• I have been watching The Lost Room on Sci-Fi. It is ultra-good, but I am going to miss tonight’s CSI:NY because of it, which makes me sad because tonight’s episode is heavily deaf-themed. But The Lost Room is just that good.
• My new addiction is Sugar Free Chocolate & Caramel Creme Savers, by the people who make Life Savers. Just 9 calories each and SO good…they taste like chocolate pudding! I think I am eating more than I should be in a day, though.
• I no longer want to win Blingo movie tickets. I used to get a bunch of them, but I hadn’t in a while until yesterday. I was given the choice of a movie ticket or a $10 iTunes card, and I chose the former; I should have chosen the latter. They don’t send movie vouchers in the mail anymore - you have to pick what movie you want to see, and what showing, and then you put in a code and print out the ticket. I pretty much never know what movie I’m going to see in advance; the old way was much more convenient. I sent the code to an unemployed friend in NYC, who will get more bang for the buck than I would have.
• Nobody has tagged me on 43 People. Tag me? I need to be classified! (And if you want to meet me, put that down too.)

I was bored today. So I looked up some hotel prices from the most recent Go Ahead brochure - we get at least one a month, because back in 2001 we went on their Turkish Adventure tour. All package prices include international airfare; their prices are really quite good considering that airfare, many meals, transportation, and guides are all included. Price ranges are given when the price I found varied by day or season.

Not just who I voted for in the 2006 Bloggies, but why!
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I feel like sharing with you all my nominations for the 2006 Bloggies. As you may notice, I got bored before the end.
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Last month I got my annual Amazon gift certificate for being a Literotica moderator, and it was more than it has been in years past. I also had a little over $20 from Mechanical Turk, so I added that to my gift certificate balance and then spent at least a week dithering over what to buy. I ended up with four books three of which arrived yesterday.

Subway Style: 100 Years of Architecture & Design in the New York City Subway

I have been wanting this for a long time, and I’m really pleased with it. It’s much bigger than I was expecting, and it is chock-full of photos! The book is broken into chapters based on design elements (light fixtures, decorative tiles, etc.) and each chapter has a few pages of text followed by several pages of pictures from all around the system and all the way back to its creation. It doesn’t quite have as much as I was hoping for about the City Hall station, but it’s a great coffee table book and I will be browsing through it frequently.

Female Chauvinist Pigs

I wasn’t expecting this one to be hardcover - I guess because of the subject matter I was expecting something more flimsy. Although I support some points of feminist philosophy, I do not actively consider myself a feminist; this book seemed interesting anyway.

Deaf Peddler: Confessions of an Inside Man

For some reason this came individually shrink-wrapped. The subject matter is interesting to me, although I didn’t realize that the author was also in a wheelchair, which seems like it might affect the telling of the deaf peddler experience - this guy probably was more successful as a peddler because he was in a wheelchair. In any case, I’m reading this one first because it’s pretty thin. The print is large, the margins are pretty big, and it’s only 136 pages.

Embassy Residences in Washington

If you’ve been to DC and driven/walked along 16th Street or Embassy Row, you know there are some pretty awesome buildings there. One of my favorites is an African embassy along 16th street - I think it might be for Uganda - that has fantastic African architectural details. This book hasn’t arrived yet because I bought it at a discount from an Amazon Marketplace seller, but I’m looking forward to browsing through the pictures and learning how the embassies came to be.

I did a bit of shopping on Fifth Avenue yesterday - okay, a lot of shopping. I went to the Diamond District first and picked up the diamond stud earring to replace the one I dropped down the drain; I had dropped off one of the surviving ones the day before. Unfortunately it turns out that the replacement is about a point smaller than the original, which makes it a point smaller than all five of my other ones, so I am going to have to call the guy to ask about it - I didn’t pay $50 for a mismatched earring!

I spent even more than that, though, at American Girl Place. (What, you didn’t know I had an American Girl doll? I do!) They’ve been bringing back Felicity and even adding new items for her, so I got the Tea Lesson Gown for A. She got the complete Felicity set as a present years ago, but the Tea Lesson is new so I got it to make sure she still has the complete set. I also got the Butterfly Brocade Outfit (which we both wanted), and for my doll I got the new inflatable kayak (just the kayak and gear, not the outfit) and Kit’s Christmas Outfit which I’ve wanted for a while. And finally I got Coconut’s Rinkside Accessories. All told, this was about $125! Yikes.

Just because I can, I guess. Be warned: much Hello Kitty to follow.
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Does anybody have a favorite team for SETI@home? I used to do the project way back when it began (1998?) but I haven’t done it in forever. I’m thinking of starting to run the software again, and I want to join a team but I don’t know which one! I’m considering Amateur Radio Operators, Team Picard, Diarist.net, Starfleet International, Spread Firefox, and Mensa. There’s also this Stargate-related team as well as this one, and this one, a team called Ham Radio Operators, and the Maryland Delaware Rocketry Association. And let’s not forget the National Space Society. And I’m surprised that the JenniCam team is so big considering she’s not even around anymore (is she?). And then there’s the BDSM Sky Searchers…so, yeah. Can anybody suggest a team to join? Because I just can’t decide!

• I really should redo my sidebar. I haven’t updated it to change the Divinitas link into a link to my main TCG page even though Divinitas has been dead for months and I’ve joined a couple of others. There’s also just random junk in there I can get rid of.
• I need to wash my Qbee quilt.
• I have found that, as I was told by a Google staffer, Google Analytics is indeed chugging right along despite it thinking it’s not properly installed on my site. It doesn’t really tell me anything useful, though, so I am hoping to get a Measure Map invitation soon. Also, I clearly have smart readers, because 48.4% are using Firefox and only 46.6% are using IE!
• I have earned upwards of $15 from the Mechanical Turk; I think I will get all the way to $25 (free shipping) before redeeming anything into my Amazon account.
• I’m not sure why I’m posting this in my journal and not in my lovely self-hosted installation of Tasks.

I mentioned Library Thing in a quicklinks post, but I hadn’t had time to fully investigate the site. Now I have, and this definitely merits its own entry.

Like all good geeks and smart people, we have a few thousand books sitting around the house. Most are in bookcases, a few are in piles, some are in storage. I have wanted to catalog these for a long time - in fact I think I originally wanted to catalog my mom’s books when I still lived at home, and she has a ton of books. (Not that I’ve weighed them, but it might be close!) Over the past several years I have tried various ways of cataloging them. Early attempts were made with software designed for collectors of all types; more recently I tried using Palm software like BookBag. The problem with both of these was that they were not connected to the web. For every single book, I had to record the title, author, ISBN, etc. - and this usually meant physically taking them off the shelf and looking at each one front and back. Needless to say, this was a pain in the ass!

Library Thing is a revolutionary leap forward in book cataloging. All you have to do is type in a search that Amazon would recognize, and you get a list of matching results. Click the title of the right book, and it’s quickly added to your list and your cursor is put back to the search field (Google-style). Type another title (author, ISBN, whatever), hit enter, click the right one, and repeat. Library Thing pulls in all the other data from Amazon, so your catalog is complete with authors and publishers and even publication dates. The absolute easiest way to use Library Thing is with a laptop and a wireless connection. I literally sat down in front of the bookshelf and fired in title after title. If you don’t have that kind of setup, I suggest taking good-quality photographs of each shelf/section and working from those. You may occasionally have to go fetch a book - sometimes it can’t find the right one when I search by author, but if I search by title it works, or vice-versa - but working from pictures would be the most efficient way to do this if you are tethered.

So, all this raving about Library Thing and I haven’t even gotten into the social aspect. Like most new web applications, you can make up your own tags. You can also view the catalogs of users with similar collections to yours, and view books others have tagged with a particular term. Oh, and there are watchlists - they’re not public knowledge like a friends list, but you can keep an eye on the catalogs of others. You can also get recommendations of books you might like, import from a few different formats, export to CSV (very nice to have that), make a blog widget with your favorite/recent/random books, leave public or private comments on the profiles of other readers…and probably even more stuff that I haven’t found yet.

So, have I convinced you to sign up for Library Thing yet? (No, that’s not an affiliate link!) If you want to see somebody’s catalog, why not take a look at mine? It’s probably only about 5% of the books I actually have, and it’s heavy on queer and deaf stuff because I had already cataloged that elsewhere, but I’ll be adding more soon!