Bye, bye, Amazon Kindle. I've been lusting after the Kindle DX for months now. I'd planned a purchase this fall as a birthday gift to myself, but no more. Amazon, a company whom I had generally trusted, has really disappointed me with this one

.

1. Publishers publish Kindle books.
2. Kindle users buy ebooks.
3. Publishers feel flip-floppy and decide to stop selling certain ebooks.
4. Amazon reverses the sale of those ebooks, refunding the purchase price and deleting them from users' Kindles and account archives without any warning or explanation.

Now, are you ready for a killer dose of irony? The books were George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm.

Sandisk has finally created an MP3 player that I can buy my son. The only improvement I can think of would be the ability to play Ogg Vorbis in addition to or instead of MP3s.

Wow. Just, wow. If only I had the money to blow right now. I am am drooling over the new Linux-powered phone/PDA from Motorola. What more is there to say?

This is mostly a note to myself, so feel free to ignore if you find gadget-oggling dull. A friend gave me enough disposable AA batteries to keep my shutter going for a while, but rechargables and a good universal (US wall/car, Euro wall) charger are on the future purchase list somewhere. Of more immediate concern are a very slim camera case (haven't found one I like yet) and enough memory to be able to take more than 6 or 7 pictures at a time. The high-speed SD memory cards I'm looking at come in 2 GB, 1 GB, and 512 MB (0.5 GB) sizes, for about $90, $50, and $31, respectively.

I finally broke down and bought a digital camera. I've been putting off spending the money, but now that I have, I'm glad I did.

The camera I purchased is a Nikon Coolpix L1. I was apprehensive at first, as I'd intended to save up for a different, more expensive camera from the same maker. Having tried the L1 out for a day or so, I am impressed.