Well crappity crap crap crap with a darn for good measure!!

I checked my email at work - bad worker bee that I am - and noticed there is a coupon for $1 off select books for a limited time only. When I clicked on it to see what books were select, one of the is the latest In Death book. It's already only $9.99 for the E version for a savings of 63%. Add to that a $1.00 coupon and how can I possibly NOT get it.

So what's the problem you ask?? Why are you bitching about such a squeal of a deal on a series you love To Death (heh, heh, heh - get it?) Are you nucking futs?????

Well - I've been collecting this series way back starting with Naked in Death. When they switched to hardcover I wasn't happy - it interrupted the flow so to speak of the shelf. Added to that it's a lot more money in hardcover than paperback. But buying online cut the price considerably. But now it's in an impossible to resist e version so my run of paper books comes to an end. Starting with this one, no longer can I look on my In Death specific book shelf.

It's like the end of an era is what it is. I'm one of those who despite having an ereader, still deep at heart, loves the print books. Maybe it's the fear of Farenheight 451 coming out - the ultimate and eventual end of paper books. Yes, I'm sure I'm making a mountain out of a moehill and should be happy that once I get home I'll have instant gratification at a really excellent price - but stil........

This and That

Thanks for all your well wishes on the new job!! I do know all the people in that department as in the Intake department, we get all the faxes and deliver them throughout the day. So when I'm on faxing, that's one of the departments I deliver too. When I went down on Friday afternoon, they were all very excited that I was moving to their department. I told one girl who doesn't get by my desk that while you may like having me in the department, you are going to LOVE my calendar (heh heh heh). And a few people in the department I'm leaving asked that when I send emails, I also include them - even if it has nothing to do with that department. They didn't want to miss them :-)

I week or so ago I got an email from the Kobo people that there was a 'fix' to my biggest issue; the diminutive size of the font from downloaded third party publishers and the inability to make it any larger. I took it into Chapters yesterday to have it upgraded. I could have done it myself apparently, but then this is a small electronic devise and - hello - if there's an option someone else will do it I'll take that one every time! The guy said it would take about 10 or 15 minutes so he would come and find me when it was done. I said I'd probably be in the romance section (no probably about it really though). He came by a couple of minutes later and gave me a coupon for downloading a free ebook and a $10 gift certificate for an in store purchase. Do you have any idea how hard it was not to pick up a book?!?!?!? Whenever I had one in my hands I put it back, telling myself I would be in a world of books in just TWO DAYS and to wait until I got back! He made it back with my improved Kobo before I broke down thank goodness - it was a close thing!

So of course when I got home I had to try it out. And of course I needed new books in order to do so. I'd read on DA that the whole series of books by P.B. Ryan were available for an incredibly excellent price at Smashwords. I've read her Patricia Ryan medievals and really enjoyed them, so I went and ordered all the P.B. Ryan series for the incredibly low price of just under $14.00 - amazing! I first heard about Smashwords from Monkey Bear Reviews when she did a review for a new book by Alexis Harrington, an author I loved who seemed to disappear. So I also picked that book up as well as a couple others by Ms. Harrington.

And wonder of wonders - it worked!! I can now adjust the font size on third party ebooks. Ebook publishers - here I come!

Lastly - I should not be here blogging!! No I should not. I thought I'd learned my lesson when I did my last minute packing for Denver. I said then and there that I wouldn't go through that again and figured to have my packing down for RWA 90% done by the Saturday before I left. The best laid plans and all that though. It seems procrastination trumps all as once again, I haven't really started. I've written down what I need to pack - but that's about as far as I've gotten. *sigh* So right now I'm off to do laundry. So when next I report in, it should be from Orlando (should being a key word!)

Bee'in' a bad little worker bee

I'm doing a very, very bad thing at the moment. I'm blogging from *gasp* work. But at the last minute I was asked to cover reception and since all my work is back at my desk and there is nothing else to do and I can alt-tab very quickly, I thought - what the heck. I'm here for two and a half hours with not a whole lot to do so why not be a totally bad worker bee.

So - I have taken procrastinaton to a whole 'nother level this time. I don't have a single thing ready yet and the taxi is picking me up at 2:00 am!! I still have to pack - I have to make a list of what to pack. I plugged in my cell phone before I left this morning but I'm not sure it's the right charger and half the time I don't remember how to turn it on anyway.

I don't even know what suitcase to bring!! Do I take the smaller one since it's only a weekend and I don't have to check it - or do I take the larger one that will have a lot of extra room for books. I think I'll go with larger. And by checking it in, I won't have to worry about bring anything other than my laptop on board with me.

One of the things I'm really hoping to do is get help sometime with downloading books onto the Kobo. From Chapters there is no problem but when it comes to other epubs it's a different story altogether! It's all in very small font and I can't make it any better. I've been forced to wear reading glasses. The only trouble is I keep losing reading glasses. I stopped at the dollar store on the way home last night and bought 3 extra pairs. At lunch when I pulled out the Kobo and started reading - I'm reading a non-Chapters book at the moment, sure enough, not a single pair of reading glasses was in my Big Checkered Purse. So I need to be able to change the font. Hopefully I have everything I need on the laptop already. I have Calibre, some kind of Adobe program, I'll have my Kobo along with the cord. Hopefully someone will take pity on me and help me with this dilemma.

I'm really looking forward to trying the Kobo out on the plane. For the first time in I don't know how long, one of the things I'm not pondering is what books to take!! I won't have any taking up space in my luggage! It's such an odd feeling. But on the Kobo I have historical, I have Westerns, I have paranormal, I have RS, I have contemporaries - You name it - I have it. Although I'd better remember reading glasses since some of them are other than Chapters books and I'll need them if I'm in the mood for a SciFi/Futuristic genre. Hopefully I can get so engrossed in a book during the 3 hour flight that gets me to Denver only an hour after I leave so I won't notice how squished I'm going to be in the middle aisle. I don't like the middle seats :-(

~*~*~*~*~

And in other news, it seems Brent's cat is in heat. I hear the poor dear merworroroing from the basement. But my sweet dears must have some kind of feline sympathic thing going as even though his cat is quite loud in her horniness, my cats aren't tormenting her. So all is quiet between Man vs Destructo Cat at the moment. Destructo Cat has an appointment next Tuesday to go in the "The Operation" Hopefully it will have some effect on her and I can go back to calling her Cally - the Tortoise Shelled Cat.

Buying up a storm

Boy, when I finally got into the e-reader field, I didn't do things lightly. Being the obsessive compulsive type - that's why I avoid horse racing, slot machines which are legal in Ontario now, lottery tickets and other various forms of gambling - I know I have the kind of personality that could get hooked real bad and real quick - I did a cannonball leap into e-books!

And once I discovered how easy it is to download from Chapters - well, I scare me!! As one who formerly said never to ereading, I seem to have grabbed hold with both hands, though I only need one to hold it.

One of the neat things I discovered is I can get some Harlequin Temptations once more!! And I discovered a new author. Well, I'd kind of read a couple of her books in the past but she wasn't really on my radar. But Chapters has some free ebooks and one that looked interesting was Slow Hands by Leslie Kelly. It was free, it was a quick read and it was good. So good I went looking for other books I could download and that's when I found the Temptation books. Boy do I miss that line! So I also got Night Whispers, Wickedly Hot and Her Last Temptation. So far I've read Her Last Temptation and I quite enjoyed it too!


And for when I get tired of these books, and feel the need for something different, I downloaded The Lost Enchantress by Patricia Coughlin. I've been eyeing this one for a while, but the price was a bit too high. But it's much lower on an ebook. The same with The Treasure Keeper by Shana Abe!



Or if I'm not in the mood, I now have Hotter After Midnight by Cynthia Eden! Or say I'm feeling like a nice good RS. All I have to do is turn on my Kobo and there I have it!






And just this morning, while still in my ratty old, yet very comfy bath robe, I discovered that I could instantly get Sugar Creek by Toni Blake, a book I've been waiting for a while for now! I was checking out other books by her and discovered a small novella type book, You Send Me, only available as an ebook, which of course I got, at $2.59, who could I not. It was then I discovered Sugar Creek as an ebook. It's not on the main page as that format.



I think I must stop though. This is just too easy! when I can buy a book at 6:30 am - in my bathrobe, I must learn control.

There are still a few glitches. I downloaded Calibre and while that helped, not all the kinks are worked out yet. But at least I can read the two other books I ordered not from Chapters. When all the bugs are worked out - then I REALLY need to watch out. I already have a cart waiting for me.

Sometimes I kill me

I have a bit of a reputation at work for sending rather......... unusual....... work emails. Some coworkers like them, other people I'm sure think them very odd.

In my particular job, I have to send a lot of faxes and we have to stamp anything we fax with a fax stamp and date stamp. It can get annoying doing both so not long ago we had a special stamp done just for our department that dates it and marks it faxed at the same time - in one fell STAMP!! It went missing last Friday, and this is the email I sent - along with picture.




BOLO!!
Our dear coworker – Faxendate Stamp – is missing!!! We miss him and I think he probably misses us too, though he did wander away. If you have seen him, can you bring him back to his home next to the fax machine? He is unique, one of a kind!! In the meantime we are making due with his cousins Fax Stamp and Date Stamp, but it just isn’t the same without our own Faxendate. He seems to have vanished on Friday afternoon. I notice his absence particularly this week. He does know how to save time!


Well, finally, a week later, something occurred to me. So I looked and found it. So I sent a follow-up email


Update
Faxendate came back!! Well, at least we found the little rascal. I think he must have been boogeying and partying too hearty and somehow jumped off his table and landed behind the fax machine. Probably that break dance he attempted. I know the whole team was worrying about him and hoping he would once more be reunited with his cousins Date Stamp and Fax Stamp – and then the other one we don’t speak of often, Urgent Stamp. Well, we can cease our worrying. Now, we just need to keep him out of the ‘ink’ on the weekends!

~*~*~ And in other news ~*~*~

And I have a Kobo update!! I've been working on it and managed to drop and drag the PDF books over to the Kobo - with a couple of glitches! It seems I can't change the font size like I can on the other book. And the font is teeny, tiny - so much so that it's too small to read. It does allow me to increase the size of the page if not the font, but when I do that, it moves the page to the right so that I can't read it all *sigh*

And I've found a few drawback. I'm an unrepentant enreader. I don't like that I am, but it's a habit I haven't been able to break and gave up trying. But with the Kobo, I don't think I can do that; not unless I want to click on hundreds of pages! The book I'm reading is very unusual and I want to see how it ends - NOW - but I can't! Also I'm curious about something that I think happened a few chapters back, but again, it's not as easy to flip back in an ereader as it is in a print book.

And I found out I still have to carry at least one paper book with me - in case the battery dies in the ereader and I can't turn it on at lunch when I have some reading time. That happened to me yesterday but luckily I had a back-up print book to get me through the lunch hour.

Adventures with an E Reader

I am afraid of small electrical devices. I am!! My cell phone is 4 years old and I don't know if it has texting capabilities. It doesn't matter - I don't plan on texting. I have a couple of devices to plug an IPod into. But they shall remain podless as I fear IPods. So as little as six months ago, I made a promise to myself I would never be an e-reader. But never make promises to yourself as you are likely to break them.

I mentioned in previous posts that I decided on, ordered and picked up a Kobo. I picked it up last Friday. On Sunday I overcame my fear enough to take it out of the box. And the next big step was last night when I decided to give 'er a go and get it up and running. Surprisingly, it was pretty easy. So them came the next test; ordering a book from Chapters.

I don't know what I did, or how I did it, but IT WORKED! With tons of books to choose from, I decided to go with Haunting Beauty by Erin Quinn. I had just started reading Haunting Warrior, the second book in the series. I soon realized it might be best to read the first book before going any further and voila, my first ereader book ever was chosen.

With that success behind me, I decided to go another step further and order books from an epublisher since the reason I went with a Kobo was to have the ability to order outside the box books that aren't always as easy to find with the NY publishers. I checked out a couple of sites and ended up at Liquid Silver where I downloaded a couple of books.

I went with A Hearing Heart by Bonnie Dee. I've read a few of her books and really enjoyed them and this one sounded intriguing. I read a review for it somewhere - can't remember where now - and the price was right. And it's a Western!!

Oh! Oh! I remember now. Aztec Lady did a review for this one on Karen's blog. Or then again, maybe it was Jayne's review at DA.



And for my third choice, Containment by Lucinda Thorne. It's a SciFi/Futuristic and I'm all over them and the story sounds interesting. I shiver at the thought of all the SciFi/Futuristics they have with E Publishers.

However, this is where I ran into a "glitch". I downloaded them in PDF format to my laptop, plugged in the Kobo and then was stuck. I had heard that it's a simple matter of dragging and dropping. The dragging part was easy, but the dropping - not so much. I couldn't figure out where to drop!! I have Kobo files but it wouldn't let me drop and I'm not sure whether the Kobo files were on the Kobo itself or on the part that was loaded on the computer when I set it up. Where ever it was, it wasn't on the Kobo. Nath is the only one I know with a Kobo and after a flurry of emails back and forth, we were both confused. And by that time, my brain had just about shut down for the night for thinking and concentrating. I know it's probably a simple matter, and once I get it figured out, the world of ebooks will be my oyster. But for the moment, I'm stymied.

Now for using it for reading. I like it!! I really like it! I'm anal about keeping my books in good shape and if a book has words going to the real inside of a book, it can drive me nuts trying to read it without doing some kind of spine bending. I really like that you can read it one handed or no handed; prop it against something and all you need is a finger to hit the next page button. And another feature I didn't realize it had until I started reading was when you turn it off and then back on, it automatically goes to where you left off reading. Kewl.

So so far, so almost good

Well!! I did it!

On my way home from work tonight I stopped at Chapters and ordered myself a Kobo. Yes - me - who swore I would never get an ereader just a few short years ago, took the plunge.

They didn't have any in stock, but in the next shipment they get, there should be a black one with my name on it. I went for black because I read a review that said the blue buttons on the white ones got dirty to quickly - as good a reason as any to choose the black one I guess. The clerk said it may take as long as 6 weeks, but in reality she said it would probably be much less time then that.

Now I'm really going to have to conquer my fear of small electronic gadgets.

And look! It comes with 100 books already loaded. One of them is a Nicolas Sparks book. It appears I will have to learn how to delete books too!! Or maybe not - I don't see it on the list of 100, although The Communist Manifesto is on it - How Bizarre, How Bizarre, How Bizarre (ear worm!)

I'm sure I'll have lots of fun adventures to come trying to work it. I'm the one who spent 3 hours trying to figure out how to work the DVD player.

I've been trying to see if it has any of those carrying case thingys but I don't see any - at least not at the 'official' web site. But I can get a 'skin'.

And now that I've already ordered and paid for it, does anyone else have one? What do you think? Do you like it? Is it easy to use? Keep in mind that while I was sitting in on the workshop given by Sarah, Jane and Angie, I kept somehow getting 'out' of the book of whichever devise I tried to use and didn't know how to go back. I can tell there will be interesting times ahead.

Nath - you're up now *g*. See, she said she would get one once I did.