Waking Up To Zinio

Woken from my slumber by a purring kitten, this morning I found my chest quite sore from yesterday's burst of exercise. It remains to be seen whether this new fitness regime, touted as requiring only 12 minutes of exercise per week, does the trick or not. Then again, it's probably perfect for me as I only manage one trip to the gym per week.

I had unexpected good news: Zinio's website broke down last week. It doesn't do to engage in schadenfreude too often, but (a) I hadn't noticed their site was broken and (b) they have given their customers a $15 voucher to apologise for the disruption caused. Or, in my case, I was paid $15 for waking up and checking my emails. Now if I can get a job that always paid so well I'd earn ... about $450 every month. Not enough to keep me in expensive electronic gadgets, but worth getting out of bed for.

Unfortunately, I'd have to spend all that money on magazines (delivered online) so I'd go hungry quickly.

I can't knock Zinio though. They provide a very useful service: allowing me to read an issue of Harper's for less than twelve times the cover price (there is a wonderful mark-up between the US newstand price and how much a magazine sells for in Hong Kong). I have their reading software installed on our Mac, on a PC and on my tiny pink laptop (linux). And on the Mac it's too far away to read comfortably because it's on the television, on the PC it's a big lump and due to a bug or an incompatibility, I can't scroll down the page on my pink laptop. Not that I'm knocking Zinio, of course. (I'm not even going to complain about how long they're taking to release an Android reader app, but that's because I don't yet have any devices running Android.)

It is hard to read Harper's on a computer screen - maybe paper just is better. Or perhaps (as Zinio will allow you to print pages from your magazines) I should just print the whole thing out and read it like a real magazine. And then feel guilt at hurting the environment and wasting company. Well, just a little bit.

Anyway, with fifteen dollars to spend, I treated myself to a year's subscription to Viz, which means I'm using thousands or millions of dollars of technology investments, research in internet communications and several MBAs to be able to read a scruffy comic made up by some loons from Newcastle.

Sometimes, living in the future really is awesome.