Category: Miscellaneous babble

Well, seems pharmaceuticals aren’t the only thing that’s cheaper to re-import into the US, rather than buying them domestically.

There’s an article at the New York Times (registration required) and discussion over at Slashdot about how a lot of textbooks can be bought for significantly cheaper from overseas markets than locally. Textbooks from Amazon UK can be as much as half the cost of the same textbook purhased from Amazon US.

Apparently, this is starting to cause textbook publishers quite a bit of consternation, which is about time. I’ve always thought textbook prices were outrageous. One of the most expensive textbooks (on a price/page basis) I ever bought was was a skinny little 8×4 textbook on classical mechanics, probably less than 200 pages. The book cost me about $100Cdn at the time (maybe about 10 years ago). I remember textbooks being a significant portion of my education expense during my undergrad year, and that was 10 years ago!. I wasn’t unusual for me to spend $400/semester on textbooks. With my wife back in school, textbook expenses are about the same, but she’s taking fewer classes than I did and most of the books we buy are used, from places like Amazon Marketplace and Classbook.com to name a few. If we bought them all new, I’m sure we’d be close to the $600/semester mark. Now that I know about this overseas thing, it’ll be one more source to check out at textbook shopping time.

Happy Canadian Thanksgiving!

That turkey yesterday was soooo good…

On the other hand, seems that our desire for big plump turkeys means we need to help them out a little to keep making big turkeys.

Picked up my new glasses yesterday. The new glasses are amazingly light compared to my old pair, which were even lighter than the ones before that. My new glasses are Easyclip titanium frames with these nifty little magnets designed to hold some clip-on sunglasses. The sunglasses just stick to the magnets, so no fumling around to slide them on, or prongs poking me in the nose. The lenses are high index glass with UV, anti-reflection (AR is a must-have) and anti-scratch coatings.

Over the years, my wife has been slowly migrating my glasses to smaller and smaller sizes, which runs counter to my preference for larger frames that preserve my peripheral vision (which now falls outside of my glasses). The smaller frames look more stylish, but now I’m limited to just detecting large blurry moving objects with my peripheral vision.

One of these days, I’ll have to talk to my optometrist about maybe getting some LASIK or some other laser surgery done on my eyes. My glasses are pretty pricy at $450 a pop. If laser surgery can improve my vision so I don’t need as strong a prescription, I’ll be happy.

In most of my dreams, I’m watching myself doing something. Last night I had a peculiar dream where I was making soup. There I am, standing at the stove stirring a pot of soup. I decided it needed some pepper, so I sprinkled some in. Then I looked over at our new pepper grinder, and decided the soup needed more pepper. So I grabbed it, and have it a few twists. Grind grind grind. Then grind grind grind some more. Eventually after some indeterminate grinding time, I looked in and saw the top of the soup pot covered in pepper. Then I woke up.

There really didn’t seem to be any point to the dream. Just pepper and soup.