Thursday, January 14, 2010

Advising

Advising goes in spurts. Weeks go by and I do nothing and feel guilty that I'm being paid (yes, that is correct) for doing it. Then I have a week where I think I'm not being paid enough.  Letters of academic probation??  Another steep and fast learning curve about that topic.  I've decided I need to go to some sessions on getting into medical school.  I have so many advisees who are "premed" and I don't think I'm giving them good or honest or realistic advice. And that's all I'm going to say on that topic.

Monday, January 11, 2010

More Reading on the Kindle

Now that I have my *own* kindle, I have more to say about the reading experience. At my nieces recommendation, i bought the first book in the series, "The Warriors". The book is about cats, with very similar names - firepaw, moonpaw, starpaw, etc. etc. If I had read the book in print, I would have occasionally flipped back to the beginning to review the list of characters. I think you can do it on the kindle, but I don't know how and it's not intuitive. The barrier is too high for me to bother to figure it out. There is also a map in the front of the book, that my niece went out of her way to point out to me. I never even thought to look at it on the kindle. The resolution was poor and again I was flummoxed by how to flip to the front of the book.

I also find it difficult to *find* books on the kindle. It's not made for browsing, which is surprising, because the Amazon site is all about browsing.

On the plus side, I *love* being about to download a sample chapter for FREE. I downloaded at least a dozen sample chapters over the weekend. I will try them and if I like them, I can just buy them while I'm travelling. O.K. That's the best thing about the kindle - I can buy a book almost anywhere, anytime!