Happy snowy Monday! We're in the midst of a positive blizzard up here in the north east, so let's turn our back to the window and check out some hot headlines:

Give the geeks an inch ... days after the Kindle 2 officially launched, Amazon.com is now battling rumors the Kindle 3 will launch before EOY and feature a touch screen. I say, give it a rest. Let people enjoy their gadgets for more than a week before declaring them obsolete. Geesh.

Also in Kindle news, Amazon.com has bowed to copyrights and will now allow authors and publishers to decide if they want their books to be able to be read by the e-reader. Byt that I mean by the device's computerized voice, not a trained actor using different voices.

If you are all up in arms about the new Facebook policies on building a community-run social network, feel free to read this story. I can't make myself care about it enough -- call me old-school, but as long as the site works for me and lets me do regular status updates, I'm cool. And, yes, some of those breast-feeding pics were too racy. There, I said it.

This is a must-read for people, like me, who use Google's awesome GMail. Every month, it seems, we are getting stories about a fun new tool from Google Labs to make email more usable -- this story tells you the ones to absolutely use and the ones to skip like fridge-hardened mac-and-cheese. So many cool things I didn't know I could do!

Have a BlackBerry? Try out some of these cool shortcuts, from our family at USAToday. We'll be featuring these all week on our elevator screens -- email me if you have any shortcuts of your own to share with the class.

Have a good few days, and keep those D&D characters coming!