On the path to geekdom

All my life so far back as I can recall, I've enjoyed books and reading. I would find solace in hanging out in the library reading whatever I felt like. I don't recall when I learned to read, but it was pretty young and I was hooked early.

When trailers for the movie Jumper came out, I remember thinking "that sounds like a cool book." The thing is, it seems that Hollywood has run out of ideas. Where are the good films coming from? Independants outside North America. So much that is coming out now is "let's turn that comic book into a movie" "... novel" "... old TV show" and of course "the first one made us a bucket of money, let's do a sequel"

It's truly sad... of course, what three movies are Mrs. Spit and I looking forward to right now? This month - Indiana Jones #4 and Narnia #2. Come November - James Bond #22. So I can't complain too vociferously... but I still feel that the majority of movies that come out aren't worth the rental fee at the local movie rental shop.

The other problem I have is that, with a very few exceptions (Lord of the Rings) I find that most movies don't do the book justice. This is not just due to the fact that you can imbue so much more depth to a character, or describe a scene in so much more detail than you can see on screen, it's more than that. For example, the Bourne Identity. Sure, the movie was cool, with lots of modern widgets. But the book was based in an early 1970's time frame!!! Things were different then! Why oh why do they have to take "artistic license" and screw up what was an excellent book!?!?! Oh yeah, I read this one in my teen years... in the 80's. The list could go on and on.

So of late, I've come to realize that I'm not reading enough. Sure, small surprise with all the net related stuff I've been caught up in. Unlike Mrs. Spit, I can't read before going to bed. I fall asleep, with few exceptions, very quickly. I've tried the read before sleep thing, but reading 1/2 page just is not my idea of how to read a novel!

Enter... the web. More specifically Amazon.com. They have come up with a very cool, very usable digital book system - the Kindle. This is the present object of my geek desire.

Of course, being in Canada - they don't ship here. A minor problem, but one all the same.

So, just as Mrs. Spit has recently acquired a lovely ipod, I think I'm going to save my shekels and get a Kindle. I have tons of ebooks already, but trying to read on my phone (PDA) is a pain - and using the laptop is just awkward. This looks like a nice synthesis of my bookworm and computer geek background into a great symbiotic relationship.

UPDATE:
So, on some rare occasions, it sucks to live in Canada. While looking further into the Kindle last night, I tried to find why it says that they don't ship outside the USA. Well, for one, the Kindle uses the Sprint EVDO network - no Sprint in Canada. Two, in order to purchase a Kindle, one must pay with a US credit card, with a billing and shipping address that are both in the US. There is some blah blah blah about copyright laws and such.

In short, my bubble is officially burst on this whole thing. Which is rather disappointing.