Reading by Kindle light

For the second time this week, we lost power. It was earlier in the evening this time, about 5:30. We listened for our neighbor’s generator. Sure enough, the low hum was rolling across the cove.
Ours is such an exciting life. Friday evenings are anchored by several PBS shows (Newshour, Beat the Press, This Old House) plus a couple of items on DVR. As a half hour became an hour, we set ourselves up for a different time.
We heard the sounds of the Northern toads in the swamp, a long, low call offered to potential mates. We had a round of checkers. Sandra won two of three. We had our supper on the deck by the sauna and lingered until the black flies and early mosquitoes drove us away.
The dark filled the house and eventually the outdoors. We could see our neighbor’s flag, waving in an easterly breeze. The hour became two. We read for a while, Sandra on her iPad, me on the Kindle. At nine, we went to bed.
I’m usually awake a couple of times during the night, for an hour or two each time. I woke at midnight, read for a while, went back to sleep, and got up again shortly before three.
National Grid, our electric company, has a website that let’s you check on the status of outages in an area. Cell phone coverage at the camp is faint, barely 1 bar.

(National Grid uses Amazon Web Services, AWS, to handle its outage map.)
Sitting by the window and with the phone high, I waited and eventually collected enough bits from the sky to get to the website and learn about the state of things.

As I was reviewing the information, the WiFi signal icon came on. Odd. I looked at the floor and noticed that the lights on one of the power strips was on. The power was restored an hour earlier than estimated.
Dunno what happened. My guess is that a transformer blew out, affecting a small part of a small town. I stayed up for a while longer, drifting off at first light.

Why is Amazon a Mac hater?

Amazon offers a publishing service that delivers blog content to Kindles and kindred e-readers. The subscription costs $.99/month, one-third of which goes to Amazon.
I set up an account and will make this stream o’ bits available through the Kindle channel. (If anyone subscribes, I will donate my proceeds to charity. I’m interested in the publishing process, not in making money.)
One annoying hitch, however, is that, when I go to the publisher’s page to log in to my account, I’m greeted with this warning.

Prompt to install IE or Firefox

Internet Explorer isn’t available and you really have to dig to find Firefox versions older than the current  (17.0) release.
It turns out that the message is benign. Safari and Chrome, the two browsers that I have installed on my Mac, work ok.