These days, sure that kind of money seems like nothing. But back when I was young, I dealt with the whole starving artist thing. Money was super tight, living paycheck to paycheck. $125 for a bag of groceries? More like $20-40 for the week. And $2500 to record an album, that was more than my car cost then. A simple cheap car repair was able to devastate my budget. You're working on the basis that self-published authors have decent jobs. So yes, $125 is something to bitch about. That's a lot of money when you're scraping by and trying to get your first bits of work out there. Especially when you know that early in your self-publishing career, it's very likely it might not even sell enough to recoup that, even if the work is good.

I picked up an optical touchscreen a while back. It was nifty and kinda gimmicky. Then my cat figure out that she could mess with the computer with her tail when I was grabbing a drink or in another room. Now the touchscreen USB cable is left unplugged. I foresee this having the same issue.

Insert obligatory Uranus joke here...

The e-ink models didn't drop any. And the regular nook tablets are just outdated tech that are really showing their age next to the Nexus 7; making it just standard price drops to clear out junk. Get back to me when they release a color e-ink reader.

Okay, I concede the kernel isn't all that matters. The UI matters too; I just got tired of seeing non-stop posts complaining about the Metro interface while talks about the kernel changes seem to get glossed over.

Everyone complains about the new Metro interface. I've been running Win8 preview for a while now and while I've adapted to the new interface, it does still bugs me. But complaining about it is like arguing about KDE vs Gnome; you can castrate the Metro interface to look like Win7 with 3rd party software. What really matters is the kernel. It may break some applications and for those people Win8 is a bad choice. But from my experience, the new kernel is runs better than Win7 (which is saying a lot given how much better 7 was than Vista). Several games I tested got a nice frame-per-second boost (or at least performed equally) under Win8 vs Win7. So for me it's worth it to upgrade but I suppose your mileage may vary and as benchmarks come out we can see more about how the kernel performs on different systems.

Why yes, there were ponies and girls. I know, it's hard to believe so here's a photo from Comic-Con proving both: http://twitter.com/bonniegrrl/status/223841022533304321/photo/1/large

The most exciting news out of Comic-Con so far for me has been Neil Gaiman announcing his Sandman prequel. Official announcement video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GndnR7oSYYk

Here are the specs when compared to the Nook Color, Nook Tablet, and Kindle Fire. https://img.skitch.com/20120622-umkafxaic4gwhdr26samdnd1h.jpg

"As stereoscopic 3D implementations fail to catch on" the post is pretty much trolling on the basis that stereoscopic gaming is failing. If anything, it's getting more support lately. Nvidia not only supports 3D monitors, but now also supports playing games in 3D via 3D HDTVs over HDMI ( www.nvidia.com/object/3dtv-play-overview.html ). ATI finally offers good stereoscopic support via HD3D ( www.amd.com/hd3D ). And 3rd parties like TriDef offer nice 3D support for a variety of video cards. I personally enjoy playing a game with added depth and would take a single monitor in stereoscopic 3D over 3 displays (though I'd love to do 3 displays all in stereoscopic 3D).

I spend almost no time dialing phone #s. I just pick a contact. Phones were reversed because people used to be able to dial faster than the phone system could handle. If you want a modified number layout, get a smartphone and reprogram the dialing interface. Leave the calculator at its default layout, it's a good setup.

Animals came from miles around. So tired of walking so close to the ground... What is the law? No spill blood!