Today I got to get together with my young friend. We stopped for a doughnut at Alma and Hedgecoxe in Plano. We went to the hiking path at Renner Road and 75, where we took the briefest of walks on the new bit of sidewalk trail which runs under 75 over to the George Bush Freeway. We then went to Escape Coffee Shop at Bethany Drive and Greenville Avenue in Allen. My friend received a Kindle Fire tablet for Christmas and asked for my help in formatting it.
I had been interested in the Fire, as I have been quite impressed with my own little simple pandigital android novel tablet, but knew the Fire had better features and a more advanced version of Android. I found myself quite impressed with the Fire. At first, the navigation seemed a bit elaborate to me--then I realized it was not elaborate so much as designed to be plug-n-play. The device is quite well-suited to using Amazon media, but I found that the browser was useful for ordinary navigation as well. I showed my friend how to find free apps, and legal and free music, and how to make things work to a greater extent than he had been able to do so before. Though my bias runs in favor of the Nook line of products rather than the Kindle, the Kindle works just fine as a fully-featured e-mail/youtube/twitter/facebook/music app device. I read that both the Kindle and the Nook expect to have keyboard docks in the near future. These, coupled with a good Word-compatible word processing software, could make computing much more affordable.
We dined at Zen Chow on Greenville in Allen, where I had the "design your own dish", for which I chose steamed chicken, steamed rice, and steamed broccoli, carrots and celery, sans sauce. Then we repaired to
Yogurtville on Greenville Avenue in Allen for frozen yogurt and further wi-fi surfing. My friend figured
out how to find Creative Commons music to his liking at Jamendo.
After I took my friend home, I drove over the bridges over Lake Lavon on Lucas Road. The ground was nearly dry beneath the bridges. I stopped by Bethany Lakes Park, where I was pleased to see ducks in plenty in the
lakes. I liked this duck, which I believe is a lesser scaup, which I am not good at lesser v. greater and indeed had to search the internet a bit to make an identification at all:
My wife is a bit under the weather with a cold. I stopped by the grocery store to pick us up some sandwich fixings--"Amish" swiss cheese, sliced turkey, Provolone cheese, Orowheat wheat bread, bananas, and 100% juice orange juice.
I downloaded an album by Matt Stevens, electing to pay 5 pounds, and listened to great songs by Clutter and Cloud Cloud off the Classwar Karaoke 16 compilation.
I was pleased that I was well enough to have a workable and fun day.