all my time on the tablet. And the Kindle 6" is small and light.

Amusingly the auto-sleep case on the Kindle has more powerful magnets than the Amazon case for the Fire HD. I know this because I set a Fire HD on top of the Kindle 6" while it was on -- and the Fire HD shut off. (magnetic-grin)

Anyway, when the new unit arrived, it was yet another easy piece of cake to get running. Nice packaging, pull it out of its clear plastic bag -- the battery still had at least three-quarters of a charge. Hooked up to our WiFi/DSL without any problems, and I had my handful of e-books downloaded. Including the MOBI version of my Beta 1 novel. It does not have a gravity sensor like the Fire, but you can go into Settings and change from Portrait to Landscape mode manually. I can live with that -- when I want to read a book, I want to read a book. I don't want the display flipping around if I set the thing down.

I haven't bought many Kindle books -- an out-of-print WWI novel I read as a kid, a Scandinavian phrase book. And I also had a copy of Steven Savile's novel Silver. Steven was one of the past winners who was a guest at the 2008 WOTF workshop. He'd mentioned on Facebook that the Kindle edition was reduced to $0.00 for an indeterminate time. So I snatched it. And hadn't gotten around to starting to read it until about two weeks ago. Now I'm reading in on Dr.'s 3rd Kindle. The book opened to the place I'd last been on the Fire. Go Whispernet.

While putting together this post, I was amused to see that I'd "bought" Silver on 17 July 2015. Lord, for some reason I thought it'd been languishing for a year -- and it's only been a month. Time gets distorted when you are working very hard AND not doing the daily job. I guess over 100,000 copies of Silver have been sold and so far it's a ripping good tale. But when I glanced at the webpage tonight, I noticed that the Kindle edition is again/still $0.00. So if you have a Kindle -- or the free Kindle for PC app -- you, too, can snatch a copy.

The Kindle came with a free month of Kindle Unlimited, but I'm going to give up on that. The first search I tried was littered with these stupid little books which are really just repackagings of the Wikipedia article on the book. I do not have time to wade through stupidity.

Will I miss not having a backlight? Dunno. Right now, I can tilt the unit and get enough reflected light, even when the only room light on is across the living room. And it's nice and contrasty during the day. And if you're not being cheap, you can always spring for the Kindle Paperwhite. Or get a clip-on LED reading light.

Dr. Phil

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-1665.95

I don't follow the Dow Jones Industrial Average closely -- it's a somewhat outdated measure which, by its very nature as a changing basket of averages, can't really be a single point number to define the stock market. Except nothing else is very much better.

If you'd asked me last week where the Dow Jones was, I probably couldn't have told you. Though I do hear rough ups and downs most weekdays on Marketplace on NPR. It's not that I don't care -- we do have retirement investments and as of a few weeks ago, they were in "good shape". But... China.

China is not a free market and its stock market is still young. It is currently going under some sort of an implosion and currency devaluation. And nobody seems to know what it means. The global stock markets -- which are based on gut feelings, rumor and computer models which are based on gut feelings and rumors -- are naturally skittish. Today's trading took the Dow Jones on an initial 1100 point drop, but they got over that.

From Tuesday 18 August 2015 09:30 to Monday 24 August 2015 16:30, the Dow Jones has gone from 17537.30 to 15,871.35 -- a cratering of 1665.95. 9.5%.

Source: Google Finance - Yahoo Finance - MSN Money

Perspective: First, remember that the Dow Jones is still nearly 16,000. Second, the great stock market crash of the Great Depression? It's total value was less than the current collapse. But at 9.5%, this decline is very much smaller than the old decline. The 1929 crash affected a lot of people because a lot of people had been lured into putting their money in the stock market. That doesn't quite work that way today -- save for retirement funds -- except in China, where they were trying to find a safe place to put their money in their pseudo economy. Right. Nothing can go wrong in the stock market.

I was in grad school during the big crash of 1987 -- Black Monday -- the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) fell exactly 508 points to 1,738.74 (-22.61%). I was in the middle of debugging a FORTRAN program and had defended but not revised my MS thesis and working on my Ph.D. research. I couldn't get a teaching job without the graduate degrees, and they were off for quite a while, so there wasn't anything I could do. I went back to debugging the program. If the U.S. was about to plunge into a Super Depression and we were all out of jobs, so be it.

Today's 588.40 loss? Just not a big deal when you're starting from a value over seven times as much as 1987.

So everyone take a deep breath and let some things sort themselves out. And maybe China could figure out how to run an economy. Or, as in some other big drops in recent years, no one outside of Wall Street will care all that much in the short term. Marketplace points out the U.S. economy only exports about 1-2% to China, though we use China for a lot of manufacturing.

And if you have money, you're no doubt buying.

Oh, and oil is now down to below $39/bbl -- first time in six years.

Dr. Phil

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