Gouging
If you use eBay, you really need to pay attention to what a seller is charging for shipping. Some of them are very unscrupulous in their attempts to make what they're selling look great because it starts off with a rock-bottom opening bid but then try to make up for it with inflated shipping costs. Take, for example, a book I was looking for the other day... I found it for $2. WOW! It's a $17 book in bricks-and-mortar stores like Barnes & Noble. And then I saw the shipping cost was $20.50. Bite me. The total starting cost of the book is $5.50 more than a brand new copy.

I really wish eBay would crack down on people who overcharge for shipping. It's out of control.

Casting
No, I have not read 50 Shades of Grey so I don't have quite as strong an opinion as all the Greyhards out there (I just made that up!) but I would like to say that the casting of Charlie Hunnam of Sons of Anarchy fame is pretty inspired. He's a damn good actor and I think he could easily clean up his rough-and-tumble hooligan/biker/robojock appearance to be the spit-and-polish Christian Grey I've heard so much about these last couple days.

Dakota Johnson on the other hand...

Locking
When Google announced the shutdown of Reader, I quickly glommed onto Feedly like so many others. I still love it, for the most part. The issue I'm currently having is that, every once in a while, it will lock up so that I cannot click the feed preview to read the full article. I'll just be stuck on my preview screen. Anyone else had that happen?

The only way I've found around it is to either wait several minutes (and I have no patience for that) or tap and hold the preview to save it to Pocket and read it there. Annoying.

Hesitating
Next Monday is #NINsday and how better to celebrate it than with a new album from Mr. Reznor and his Nails of Nine Inches titled Hesitation Marks, which was released (officially) yesterday.

I have a copy although I have not listened yet. I am very much looking forward to it, though!

Bundling
Great news for reading fans! Amazon has announced that, inline with how they started giving free digital copies of music to people who had purchased physical CDs from them in the past, they are also now going to start making available digital copies of select books (likely determined by the publisher) that were purchased retroactive back to Amazon's launch in 1995. While not all the digital copies offered in Amazon Matchbook will necessarily be free, they could be or they could cost as much as $2.99, which still is pretty awesome! The downside, I just discovered in reading a press release from Amazon, is that they're only Kindle format. I wonder if they can be converted somehow. Anyone know a good converter?

I would love to see this expanded by Amazon to include other digital formats or by publishing houses so that future hardcopy book purchases come with a digital copy code. Obviously you cannot make the latter retroactive to past purchases. Too hard to prove you paid full price or didn't just buy it at Goodwill or a garage sale.

Chronicling
In response to a comment Marie left on a post here last week, she sent me a link to a video titled "A Second a Day from Birth" by Sam Cornwell. At its most distilled, Sam captured and edited together a second of video from each day of the first year of his newborn son's life into a full year's chronicle of his growth and development.

I'm at a loss. It's stunningly beautiful and something I wish I'd thought to do with Nathan. Alas...

Turning
Speaking of Nathan and "beautiful" and the like, last week when I got home from work, I picked up Nathan in my arms and was talking to my Mother-in-Law who was babysitting him that day. While talking to her, Nathan reached over and grabbed my chin and turned my face toward him like he wanted to talk to me. Then he hugged me.

That kid just tugs on my heartstrings every chance he gets.