But it is not the same as having a book that sits on your shelve and collects dust.

The Amazon Kindle 2 is here:

Lighter, better display, more storage and longer battery seem to be the improvements in the second generation Kindle.

I want one, but part of buying books and novels is the feel of collecting and adding to my library... I'm not sure I want to miss that feeling. I must be getting old fashioned

More info here.

Living in the United States it is sometimes easy to forget that some companies are much more America focused than others. Microsoft will offer some of it's betas to the North American region only, but products are usually available worldwide. Windows Azure, as a beta, is offered worldwide.

Amazon EC2 (RTM) has been offered in North America only, but has made the jump across the pond to Europe. In my mailbox today:

"We are excited to announce that we have extended Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to Europe. Developers and businesses can now run their Amazon EC2 instances in the EU to help achieve lower latency, operate closer to other resources like Amazon S3 in the EU, and meet EU data storage requirements when applicable. The new European Region for Amazon EC2 contains two Availability Zones enabling you to easily and cost effectively run fault-tolerant applications with the same scalability, reliability and cost efficiency achieved with Amazon EC2 in the U.S."

Amazon EC2 is the Amazon offering for hosting virtual machines in the Amazon Cloud. Windows Azure is a slightly different, but competing solution from Microsoft.

Note: Interested in Amazon services? Some time ago I wrote Introduction to AWS for C# developers.

Amazon Unbox is an online video service, allowing you to download videos to your laptop. As a frequent traveller I've started using this service recently and am extremely pleased with the quality of the video, the ease of use and availability of titles. I like to watch series (currently Shark season 2) and this is a great way for me to keep up with what I like to watch, even if I'm on the road. Episodes seem to appear on Unbox within a week, often one day, of airing on TV.

Wikipedia says:

Amazon Unbox is an Internet video on demand service offered by Amazon.com which according to their website is available to "U.S. customers located in the 48 contiguous states, Alaska, Hawaii, and the District of Columbia". The service became available on September 7, 2006 and offers television shows and films for rental and purchase from eight major television and film studios.^[1] Rental pricing for feature length films range from $0.99 to $3.99, while television shows can be purchased for $1.99. Additional discounts are given for full season purchases. Downloaded films includes two versions of videos requested, a full resolution video file and a lower resolution copy for portable devices.

Maybe 70-291 is comparatively easier than 70-296, still, merely studying for 156-215 or 350-001 is not just enough to go for the latter certifications. Just in the way preparation material for 642-552 differs from that of 642-176 and cannot be used to go for a 350-030, same is the scenario in the previous case.

The Amazon associate program also offers to provide links to specific product. Ofcourse I can't help but put up a link to my book

The way it all works is pretty clever. Using the Amazon tools I search and select a product, then have them generate a little bit of HTML. The HTML is actually an iframe which displays content generated by Amazon. Cool!

My "Introduction to Amazon Web Services for C# Developers" has gone live!

I've been doing some technical writing for Amazon Web Services, so now I'm trying to keep an eye on what's going on at their shop.

They've just announced a price cut got their Amazon S3 service.

Read more on: http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=16427261