I had thought of getting Jeanne an iPod touch but I’ve pushed back the purchase time and time again. But recently, Michelle and I have been reading ebooks a lot and although it’s reasonable on the iPhone because of its retina display, it’s not exactly ideal on Michelle’s Nokia 5800 where your squint at the small low-resolution display and tapping the not-so-sensitive resistive touchscreen so often. And there’s also Jeanne taking over the iPhone especially when I’m reading. And yet, the display is too small and she ends up hunching over it. So I finally decided to get an iPad. Now Michelle can read on the iPad, Jeanne can play with a bigger screen, and I have the iPhone all to myself. Now that’s a win-win-win situation! :P
Michelle has been reading a PDF version of A Game of Thrones on her Nokia 5800. I had been reading the same PDF on my iPhone before I got an ePub version and knew was a chore reading. So I searched for an ePub reader for her phone. A quick search got led me to Wijnands’ blog and to the Dorian reader. It requires Qt which is pretty big but it works great!
I read the GSMArena review of the upcoming Nokia N9 and I was quite impressed. The hardware, as with the Nokia N8, is quite good. The software, MeeGo, seems to be as good, if not at par, with iOS and Android. And with Alien Dalvik, it can actually run Android apps via emulation. Yet, the N9 will be coming out under planned obsolescence: it was confirmed to be the final MeeGo phone as Nokia’s dark union with Microsoft bears fruit to the N9’s lesser twin. Nokia already knew what MeeGo was and what MeeGo will be when they decided to go to bed with Microsoft. MeeGo was even then better than WP7. And yet they pushed on. What’s up with that?
Finished A Clash of Kings over the long weekend. It’s about as good as A Game of Thrones, if not a bit better. The saga goes on and there’s still the political maneuverings, the cloak-and-dagger stuff, the skirmishes, and the battles. There’s also a little bit more of magic and sorcery, edging the series from medieval and towards fantasy. Unexpected was the battle outside the walls of King’s Landing towards the end. The battles in A Game of Thrones were rather smallish or seemed like so but this one was HUGE. Though it could have been more epic by adding more detail and perspectives, but it’s good enough as it is. I read there’s going to be a TV version and I wonder, considering the low budget of TV productions, how they’re going to pull this off. It would be sad if they couldn’t.
Jeanne, Michelle, and I went to High Street for a Father’s Day dinner. After dinner we dropped by Animaland and she grabbed this black bear. Michelle tried to show her a giraffe, an elephant, even a polar bear but she wouldn’t let go of the black bear. So we decided to adopt the black bear. And since it was my day, I got to name him Mormont.