The speed of reading off the screen is reportedly ca. 30-50% of the typical paper reading speed. I haven’t done any scientific comparisons, but really it feels like it. So, having so much interesting things worth reading on the Internet, and an irritating reading speed, I was planning to get myself an eInk reader, basically to read faster and more conveniently. Now, according to my limited knowledge, there are three major devices on the horizon - Sony Reader - a successor of DRM-heavy Librie, Chinese Hanlin v2, and iRex Iliad. The last one seems like the best feature-wise. It was supposed to come out in April. End of April they announced that due to some problems with the web shop (these days such things take vast amounts of time, for sure ;-)), the launch will be delayed to May. There was some speculation that it is due to software problems, which would be understandable at that stage, but the Website story prevailed.

Today, on 31st of May, a new message appeared on their website - consumer sales delayed until September, with a “more extended functionality”! Oh wow! They mention no issues whatsoever, so obviously the website problem must have gotten worse. These websites… Good that I am so stupid, otherwise I would suspect that they were not telling the truth.

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I used to store my “work knowledge base”, as Notes in Outlook. That’s what I was doing before, and that’s what I did for the last 1.5 years. So I collected quite some snippets of practical knowledge, work-related thoughts, etc. all as notes in Outlook. The mailboxes are on Exchange server, all backed-up, the backups are (should be…) stored in compliance with document retention regulations. So that’s quite a fail-safe method of storing the precious gems, right? No! After my pc was reinstalled, I found that this single damn notes folder, was not being synched through the firewall, effectively it’s like if it were on the local drive! Here I am, with 1.5 years worth of systematized knowledge down the drain.

I make backup copies of files I work on, store my old mails, archive the important data on my home pc, and when I put trust in someone else’s system, I get burnt! Never put your eggs in someone else’s basket.