Sunday, January 17, 2010

January is here

January. Named by a dead Roman for Janus, their god of the doorway. His wife was not named Lintel as you'd expect but Camese. He got the gift of seeing the future and past which is why masks of Janus have a face in front and in back. You might have seen such masks at balls and I think there was one in Zardoz and Eyes Wide Shut.

The air in Utah is terrible due to our long-lasting temperature inversion that lets too little fresh air circulate into the system. Allergy and asthma sufferers are having a hard time so we're not enjoying it much and hope it snows soon.

My newest toy is the Witstech A81, aka Wirelession W1060. It's a mobile internet device, supposedly, with a 7" 800x480 screen. It's great for watching movies or tv shows, works good as an ebook reader and is very poor at surfing the web. Hopefully a firmware update will fix this and I bought it with the assurance they were going to add Android during December. Which still hasn't happened so it doesn't get much use beyond reading but I expect it will be handy on our cruise in February. I can play Bejewelled and it looks odd displayed on such a big screen and the stylus is required since the screen is neither transreflective or capacitive in the way the iPod Touch is. So reading in sunlight will be difficult. Ah well, it will do until Apple decides to offer the Touch with a bigger screen. It will at least play most codecs which is more than the Touch can do.