New Year's Resolution #1 - Buy a Kindle

For the last couple of years I've allowed my interest in technology to take a back seat while I spent more time with Uni studies and gaining knowledge and experience as a hockey coach.  This year however I've promised that I will immerse myself in the latest rounds of technology - hence this blog. 

A big part of my life with technology has always been the software that I create - and this only gets better with the current wave - but I've not really been much of a gadget guy.  This is all changing though and now that we have Kindle in Australia I've decided to invest in one.

This was a big decision for me and I thought long and hard about whether to get a Kindle or to purchase a Netbook.  The attraction of having a device of this type was mostly so that I can extend my reading - especially of technical articles - to the 2 hour daily bus commute.  And the decision point between a Kindle and a Netbook really came down to the fact that you can do a lot more on a Netbook than you can on a Kindle.  For example, if I was reading a PDF tutorial on how to use PowerShell, then using a Netbook I could easily fire up PowerShell and try some of that stuff right there and then.

The thing that swayed me away from buying a Netbook in the end was mostly that the Netbook market is still such a changing landscape and, to get the Netbook that I wanted I would probably have ended up spending around $700 anyways. 

So the final decision was: spend $300 on a Kindle and solve my immediate reading need problem, then tackle a small form-factor PC later in the year.

Oh yeah, and with the $AUD doing so well against the $USD... how could I afford not to buy one!