Another funny video from MJHibbett.
Author: Andrew Huey
Programming Is A Poetry For Our Time
Okay, it’s geeky, but I like it!
more Kindle stuff
I just noticed a post by Tim O’Reilly on the Kindle over at Radar. He talks a bit about the possibility of getting O’Reilly books out on the Kindle. In one of the comments, something interesting is mentioned: The Kindle has no monospaced font! That’s really a big problem, when you start getting into code samples in programming books. Oh well, yet another obstacle keeping me from the Holy Grail of tossing all my 1500-page programming books and replacing them with e-book equivalents.
inbox zero again
I got my inbox back to zero again today. This is probably because a lot of people took today off, so it was pretty quiet at work. I managed to go through a bunch of unprocessed stuff and sort some of it out into projects & actions. The roads were nice and clear today too, and the parking lot was fairly empty. Overall, a nice day for getting things done.
Microsoft Research
Wow, here’s a building I’d like to work in! I guess I’d have to get a PhD first, and probably be a lot smarter than I am.
del.icio.us weirdness
Hmm, my del.icio.us linkroll seems to have turned into a list of my tags instead. I wonder what happened there. A quick search shows that I’m not the only person who has noticed this.
books about Paris
A friend’s niece is going on a class trip to Paris soon. That made me think of my trip to Paris back in high school. I’m not going to write a long post reminiscing about that, but I thought I’d just post links to a couple of books on Amazon about Paris, mostly just because I wanted to play around with the function that allows you to do that from the Amazon Media Library.
The two books above were reviewed in The Economist a few years back, and I got interested in them based on that review. I had meant to buy them for myself at some point, but someone bought them for me as a gift before I’d gotten around to doing that.
(Edit, 02/14/2021: The Amazon iframe thing above stopped working at some point, so here are plain links to the books:
Paris: The Biography of a City
Paris Tales
More than ten years after I posted this, and I still haven’t finished reading the first one, or started reading the second. Sigh.)
San Diego – Air
I made my travel arrangements for San Diego today. I had almost enough frequent flyer points for the trip. I transferred a few thousand Membership Rewards points from my AmEx cards, and that gave me enough. So, for this year, I’m flying to San Diego for free. Cool.
Cataloging Books
I just entered a bunch of books into Delicious Library on my Mac. I hadn’t bothered entering anything into there since I got my new MacBook. Since the new MacBook has an iSight camera built in, I was kind of curious to see how the scanning function would work. Well, it scanned the bar codes OK, and came up with the correct UPCs, but it didn’t once pull the correct item for the UPC. I tried it on about ten books, and it didn’t work on any of them. I gave up, and went back to just typing in the ISBNs.
I then tried exporting from DL and importing to Amazon’s Media Library. I cut the ISBNs from DL’s export file, and pasted them into a separate text file, since Amazon seems to just want one ISBN per line, and nothing else. Amazon read in the file, and recognized about 20 items out of 80. Not a great success rate. I didn’t really try to troubleshoot that import at all, though, so maybe I messed something up. Amazon also has a scanning function similar to DL’s. I gave that a try, but I couldn’t get it to recognize my bar codes at all.
The thing that got me started on this was an attempt to figure out exactly which William Marshall books I own. Last night, I noticed one on Amazon (The Far Away Man) that didn’t sound familiar, so I ordered it. I guess there are a few others I haven’t read yet either, based on the list at Overbooked.
HD-DVD stuff
When I bought my HD-DVD player back in November, there was a mail-in offer for 5 free discs. I’d mostly forgotten about it, but when I came home from work today, there was a bag outside my door with five HD-DVDs in it. The list of discs that you could pick from wasn’t great, but I did wind up with a few decent titles, and a couple of OK ones: Full Metal Jacket, The Thing, Darkman, The Frighteners, and The Italian Job. I don’t know if I’ll bother buying many more (or *any* more) HD-DVDs, since the format seems to be getting deader every day. Maybe if I find all the Harry Potter movies on sale at some point, I’ll pick those up, just to have a compete set.