1. It’s great machine if you travel. If you travel, the Kindle is a godsend for you. I’m the kind of guy who stocks up a pile books for even shorter trips, fully expecting to finish Way of the Turtle, The Yankee Years, and Watchmen on a boat trip from Gothenburg to Copenhagen. With the Kindle you have a full complement of books available at any time.

2. It looks great. The Kindle 2 is an amazing improvement over the Kindle 1. If every manufacturer took cues on build quality and product life cycles from Amazon, we’d all be better off.

3. You can put anything you want on it. You can easily email DOC, TXT, and PDF files to your own Kindle email address for conversion to the Kindle – but that costs 10 cents.

4. It feels great. This new Kindle 2 has excellent button placement and is thin enough to cut cheese. It’s extremely portable.

5. It works in inclement conditions. I was in Mexico with the wife and kids and I wanted to test the Kindle out near the pool. Three books later and I felt like the laziest high-tech maven in the world. The ladies next to me brought twenty softcover novels with them and all of them got wet and messy. The Kindle worked like a dream.

6. Almost any book at any time. Except for a few esoteric reference books I’ve found just about everything I need on the Kindle store. As more and more publishers go ebook – and I think an iPhone Kindle reader will truly blow the last bottlenecks out – this excuse will become ineffective.

7. The bookmarking and highlighting systems are vastly improved. The original Kindle had two methods for note-taking: you could select text and add a note or you could add a book mark. The new system refines those considerably and adds visual feedback whenever you take a note.

8. The dictionary is now in-line. When you move to a word, its definition appears at the bottom of the page. If you wanted a definition before, you had to pop out to a separate page.

9. It is the future. Sorry, it is. Amazon nailed the ebook and they’re going to own the space for the next few years. Maybe they’ll pull a Netflix and sell the software to OEMs, which is fine by me. But ebooks are what we’ll be reading while we rocket to the moon in 2040. Or we’ll have our robotic friends read them to us.

Understanding exposure third edition. Although it could be called understanding your camera.

This is a moderately complete overhaul of the second edition. It covers all of the things covered in the second edition plus additionally Author Bryan Peterson covers HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography.

One of the sections I enjoyed the most is Peterson’s photographic triangle. aperture, shutter speed plus iso. All three are of equal importance in the photo hard I sometimes forget about the effects of different iso’s so this section brought that to life for me. some of the other subjects that were fascinating to me was his explanation of white balance plus how it’s over rated “It’s my view that, next to the histogram, the white balance is one of the most overrated controls on the digital camera”. Another section I liked was one entitled “The sky brothers” Here Peterson talks about difficult light plus contracts situations that meters have difficulty with. Peterson moves the light meeter to one area or another to receive a reading that’s not so effected by bad light or contrast including the always difficult images of snow. Read more »

This book really clarified in my mind, why it is so important to put yourself out there & make growing your network part of your daily ritual along with eating a healthy breakfast & exercise. In all six cases, the benefits may not immediately felt, but over time the payback is indisputable!

I highly recommend this book to somebody trying to get their head around the concepts of social networking & why it may be relevant to you.

Each chapter contains important lessons of how to leverage the tools that now exist so that you can establish & grow your brand online. The story of how Gary Vernechuck, a 22 year elderly, transformed his parent’s wine business from $2 million a year to $45 million a year & became a mini-celebrity in the system is a lesson that can be applied by both individuals & corporations.

In today’s down economy, making a rich network of people that you can tap in to is more important than ever before. require a job? require a recipe? require advice on where to stay in the south of spain? The more individuals who know you directly relates to the more individuals who can help you accomplish your goals whatever we may be. It worked for Obama (he tapped in to the social networking to raise huge amounts of campaign funds), it can work for you .

The book is both a practical guide for somebody looking to carve out a niche online & get their brand noticed.

The tools that Juliette gives you in this book can basically be applied by somebody irrespective of your field. These are the ingredients you require to know in order to become a ‘mini-celebrity’.