botwerks

after a rather brutal couple of weeks on the road and a series of weekend projects, we decided to take a really low key approach to the holiday weekend.  this resulted in copious amounts of reading  getting done.  some nuggets that i thought were interesting …

• i finally finished the black swan (nassim nicholas taleb – NNT) a week or so ago.  yeah, i know, it came out in 2007 and pretty much everyone has read it by now.  i’m suffering from a horrible reading backlog.  this of course triggered a cascade of adding a bunch of stuff from his web site to my instapaper queue and the papers collection.  of particular interest here is a blurb that NNT did for the drawbridge, be a gentleman on the treadmill.  a delightful spin on the notion that the fungible nature of entry level jobs provide greater freedoms than highly specialized and narrow job profiles.  this gives one a little pause when people talk about the dead-end nature of various jobs.  corollary - don’t let your expenses expand to match your earning potential and you can keep your FYI in alignment.
• foreign affairs – a crude predicament – TL;DR – you bought a big ass SUV in the past couple of years and you’re bitching about gas prices?  STFU and think things through.  wild gas price variability is here to stay.  oh and get on your bike.
• my philanthropy – george soros - we need more of this.  couple this with a reasonable interpretation of the political mind (get the newer edition) and if you can find some democrat strategists with some stones you might be able to move something progressive forward.
• michele bachmann’s holy war (rolling stone) – why, oh why does this crazy shit have to come from my state?
• don’t ask me where i find this stuff - a few hundred words on obsessive camera stuff for stanley kubrick.  there’s no getting around the fact that kubrick was a cinematic genius.  i don’t know how he ranked on the continuum of camera geeks, but i’m guessing a few SD from the mean.

truly of interest to nobody but myself …

this nybooks article got me to thinking about the role of the library in my life over the years.  when i was a kid there were multiple trips to the library each week.  we were beneficiaries of what i can recall as a solid library system.  now, i don’t know how true that was/is, but the library certainly held a place of reverence in our home and i could count on it being open pretty much every day of the week.  this was how a cash strapped kid got his bicycling, transworld snowboarding and BMX bike magazine fix.  if there were research projects for school i could count on the availability of newspaper archives on microfiche (remember microfiche?) and i could get articles on that crappy waxy paper for $0.25.

through the 90s i used the library less and less as i made enough money to start buying those books that interested me and worked up close and personally with this new thing, the internet.  books have always been that impulse purchase weakness for me and disposable income shifted to spend at amazon, BN, borders, etc..  the library faded into the background and wasn’t something that remained a fixture in my life.  there was lurking sense of pride that we could have these facilities available for the public but i didn’t feel a need to draw upon.  further i had this, likely incorrect and still lurking, impression that the library wasn’t current enough for my tastes.

i didn’t really start to pay attention to the library again until i met kathy and was exposed to the fickle nature and attention span of kids.  spending money on books simply to have them tossed aside when there was no longer any interest or to read and complete a book within the time span of 15 minutes (never to be read again) was an obvious waste of money.  the library seemed like the obvious solution to the kids book(s) dilemma.

we live in an area with a phenomenal neighborhood library.  it’s a building that evokes all of those nostalgic feelings one associates with the library in movies. it’s modest in size but there’s a cozy kids book section, nice reading areas and a surprising range of book selection.  i particularly love the travel book section there.  throw in the free wifi and it’s a great place to kill an afternoon.  that is, if i had idle afternoons to kill.

we’ve been lucky, our library’s only closed on mondays and sundays and the hours are pretty good.  but i do find myself wondering if we should be more ardent in our support of the library.   there are neighborhood where the utilization is high and the community support isn’t as strong and/or the community as effectively organized. these will be the recipients of deep cuts.

clearly it’s time to dust up the friends of the library membership.

turning a page in eucalyptus

i recently ran across a number of references to hiram bingham’s, Inca Land, which is available for free from project gutenberg.  this of course prompted the search for an appropriate ebook reader with hooks to project gutenberg.  behold eucalyptus, which will download books from project gutenberg on the fly and give you a killer interface for viewing the contents of the book.  insane attention to detail is visible everywhere.

the text is rendered in very high quality fonts, the animation is tight and the search function is spot on.  my only nit, is the lack of graphics for books which do have photos.

http://eucalyptusapp.com/ – definitely worth the $9.99 that they’re asking for it.

i should point out that i’ve also purchased classics (http://www.classicsapp.com/) which is equally stunning visually. however, the library that’s embedded inside classics is anemic.  while they’ve taken great care to display the content beautifully i find myself aching for more content.  i’d give up some of the visual appeal for the content and the portability.  eucalyptus seems to have struck a very nice balance here.

while all these two apps are capable reading platforms, i do find them lacking a few features which i really irritate me.  specifically these:

• the ability to annotate or make notes. now, i know that there are all sorts of additional considerations associated with this and there’s a corresponding need to provide a means to extract those notes into a different application, provide sexy input overlay, etc.  but i’m a margin writer or a highlighter.  if i like a book i like to make it mine.  while this is a general nit with ebooks, i would love to find a reasonably decent digital proxy.  failing this, i would like …
• the ability to copy a selected region of text and use the paste function to bring that content into another application for sharing or notes.  seems like a pretty duh item for me, particularly given that the content is all without copyright encumbrance.

these are hardly damning criticisms of these apps, in fact they’re more reflective of my desire to have a host of reading functionality in my pocket which to date i haven’t been able to find.  these apps represent the greatest non-kindle based means of portable reading that i’ve personally poked at and i find my curiosity piqued and a couple of things lacking.

i just whacked a nascent relationship with shelfari. i had poked at shelfari a year or so ago, but i was non-plussed with the manner in which i could interact with my “bookshelf”. in poking around various facebook applications, i was looking for something that would have some interesting integration with the social networking component from a reading perspective. it would have been nice to simply export my reading list from delicious library into something that would facilitate sharing my library with friends and family.

my thought here was to simply use the shelfari to FB integration and do a fresh export of my delicious library into shelfari and link the shelfari profile to FB. done.

no dice. first my shelfari profile required some serious scrubbing to eliminate a bunch of stuff that i’d eliminated and new acquisitions. this proved to be an exercise in we’re just going to keep your stuff data grabbiness by shelfari. after a moderate amount of swearing i was able to get this resolved.

then i tried to import my library. turns out that they’re not used to libraries as large as mine? i find this shortsighted but splitting the library into 3 chunks w/vim seemed to get it to accept the first chunk of the import. then i was presented with what looked to be screen after screen of cover art verification. although i was never really given the opportunity to test that theory. after i hit “next” to proceed to the next it just crapped out on me. apparently importing just 18 books. that sucked. at this point i had no interest in proceeding any further.

the reviews for the FB application aren’t particularly plussing either. i’ll cut my losses while i’m still ahead. feh.