Taken with iPhone

My Sister’s Keeper just started showing in the US and will be out in August here in the Netherlands. I decided to read the book first and then see the movie. A movie can never tell the whole story and details like a book can.

The book was written by Jody Picoult. This is the first book that I read written by her. From what I can see on her website her other books also have the same genre as My Sister’s Keeper.

Anna is not sick, but she might as well be. By age thirteen, she has undergone countless surgeries, transfusions, and shots so that her older sister, Kate, can somehow fight the leukemia that has plagued her since childhood. The product of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, Anna was conceived as a bone marrow match for Kate – a life and a role that she has never questioned… until now. –Synopsis

The book is real emotional and deep and it keeps you reading till the end without stopping. The ending is heart breaking and you don’t see it coming, it leaves you shocked. I’m glad I read the book first seeing the comment by the writer on her website.

Yes, I know the ending is different. Yes, I know some of you are very upset. I didn’t change it. The author has no control over the movie, and it was hard for me to accept too. However, there’s a great deal in the movie that I think is great, and I enjoyed watching it – and I hope you did too. Please don’t email me asking me why I changed the ending, or “let” Hollywood do that – it wasn’t something I had any control over. -Jody Picoult

This again proves how Hollywood can butcher good books into lesser movies. Although I must say I haven’t seen the movie yet so I wonder what my opinion will be of the movie in contrast to the book.

Julie and Julia

Today while browsing in the book store I saw a book by Julia Child and the cover had a feature of the soon to be released movieJulie and Julia. A while back I saw the preview and was instantly sold, but the release date here is October so I soon forgot about it till today. I wondered if the movie is based on a book, so rather stand in line at the info counter I took my iPhone and did some quick googling and yes the movie is based on a book. I did take some extra minutes to find the book as it wasn’t in the regular books sections but in the cooking section and very well hidden too between all other books. But I got the one and only copy they had.

The movie stars Meryl Streep so I’m pretty confident it will be a good movie as Meryl Streeps movies almost never disappoints. The book on the other hand has a 3 out of 5 stars review on Amazon. I bought this book on a whim today, I’m just reading through the reviews on Amazon, and people really dislike this book. From what I take out of the reviews the ones who thought it was bad had they expectations set before even reading it and the ones who liked it just took the book on a lighter note.

A one star review:

As an avid blogger and foodie, I looked forward to buying this book for over a year. Now that I have it, I can’t even finish reading it. Powell is not only a bad cook but a bad writer as well. This book doesn’t stick with any audience. Bloggers think it’s overrated. Foodies think it’s insulting to Julia Child. Readers feel it’s a bad piece of writing. Overall, it’s just bad. On top of everything else, her constant b*tching about her botched recipes got on my last nerve.

A five star review:

I’m truly surprised to see so many negative reviews. Really, it’s not a foodie book, and I don’t think ever sold as such. It’s also not even really about Julia Child (though the touching eulogy from the author is nice). It’s just about one woman and how she used a year of cooking some old, rather out-dated and often over-complicated recipes, to find something new within herself.

After I finish the book I’ll update this post which how many stars I’ll award the book.

Back to the movie, from what I gather from the Julie and Julia trailer the movie is based on Julie Powells book and Julia Childs My Life in France The director and writer is Nora Ephron so the movie has high expectations.

I said I would wait a week after purchasing Fever to write a review but I use it regularly everyday so I already have some data. When Fever came out the main complain by the crowd was that it is self hosted. I have no idea but I’m guessing Shaun Inman’s target group are the more tech savy people who probably already have a host and website but on the other hand the install is so simple that anyone can do it. It even auto updates when there is a new release!

Before purchasing I was wondering if I would just put it on this domain, but I only have 400mb space of which 350 is already in use. Considering Fever is new there is no feedback on how much space it will take and how much data traffic. To be safe I put it on another host and domain where I don’t have anything much. Since June 19 I have Fever running, today is the 24th, so 5 days of running Fever without cron, but keeping it connected with the server through Fluid.

On June 18 I cleared the data on the host and on June 19 I installed Fever so the data shown here is all Fever usage. I started with 43 feeds I now have 54 feeds.

This can be way wrong mode. Correct me in the comments if so, I’m no math person Lets do some math, nothing precisely but an average: 1MB – 1024KB, From June 19 till June 23 Fever used an average of 33MB. In those 5 days I went from 43 feeds to 54 feeds so we will use an average of 50 feeds.

The math: 33MB divided by 50 feeds is 675.84KB per feed in 5 days. Also most of these 50 feeds did not update in these days so no data came in.

So if you have like 200 feeds, that would be like 132MB for 200 feeds over 5 days, but obviously this only ads if the feed is updated. End this can be wrong mode

Assuming this math is correct Fever can be a real data traffic consumer if you have more then 100 feeds which most of them being active, thus updating weekly. I’m curious about others their stats for Fever to compare.

I just had the cron set a moment ago but before cron using the iPhone version is a bit useless as it isn’t possible to refresh from the iPhone.

Refreshing feeds requires maintaining a connection to your server. This persistent connection would be a significant drain on your device’s battery.

What I currently do is in the morning when I turn on the computer I open Fever just to let it update before leaving for work and before leaving work I open Fever in the browser to let it refresh. So this way I can read the new feeds on my iPhone when on the go. So for iPhone using a cron job is a must.

The Mobile version supposedly also works on the Pre and Android browsers per update 1.01 so I’m guessing it works on the Blackberry too.

If you like me like using something usable and beautiful then Fever is the way to go for a feed reader. Shaun Inman works full time on it so features are added without long waits, bugs gets fixed on timely basis. For example the bookmarklet; “Feedlet” to add the feed of the website you are currently viewing, had the option set to add the feed to the “Sparks” group. With the recent update 1.02 this is changed, so if you just subscribe the feed will go in Kindling with all other feeds unless you specify a group, then it will also be added to that group.

But the best of all, the main feature is the Hot factor of recent entries. If you have a lot a feeds you can filter out what is being talked about the most and by which blogs. Now with Fever I subscribe faster to feeds where before I was really picky because I don’t like scanning through hundreds of feeds to see what’s being talked about.

Finally did I mention the auto update?! It’s pretty awesome, I hope the next point zero release of Mint will have this feature too. With Wordpress now also sporting an “Automatically update” button, apps that require you to unzip, read instruction and upload by FTP are now so old fashioned in comparison. I should start polishing my PHP skills and learn how to code these functionality.

Is Fever worth 30 dollars? Yes. You get a high end interface, smooth AJAX functionality, you don’t have to worry about running updates and a developer who dedicates a lot of time to improving the application.