Discover and Link to Holiday Events
Have you seen our new Holiday Offers Page at Associates Central? Discover Amazon Holiday store fronts and promotions happening in November and December all in one location and quickly get text links and banners. Earn up to 15% advertising fees.
Black Friday Week and Cyber Monday Week Starting November 21st, the Holiday Offers Page has all the premier Black Friday special promotions. Below is a summary of the special promotions, gift guides and other events happening right now.

Big Holiday Events
* Holiday Deals - Black Friday and Cyber Week
* The Holiday Toy List – Hundreds of this year’s best gifts for Children
* The Christmas Corner: Holiday Decor, Tableware and Entertainment
* Holiday Gift Guide – Gourmet gift baskets, chocolates, cheeses and more for every occasion
Electronics* The New Kindle Fire – Now Shipping!
* Black Friday Deals Week for GPS, Car Electronics, MP3 Players and Consumer Electronics
* Wireless - All Phones sold with a plan for a penny and $100 Amazon.com Gift Card on Select Phones

Media
* Books Gift Guides – Adults, Kids and Teen
* Movies and TV Best Sellers and Deals
* Holiday Music - Playlists and Classics
* Video Game Best Sellers, New Releases and Deals
Home, Kitchen and Garden
* Home, Kitchen and Garden Gift Guide
* Buyer’s Guides -Espresso Makers, Juicers, Cuisinart Food Processors and Kitchen Aid Mixers
* Holiday Baking Store
* Grocery and Gourmet Foods - Including Gift Baskets

Auto and Home Improvement* Tools – Up to 50% off top name brands and popular items
* Black Friday Automobile Deals
* Lawn and Garden Gift Guide

I'm very impressed with the Kindle Fire, I was so thrilled when i heard about the price of it. Since 2009 I have been a True Kindle fan, it has changed my life of the way I read, and now we have the Kindle Fire that will also change the way I listen to music and watch films, and TV programming.

Lets start with the video. Wow Hulu+ looks and works great on this, I have it on my PS3 also and it is really buggy on the PS3 but on the Kindle no problems at all. Great picture and sound and easy to navigate. Netflix seems to run very well also other than every once in a while you hear a slight click in the audio. As for Amazon Streaming video it is where this Machine really shines. With a free month of Prime you get plenty of films and TV shows to watch for Free. With a click of the button within seconds you have the movie in amazing clarity and sound in the palm of your hand. Super Troopers was the first movie i watched and was a lot of fun, nice to be able to stop it at any point and then start it right back up where you left off. A nice feature is having it in your carousel so all you have to do is press on it to resume the playback. Side loading video from you own collection is very easy also just plug in the USB to you computer just drag and drop.

Music: What can I say but yes i'm in heaven with Amazon and their cloud service I think it was April when they announced the whole cloud service for music and then they offered unlimited cloud service and thats all it took. I have an obsession for music and have a failing hard drive with over 200 Gigs of music from my collection. So since May I have been uploading my entire music collection to Amazon Cloud and now with a Wifi connection I have all the music at my finger tips with the Kindle Fire. If i'm going to be on the road I can easily hit a button and zoom the music is downloaded to the Fire.Yes it is a dream come true. The ease of just popping on over to the store while listing to the music is all right there.

Apps: Along with Amazon's mention of the cloud service they also gave us an app store with a FREE app of the day that I usually start my day checking out and purchasing since the opening just to have plenty of Apps to go with the then rumored Kindle Tablet. Well the day is here and I have plenty of Apps to play with on the Fire. Games, utilities, art programs. they all run great on the Kindle Fire. I also have a Dell Streak tablet and the apps on it are so so sometimes it works other times it just sits there. The Kindle Fire always boots them up and your on your way.

Web: It is nice to sit on the couch or at the kitchen table and surf the web, It seems very quick and easy to me I enjoy it just sometime I forget the ability is there right on the Fire.

Books: Well here we go back in 2009 i purchased my first Kindle 2 and instantly became a true addict to reading again. Having Dyslexia reading has always been so hard and it took me forever to read a Dead Tree book but then the Kindle came out with the ability to adjust the type size and the line spacing and it was like being reborn I was able to finally read without using my finger following each and every word. Now with the Fire not only do you have the ability to adjust the txt, We also get to be immersed in full color graphics and photos. Reading on the Fire is also a lot of fun with a tap of the finger you can read the definition of a word with in seconds. If thats not enough you can link it right to Google of Wikipedia and explore more.

I just love going to the book shelf section and enjoying all the cover art of the books. Your done with a book you are just a tap away from browsing the Amazon Kindle store. The ease of syncing up across all of you Kindle's is just another amazing way Amazon has changed the way we read and enjoy all other forms of media. Sure there a few flaws but it all can be fixed in a firmware update. I hope they put the Twitter posting capability in the reading app into the Fire OS along with the ability to see popular highlights. But those are a few minor things.

I hear from others that the battery life is not up to what the iPad offers? I have no problems with the battery life, consider you can buy two Kindle Fires and still save a $100 over the iPad price and then get 14 hours of battery life. I love my eInk display but the Fire is also another great way to read and have all your media at your finger tips.

Activision, the game's publisher, said that Modern Warfare 3 sales had totalled more than $400 million (£250m) in the first 24 hours in Britain and the United States alone. The game went on sale worldwide on Friday.

“We believe the launch of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is the biggest entertainment launch of all time in any medium, and we achieved this record with sales from only two territories,” said Bobby Kotick, the chief executive of Activision Blizzard.

He added that the total sales for the Call of Duty series exceeded the box office takings for the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings film series.

More than 13,000 shops around the world opened at midnight to sell the game, which sold more in its opening 24 hours than its rival, Battlefield 3, sold in its first week.

Modern Warfare 3 players have since broken the Xbox Live record for the number of players online at the same time, according to Microsoft.

The game begins where Modern Warfare 2 left off, with special forces protagonists pursuing Vladimir Makarov, a Russian terrorist, in cities including London, Paris and New York.
The game has been awarded an 18 certificate from the BBFC due to its graphic violence and real-world settings.
The game attracted some controversy over a scene set in London that shows an Underground train being blown up. There were calls for the scene to be removed because of an alleged similarity to the London bombings of July 2005.

The BBFC did not require any scenes to be removed but did point out that the game is "completely inappropriate" for children This year's release coincides with the launch of Call of Duty Elite, an online subscription service. Annual membership costs £34.99 and gives players extra downloadable content and competitions. Players can also access a free version that offers stats and the ability to arrange games with fellow players.

This year's edition broke the record set by its predecessor, Call of Duty: Black Ops, in 2010, which in turn broke the record set by Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 in 2009.
The Call of Duty series has been running since 2003 and more than 100 million copies of its various titles have now been sold.

According to Amazon, Kindle Fire is a premium product, offered at a non-premium price. It brings everything they’ve been working on at Amazon for 15 years - Kindle, Amazon Instant Video, Amazon MP3, Amazon Prime, Amazon Appstore, and Amazon Web Services - together into a single, fully-integrated experience for customers.

But do they really match the power, style, performance that Apple's products provide and we've all come to expect from smart devices? Well, they've put up a nicely written document which compares the two devices side by side. It makes a very nice reading especially if you've been wondering which of the two to buy for Christmas.

As someone who has an iPad already, it's quite fascinating to actually see how much they have in common and not only size, but in features and functionality.

See the whole Kindle vs iPad here. This might just change how you've always looked at products before because the retail price of a product does not necessarily mean it packs much better punch.

If you were thinking of buying an iPad in the next few weeks or months, you might want to read the comparison document to be sure you are not throwing away your hard earned cash. 

I adored reading this book on my latest Kindle Fire 3G Wireless device. Many people have pointed out its faults, and one I will agree with is that at times it is repetitious. But for me, whom worked in the entertainment business and was a tech geek, in many parts it was a walk down memory lane. My first computer when I arrived at college was a used Apple III. I was the only one on my floor to have a computer, so many people used it. It lasted about 3 years, then the "C" key broke when I was writing a paper on "Marconi and the influence teens had on the invention of radio." I had to write the whole paper using as little C's as possible, but I still had to go into the final draft and pen in all the C's in Marconi's name.

I then got a Window's based computer, used again, while my friends were getting Mac's. It was clear to me then that the Mac was better, but I had what I had, and it turned me into a "hacker." By the time I finished college in the early 90's, I was switching and adding more ram, adding graphics cards, worrying about the fan, switched to a new motherboard, etc. etc. etc.

Then Napster came around and I was downloading music. I only had dial up at the time, so I would set up my computer to download songs all night line over an open phone line while I slept. Remember download times. I worked for a major studio at the time, and I remember the funniest stern memo that came out that voiced outrage at the fact that they had found that most of the work computers had at least one program on it for "stealing" music. People were "stealing" music at work from their own company!!! I just couldn't figure out why the studios and their music companies were not working on ways to make it easier to buy music online rather than prosecuting 12 year olds and trying to encode each song with an electronic booby-traps.

Nonetheless, I went the Frye's hacking route for way too long. Finally after having so much trouble with my windows crashing with my itunes software, I bought a MacBook. Wow. What a machine. I'm on my 3rd iPod, my 2nd MacBook, my second iPhone, and now I want an iPad.

I guess all of this doesn't have much to do with the book. It is my own experience. It's history though, and a history completely shaped by the characters in this book, especially Mr. Jobs.

On January 22, 1984, in what has become an iconic moment in advertising history, the first Apple Macintosh computer was introduced to the world. Striking a cinematic blow against an Orwellian Big Brother figure haranguing a grey and faceless army of brainwashed drones, an attractive and athletic young woman eludes pursuing stormtrooper guards and heroically hurls an iron hammer that shatters Big Brother's huge black and white telescreen, ending oppression, freeing everyone--changing the world. The voiceover intones--"1984 will not be like 1984."

1984. You know--the dystopian novel by George Orwell written in 1948 that depicts a nightmare no-hope future where everything is rotten and nobody ever has a nice day.

Rewind your cassette tape. On an average spring day in central Tokyo, April 1984, an impeccably attired, attractive young woman, Masumi Aomame, late for a very important appointment but marooned in a taxi on a hopelessly jammed elevated expressway, takes an extreme measure. At the suggestion of her slightly odd driver, she escapes the highway using a little-noticed rickety emergency exit to street level underneath a prominent Esso put-a-tiger-in-your-tank billboard. Before departing the cab, the driver cautions that if she does this, "Things may look different to you than they did before. I've had that experience myself. But don't let appearances fool you. There is always only one reality." And with that, while Leos Janacek's Sinfonietta booms ominously on the taxi's high-end FM radio, Aomame enters a world where there are two moons in the night sky and everything she knows is wrong--to her 1984 will not be like 1984, it will be 1Q84. Magic.

With this bravura and memorable opening, Haruki Murakami's vast, ambitious but flawed novel of everything, 1Q84, leaves the flat earth world of conventional fiction and begins the long, sometimes thrilling and entertaining, slog to the far distant end of some nine hundred beautifully written and translated pages. Not unlike flying to Tokyo on the Concorde, taking the long way around with the airbrakes on.

So, the title: 1Q84. The Japanese word for the number nine is kyu. The year 1984 is thus spoken sen kyu-haku hachi-juu shi-nen. The use of the English letter Q is a multilingual pun, signifying to the Japanese reader (and should to anybody else), "we ain't in Kansas anymore."--Reality has changed, old rules don't necessarily apply. We see that a weird novella named Air Chrysalis is rewritten, conspiracies are hatched, passions explode, people die, lovers are lost, puzzles and questions posed. While 1Q84 is indeed a novel of everything, probing notions of reality, truth, death, religion, identity, time, connections, pop culture, anger, duality, mirrors and strange sex, (the novels of Thomas Pynchon or David Foster Wallace and the stories of Jorge Luis Borges come to mind), it is not an envelope-pushing, hard to follow postmodern pyrotechnical fizz-fest. At its heart, it is a love story, sometimes achingly romantic.

Our two protagonists, Aomame (a tough, outwardly cold chick who happens to be a very capable assassin of abusive men--think a Japanese Lisbeth Salander) and Tengo Kawana (a blandly quiet math teacher, novelist and ghostwriter), are both outsiders, both lonely. They are disconnected from each other and much of the world and have been since a long ago innocent grade school encounter was indelibly etched on their souls. They must traverse nine months in a strange new world filled with weird characters and baffling events, where, as in 1984, good days don't happen. Stand-ins for Orwell's Big Brother, the so-called Little People are maybe real, maybe unreal, and bizarre obstacles and complications must be overcome. Whether they know it or not, Tengo and Aomame are in love, and, like lovers everywhere, they must connect. Will they find each other? That is the venerable V-8 engine of the novel--though it is in much need of a slimmed-down tiger in its nine hundred-page tank.

But how does one edit a Japanese National Treasure, an acknowledged master of world literature, a writer perhaps in line for a Nobel Prize? How? Slashing lines, cutting entire episodes--go from here to there, eliminate that back-story, do we really need to know that? Or how about the long passages of half-baked arcana of that sinister religious cult--you lost me there. Let's off-load some unnecessary baggage, fly higher.

Murakami, though, is a wizard. Using a technique familiar to his loyal readers around the world, Murakami, developing his theme of duality and reflected identities, alternates the narrative's point of view chapter by chapter. He is convincingly inside Aomame's head, then Tengo's, and in Book 3 adds the dogged and froggish detective Ushikawa--only then does the novel finally achieve lift off. Murakami carefully braids the threads of the story, gradually tightening them like a Chinese finger trap, ultimately permitting the reader differing views of the same event, resulting in our seeing the action from a higher altitude, a crafty cinematic device. Throughout, each chapter's title is a fragment of a line in the narrative--a delightful motif that prompts an engaging bit of paging back and forth as the reader works to decipher Murakami's narrative trail of bread crumbs.

With a painstaking Japanese, perhaps Apple-like, attention to detail, the book itself is beautifully designed and produced. Fine paper, a lovely binding and a translucent moon grey rice-paper dust jacket with haunting frontispiece images of the twin moons of the story add to the proposition of the presence of a new world. Page numbers alternate, printing backwards, sometimes left hand, sometimes right. And the book's logo, 1Q84, is mirrored across facing margins, reflecting itself, helping to produce an effective and unique coherence to the novel as a complete package.

And yet. The magic and promise of the opening chapter, the image of the elegant Aomame descending that fragile stairway into the heart of a gritty new Tokyo, is not sustained over the many miles in the long distance flight of this novel. The slim and beautiful Concorde flew fast and high. But the fat and beautiful 1Q84 aspires to do more, to fly us to the moon--too bad it staggers under its own weight, never quite leaving the orbit of this flat earth.

I really enjoyed the movie. It was fun, entertaining and really tied things up well, the movie deserves 4 stars, however!!!. The reason for this post is the HORRIBLE Ultraviolet copy, not a true digital copy. Ultraviolet streams the movie and dosn't use the now industry standards for Mac and Win. The movie is NOT stored on the computer as iTunes files or windows format video files. The movie streams from Flixter, which is horribly broken. If you dont have internet connectivity you cant watch the movie.

If you have a slow connection you loose frames for a horrible watching experience and if you pay for internet access by the megabyte you pay more then the movie costs on BluRay just to watch it once. It just dosn't work well.

Why is Warner Brothers changing a system people have become use to and a system for digital copies that most people like.. Ultraviolet is a solution where no problem exists. This is change that only WB and Flixter want. Digital format users are mostly happy with the system that has been developed, iTunes etc.

I have tried to contact WB to issue my complaint, to no avail. I did go to WB on Facebook and posted, along with only one other person, my dislike for Ultraviolet. I also recommend Amazon give feedback to WB of our dislike of Ultraviolet. I'm not a fan of ripping movies but it looks like that may be the only way to get WB movies in a digital format so we can watch the movie where and when we want and on what device we choose. Do what you can to avoid Ultraviolet and complain and complain often until they listen.

I brought this JBud earphones in March of this year and I notice about 2 weeks ago that they were splitting from cord to the plug. Well tonight it went bad, stopped working. I have just upgraded myearphones to a JBud J3. I hoped that the cord is better the 2nd time around. I can say that I was pleased with my choice that is why I upgraded my 2nd pair. I would really appreciate it if this cord is of better quality than my last purchase.

I enjoyed the sound of my music through the earphones. I also appreciated the color orange, it matched my Ipod to the tee. I would recommend the earphones just with knowing nothing last forever. And I will take my fault in how it went from my ear to my pocketbook back to my ear. Cord is not lasting. I would like for the company to make the cord out of a better material that will last with the way we try to put it away.

I would wrap my cord around my Ipod. Not in a forceful way but in a way to keep it together until it's next use.