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 Went to a retirement home for a birthday the other day and Henry was watching Sesamestreet and this older gentleman in a wheelchair wheels in and sits and watches it with Henry. Great moment. I did an iPod sketch of him at the time with Sketchbook Mobile. He looked like the guy from Up.

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I have my head buried in pencils, working on The situation. Almost done. After that it will just be Maddy Kettle and Robot Museum on the side.I haven't been able to post much of The Situation but I'm hoping I'll be able to post more of the other projects.

In personal news I'm still working at the art store part time and Julie's still looking for work. I hope to have good news on Julie soon. Henry's great and will be 2 next month. 2!!

Reading through the classics of science fiction right now. There are so many great, diverse SF books. Just finished Arthur C Clarke's 2001 and now I'm reading Philip K Dick's The Man in The High Tower, which is powerful and surprisingly contemporary.

Also really looking forward to HBO's Game of Thrones.....

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iPod doodle. i think I was looking at the Tweetdeck icon.

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The last two weeks I worked a lot at an art store to make some money to help pay for a computer I just bought. I live on the edge of Toronto so there's a lot of travel time on the street car. I love the street car. During the last weeks I listened to an audiobook of Frank Herbert's Heretics of Dune and would sketch scenes or characters . They are really sketchy but boy, were they ever fun to draw.

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To cut to the chase: a Kindle has come into my possession, and I’m surprised to find I adore it. That’s right, Mac-fangirl, iPad-coveting me.

After a mere four days of Kindle use, I find myself eyeing the stacks of books in the TBR pile and wishing I had their digital versions instead.

This feels passing strange, considering how much I love the tactile aspects of a book-book. The intriguing or unsuitable cover, the shush of pages rustling, the crisp words springing up from the page. Font, margin, endpapers: these things I cherish.

But: the Kindle—it’s so slim and smooth in the hand, and one hand is enough. Tap, tap, tap, a single thumb—either thumb, a detail I appreciate—advances the pages. Three chapters into a book about Sudan, I find myself wanting some background; I nudge the little square button and make my way, lightning-quick, to Google or Wikipedia. (How much saner I’d have been had I read the recent Byatt book this way instead.) Dickens makes me laugh, and I want to share the passage with Scott: chk chk, I’ve highlighted the quote and added a note of my own.

The Dickens was free, of course, and easy to find.

Unlike my iPod Touch, I can’t read the Kindle in the dark. But any book I download to the Kindle can be sent to the Touch as well, and there’s a sync function to make sure my bookmark is always in the right spot.

When I first turned the Kindle on, I was disappointed. The contrast is not terrific; the background of the page is gray, not white, not the creamy color my Touch can produce. Oh dear, I thought, this is going to be a bust. My eyes require good contrast. I drive Scott crazy by wearing down my laptop battery with the screen turned always to maximum bright.

But I wasn’t sitting in good light during that first encounter. I upped the font size and moved to a sunny corner, and I could read just fine. Under a lamp or reading light, it’s the same as reading a real book.

(I will always call them real books, you know.)

When I read on my iPod, the device seldom ceases calling attention to itself. I’ve written before about feeling curiously distant from the text of a book-on-iPod. Is it the small screen? The backlighting? Whatever the cause,  I have to concentrate harder. That isn’t happening with the Kindle. The Kindle disappears. There’s just the unfolding story. I’d heard people say that, but I was skeptical. It’s true. It disappears—until the moment I desire its presence. I really love that note-and-highlight function.

The iPod Touch is a brilliant multitasker. You know I love its versatility: mail, web, games, books, language lessons, social networks, videos, good grief is there anything it can’t do? Well, it seems it can’t stop nibbling at my attention, that’s what. I’m reading a book but I know I can do a quick mail check with two taps. Temptations. Distractions.

The Kindle’s web browser is boring black-and-white, not at all tempting. It’s a unitasker, and that’s what this fidgety brain of mine needs in order to focus on a book. A real book is a single-purpose tool. (Unless you count serving as the dominant element of my home’s interior design.)

These are just notes on the honeymoon phase of the Kindle experience. The novelty may wear off quickly; we’ll see. I have all these lovely realbooks here waiting to be read. Real books with no DRM attached—that’s a major strike against the Kindle, when it comes to newer publications, the kind you actually pay for. And of course with a great many children’s books (picture books go without saying), you want to turn real pages, pages your four-year-old can point at and and pore over.

For cla

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GameCrush (a social network looks to cash in on lonely gamer guy stereotypes by pairing up paying players with hot chicks. Ick. Plus new research from Flurry suggests the iPhone and the iPod Touch might just be "the most dangerous thing that ever... Read the rest of this post

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Today's Ypulse Youth Advisory Board review is from one of our resident gamers Julia on iPod Touch/iPhone shooter game N.O.V.A. Below we see another good example of play that doesn't simply appeal to the girl in the gamer so much as the gamer in the... Read the rest of this post

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Since I seem to be writing a lot about iPod Touch apps and social media lately, here’s a roundup page for easy reference.

A day in the life of my iPod Touch (my favorite apps)

A couple more apps

Streamlining the way I use social media

Social networks for book lovers

Facebook—why I love it; how I keep it streamlined

Facebook’s privacy settings

5 reasons I love  Twitter

Tips for using Twitter   (these last four are part of a series at Faith & Family Live; that last one is coming tomorrow)

And lest you think I spend all my time online (what mom of six could?)—I’ve written a few posts about books in my time, too.

Who can stay online when there are cheeks like this to smooch?

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Satire for the Nu.nl news website, referring to indifferent reactions after the presentation of the iPad tablet from Apple.

You're invited to Sevensheaven.nl for more imagery.

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To be honest I post things on weekends I wouldn't post any other day. Especially Sundays. This is because I get less visitors so I don't feel a need to put something up that represents my work in a definitive way. I can post images that are experiments or failures or just uncharacteristic. I look forward to Sundays for this reason. Here are some noodles things I've done on the iPod, a little more abstract or looser than usual.

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Here's a sketch I did on the iPod with the Brushes App. I'm pretty happy with this one and I'm starting to see new influences creep into my work.

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Today's Ypulse Sponsored post is from Lauren Zaner (pictured below) of Fuse, anchor sponsor for this year's Ypulse Youth Marketing Mashup. This post is part of that sponsorship. To learn more about Fuse Marketing and their unique approach to... Read the rest of this post

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©Armand Serrano.
This Brushes app in my iTouch comes very handy during my daughter's gymnastics class.

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In reading through yesterday's press release about teens and music from the NPD Group, one stat caught my eye: "23 percent claimed to already have a suitable collection of digital music." At first I thought, is it that teens aren't finding enough... Read the rest of this post

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