Useless Conversation

[Signe]

I got one of those electric book machines but I don't know what to do with it yet.

Signe, this statement probably makes you the 'old crank' winner of this thread. Maybe Ironwood can pull something off at the last moment, but I doubt it.

Other than that, sorry for your shitty xmas. I will forever remember your xmas next time I'm about to bitch about mine.

Thanks.  I'm not sad to see xmas over with this year.  Still, the fact that I even knew my grand-aunts and grand-uncles let alone my great grandfather and great grandmother feels good.  I have a picture of my nephew with his great-great grandfather.  Pretty awesome.  Next year will be different.  No one will die, people or pets, and I think I'll start worshiping that great horny red bloke.



That might be Dave Grohl, actually. 

[Ironwood]

I got one of those electric book machines but I don't know what to do with it yet.

Signe, this statement probably makes you the 'old crank' winner of this thread. Maybe Ironwood can pull something off at the last moment, but I doubt it.

Other than that, sorry for your shitty xmas. I will forever remember your xmas next time I'm about to bitch about mine.

Um, Thanks ?

Also, Fuck Facebook.

[Morat20]

I got one of those electric book machines but I don't know what to do with it yet. 

You put books on it. :)

Actually, first you go "Oh, it lacks the FEEL/SMELL/HEFT/WEIGHT/MEMORY/SOMETHING of print/books" but you put a book or three on it anyways (probably one you get free, because Amazon has lots of free classics, or Baen has lots of free sci-fi, or someone gives you a ten dollar gift card and you're 'fuck it, I'm too lazy to go to the bookstore'.

And then you get used to it, and you get annoyed when your portable, light-weight library LACKS a book or reference you need. So you buy that. And then you realize you have print copies taking up tons of room and you free up space by getting electronic copies, because it's so much more convenient to take your library anywhere you go.....

Then again, I'm an old fart because I insist on a Kindle (because back-lit screens suck if you're reading for hours) and while I do read the occasional book on my phone or tablet, it's almost always because I left my paperwhite at home.

Seriously, I'm reducing my book collection to signed copies, classics and art books, and a handful of stuff like that. I'm hoping to go from seven bookcases to two...

I love my Kindle. Especially on cruises and long vacations. Being able to sit on deck, or outdoors in front of a fire just relaxing with hundreds of books at my disposal....(Hey, a week long cruise? You know how many books I can get through? I'd have to pack a separate suitcase....)

[Samwise]

You'll have to pry my seven bookcases out of my cold, dead fingers. 

[Sky]

Not mutually exclusive. I'm in a campaign against the moron who buys scifi/fantasy ebooks for our library system because she's a fucking moron, and also an asshole. She reads romantic fiction. So guess what the collection looks like? Page after page of shirtless men in scifi and/or fantasy settings. Also a few shitty best-sellers (she loves koontz so we have a couple dozen of those) and freebie classics.

Ideally, I'd like to have a copy of stuff I'm currently reading on my phone so if I do get caught somewhere without my book I can get a quick couple pages in.

Also, fuck facebook.

[Morat20]

You'll have to pry my seven bookcases out of my cold, dead fingers. 

Tiny, tiny house. Plus, to be totally honest, one is getting replaced with...well, it's going to contain mostly booze and glasses but some of it's supposed to hold my wife's favorite cookbooks, so technically it's still a bookshelf! :) (My father in law recently retired, loves to do woodwork, and saw something on Pinterest that is both ridiculously geeky and easily adapted to what we needed anyways. So he's planning on making it. Like I'm gonna say no to that...)

[Samwise]

You'll have to pry my seven bookcases out of my cold, dead fingers. 

Tiny, tiny house.

IIRC you live in Texas somewhere and I live in SF.  By all means, let's have a tiny-house-off.   

[Paelos]

Gather round ladies, it's a tiny-off!

[lamaros]

Happy new year all! Welcome to 2015, I hope the new year is a good one for all.

[Bunk]

Not mutually exclusive. I'm in a campaign against the moron who buys scifi/fantasy ebooks for our library system because she's a fucking moron, and also an asshole. She reads romantic fiction. So guess what the collection looks like? Page after page of shirtless men in scifi and/or fantasy settings. Also a few shitty best-sellers (she loves koontz so we have a couple dozen of those) and freebie classics.

Ideally, I'd like to have a copy of stuff I'm currently reading on my phone so if I do get caught somewhere without my book I can get a quick couple pages in.

Yea, I'm one of those guys witha book collection that fills half a wall, and then an ereader for what I actually read.

As to current sci fi/fantasy: I do greatly appreciate the few book stores I've found that separate "paranormal romance" off in to its own section now.

[bhodi]

I got a kindle paperwhite a year or so ago, it's pretty fantastic. I'm down to a half-bookcase sized space with physical books in it. The joy is in the words for me, I was never a tactile kind of guy, and it fits me and my life perfectly.

I do listen to audiobooks almost exclusively these days, though - the internet has replaced bedtime reading, and I enjoy listening because I can do other stuff (cook, clean, commute) during.

[Signe]

My brother in law made the wall along the stairs into shelves for more room for books.  There is absolutely no more space in this house for any more and yet every time he goes out, he comes back with a bag of books.  GAH!  I don't even know where he puts them now!  It's like he has some kind of invisible book shelves in an alternate world office.   When I'm done with a book I toss it or, if it's a hard cover, I donate it.  My bag of books to be tossed or donated has disappeared in to his never ending collection.  Now I just put whatever I finish reading on his desk and it gets absorbed.  Of course, he's a writer and editor and publishes an online writers thingamajibble but still... book collecting people are nutty.  This house needs a new house for the books.

[Yegolev]

I have used Calibre for electric book conversion and it's a nice application.  Easy to read IBM EPUB on a PC or upload to my paperwhite without that nasty PDF smell.  I'm probably a great candidate for a non-Amazon reader but this is what I have so I'm doing what I can.

[rattran]

Calibre is great, it makes my Kindle dx way more awesome. That said, I still have books everywhere in this house, the library is full, and there are bookshelves in every room. Including the bathroom now.

[apocrypha]

I got a Kobo last year because fuck Amazon, and I love it.

I've had boxes and boxes and boxes of books all my life. Books I've loved and carried around and crammed into tiny flats and houses forever, but over the last two years my wife & I have started getting rid of the physical books. First they went into boxes into the attic, now we've slowly started transferring them to charity shops.

The amount of extra space it's creating in every room in the house is amazing, and we've probably only got rid of 1/3rd of our total books. I love books, I love the physical objects, but the freedom from all those boxes of heavy, bulky paper is awesome too.

[bhodi]

At some point amazon disabled the ability to email epubs into people's kindles. Must have happened in the past year. So unfortunate.

I kind of want to write a calibre plugin where it communicates with other people using calibre and just adds other people's books to a giant library list, peer to peer style.

[Yegolev]

In my unwritten book, Things I Do To Annoy My Wife, I have a new entry.

Arriving home...
Wife: Can you see what's in the mailbox?
Me: No, it's opaque.

[Ironwood]

You must light up that womans life.

You know that they don't HAVE to stay with you right ?

I keep getting reminded of that, for some reason....

[Merusk]

Yeah, but when you call 'em on that bluff and they don't go.

"I don't have to stay."
"So don't. Bye!"
*storms off to room*

Eh.

[RhyssaFireheart]

I got a Kobo last year because fuck Amazon, and I love it.

I've had boxes and boxes and boxes of books all my life. Books I've loved and carried around and crammed into tiny flats and houses forever, but over the last two years my wife & I have started getting rid of the physical books. First they went into boxes into the attic, now we've slowly started transferring them to charity shops.

The amount of extra space it's creating in every room in the house is amazing, and we've probably only got rid of 1/3rd of our total books. I love books, I love the physical objects, but the freedom from all those boxes of heavy, bulky paper is awesome too.

I'm slowly coming around to the idea of converting my physical books into ebooks and unless I have a specific reason (like I started a series in physical format), I've just been buying ebooks.  It's so nice to do.

There are some books that I just keep hesitating to donate though, like my Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms paperbacks.  I don't know why.  I tried rereading the Dragonlance novels a while back and just didn't get into them, so why do I hesitate to get rid of the books?

[RhyssaFireheart]

Oh, and an actual (okay, paraphrased) phone conversation with the financial analyst who supports our group (I coordinate the project financials for our group for her):

Her : So these two invoices from <vendor> hit the general ledger this month; are you going to move them to a project?
Me : Not this month.  The PM is out and I need their okay to pay the invoices and then move to the project.
Her : But they already hit the ledger?
Me : Yes, but they just hit yesterday and the PM is out.
Her : But we don't have extra funds in the budget to carry these invoices!
Me : I get that, but I need the PM's okay first.  I don't know if these are capital or expense charges for the project.
Her : Can't you just move them as expense and do a reconciliation later?
Me : No. I won't do that.
Her : Okay, but do I need to accrue for these then?

 

She's a nice girl, but is really, really panicky about things.  Plus there is a bit of a language barrier going on (she's from Turkey) so I can say something, she'll get confused, I'll repeat it in a slightly different way and she'll get it... usually.    I know some of her panic is because it's EOY and this is her first one working here, but sheesh.  This is also the same person who was freaking out over the summer because our dept budgets were SOOOOOOOO unfavorable but now at the end of the year, we're suddenly OMG favorable again. 

[WayAbvPar]

I love people who decide shit needs to get done RIGHT NOW on holidays. Got an email from a place I send data to at 12:30 PM on Christmas Eve...their customer had just discovered that some pieces of data they got IN FUCKING AUGUST didn't match the same data they got in March. All the associated metadata was the same, nothing was broken, but the files were like .5kb larger than they were before. So my customer wants to satisfy his customer and tells us he wants to answer them by the end of the day. On Christmas Eve.

After I got done swearing and throwing things around, I laughed. Then I laughed even more when I realized that the files in question are not part of the data package I send, and that I was A) not responsible, and B) got to wash my hands of it. Called him up and gave him the good news (at least for me!) then hung up and laughed some more.

I get that people want answers, but you have to be realistic. I happened to be working from home that day, but the other guy I was working with was at a Christmas Eve Mass with his wife and typing shit out on his Blackberry while she stared daggers at him.


On e-books- I really thought I would miss the feel and smell and heft of books. I got the fuck over it in a hurry when I realized I could carry a few thousand books around with me at all times, and that I could buy almost any book I wanted whenever I thought I might like to read it. I just wish there was an easy way to get electronic versions of my print library. I have gathered quite a few, but I try not to pay for e-books for books I already own. Also, there are several books that I would love to go back and read again that are out of print, and my print paperbacks have disintegrated to the point of uselessness.

Happy New Year, everyone. We survived another one. Fuck those Mayans.

[Merusk]

People pull that shit because EOY is right around the corner and they've only just realized the depth of their mistake. So now it's your problem. 

Saw it in Architecture all the time, too. Didn't matter that the job site was going to be 80-100% closed until the first week of January, or that City plan departments were equally closed. You have to get those plan sets out or make those massive changes by Dec. 25 or 31st, damnit!

The life of a service industry professional serf.

[HaemishM]

I got that this week. Every year, half the agency gets the week of Christmas off, half gets the week after Christmas off. I tend to always pick the week after. So I'm off this week, and one of my clients emails me, then calls me and leaves a voicemail, then calls my cell twice (the agency pays for the cell phone as a business thing so I have to answer clients). I was quite happy to call him back and tell him it was my week off and I could handle it when I get back next week. Of course, he was only calling because people above him suddenly remembered they needed that done and were yelling at him before turning around and admitting that no, it didn't actually have to get done this week.

Fuck people.

[apocrypha]

There are some books that I just keep hesitating to donate though, like my Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms paperbacks.  I don't know why.  I tried rereading the Dragonlance novels a while back and just didn't get into them, so why do I hesitate to get rid of the books?

Yeah, there's definitely a section of books that will never be turned into digital copies. For me it's mostly photography books and cook books, because neither of them work as digital versions. I annotate my cook books quite a lot (e.g. 'too hot!' or 'takes bloody hours to make!' or 'more chili!' etc.) and photography books are all pictures

Also, happy new year you lot!

[Yegolev]

You know that they don't HAVE to stay with you right ?

As suggested, we've tested those waters.  It goes as far as telling me to get out, which doesn't work because no.

We do love each other, really.

[murdoc]

Ugh why am I at work today?

[Phildo]

Ugh why am I at work today?

I am, too.  None of my clients are, so it's just busy work and basic maintenance.  Hoping we get to go home early.

[Morat20]

Ugh why am I at work today?

I considered it and then just said "fuck it" and took a vacation day. From past experience, there's probably two people per floor there.

Mostly coders who can finally get shit done now that it's quiet.

[Yegolev]

There is at least one PM working today, so I get to write emails.

[HaemishM]

I'm happily ignoring the work emails that are coming into my phone/tablet while I'm off. Monday is going to SUCK.

[Yegolev]

I made some productive moves today, against the odds.  Now to fuck off until Monday morning.

[Rasix]

I haven't opened my laptop since the 18th.  Monday should be fun.

[Chimpy]

They are shutting off all power to the building where our current production servers live for several hours on Sunday morning so I have been at work making sure I have all of my stuff ready to be shut down at 5am on Sunday when I get in.

[Ingmar]

They are shutting off all power to the building where our current production servers live for several hours on Sunday morning so I have been at work making sure I have all of my stuff ready to be shut down at 5am on Sunday when I get in.

Ugh, I feel you on that. I have to shut our whole server room down at some point to replace a breaker in our Symmetra. Luckily the issue is just with going into bypass so we can push it off until we get rid of the 8 year old Oracle servers that might not turn back on if we turn them off. Still going to be one of those hold-your-breath things.