iSuppli, which makes a business out of tearing down electronics products to see what's inside and then publishing their cost findings, released a report stating that Amazon's Kindle 2 costs $185.49 in components. The Kindle 2 retails for $359. That's a difference of $173.51.

Engadget shows the component breakdown:

I don't mind Amazon making a profit, but I'm still not sold enough on the Kindle to fork over $359 for it. James Martin of PC World did a cost-justification analysis comparing the purchase of a Kindle 2 and associated e-books vs. going the traditional route and it didn't work out so well:

"...my number crunching reve... [More]

Sometimes I need a little help coming up with the name of a character or place. I'm compiling a list here of the name generators I find most useful. Note that they have a decidedly fantasy genre bend to them; that is what I write, after all. Also, I rarely take a random name literally. Rather I'll tweak it a bit. But I've found these sites good starting places when the mind is stuck.

People

1. Rinkworks Fantasy Name Generator
2. Fantasy Land: Comprehensive Fantasy Names Links
3. Orcish Name Generator
4. Seventh Sanctum: Cat Being Namer
5. Seventh Sanctum: Dwarf Name Generator
6. Seventh Sanctum: Lovecraftian Name Genera... [More]

Rumors of my death are false. I'm still alive and kicking and trying to squeeze in some writing whenever and however I can. I'm relying more and more on Office Live Workspace for those days when I don't have my laptop with me. It's working out pretty well; I'd like to do another blog post on the topic as a follow-up. Stay tuned for that.

Now, however, I've slowed the blogging, including doing weekly writing updates because I've been finding it harder and harder of late to make any significant progress. I hate to just post that I didn't make any progress week in and week out—of course, here I am doing just that.

On writing… I did take a coupl... [More]