Tag: books

  1. I nearly forgot to put a title on this post.

    19 May 2008

    The way the last couple of weeks have been going, it's a safe bet that you can guess how Friday went. If you guessed 'more dental work', then you hit the nail squarely on the head. It has been two weeks (now a bit more than that) since my root canal, and I had gone back to Family Dentistry to get the molar in question cleaned out, built up, and have a temporary crown installed. Ordinarily, this isn't such a big deal because once the nerve's gone (i.e., post-root canal) you can pretty much dig around inside the tooth …

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  2. State of the Time Lord: I never could stay put for very long...

    23 December 2007

    I'm writing this update from Lyssa's parents' house once again - the holiday is here once again (however you happen to celebrate it), and this year we've gone back to visit our families. We left around 1200 EST5EDT yesterday in an attempt to beat the traffic rush headed to points north, west, east, and everywhere but the southern half of the compass rose. Traffic, weather, and being worn out from staying up far too late the night before being what they are, we pulled in around 1730 EST5EDT, a respectable timetable for leaving at noon.

    The fairest thing you can say …

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  3. It seems that the one book they read was 1984.

    20 September 2007

    George W. Bush, while at NSA headquarters yesterday, asked the US Congress to turn the NSA program that allows any and all communications to be monitored without a warrant into a law rather than letting the program expire in February of 2008. While this law does not give operatives carte blanche to break into a home and plant monitoring devices or copy data from computers (that's covered by another set of statutes entirely), it does mean that they can record and analyze telephone calls, e-mails, and other forms of communication without oversight or legal record. As to why he didn't …

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  4. Eureka!

    30 July 2007

    I got it!! Thread pools!

    Here's something you don't see every day, but I sincerely hope will become common in the next couple of years: Books On Demand, both a principle and the name of a company (well, it's called On Demand Books, actually... I tried) that manufactures automatic printing press/bindaries. Their first model, called the Espresso Book Machine, costs $50kus, but can print, cut, trim, bind, and fit into a laminated cover two books simultaneously inside of seven wallclock minutes, or 15-20 library quality books per hour. There are two in public right now, one at the World …

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  5. Favourite author not coming to your city on a book-signing tour?

    03 April 2007

    Check out SignedPage.com.

    This website sells first editions of books signed by the authors for fans who can't make it to book signings or whose cities will not be visited by authors on their book-signing and publicity tours.

    Notables on the site at this time are Jim Butcher, author of the Dresden Files, who will be offering signed copies of his latest book, White Knight, and Jacqueline Carey, whose latest novel, Kushiel's Justice, will be released on 20 June 2007.

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  6. First the man is gone, now his books have followed.

    15 February 2007

    Following the death of Terrence McKenna in the year 2000, the Esalen Institute took ownership of his voluminous library of rare texts and an uncatalogued number of his notes, diaries, and other pieces of written information that accumulated through the course of his life. On 5 February a five-alarm fire broke out in the building in Monterey that the library was kept in, destroying everything. An incredible amount of information was lost in the blaze that also consumed a couple of restaurants, a coffee shop, and several other office blocks. So many rare tomes, some dating back to the 1800's …

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  7. Happy "Oh, gods, I have to go back to work?!" day, everyone.

    31 January 2007

    Wait a minute... ex-president Gerald Ford died?!

    Lyssa pointed me at an article that brought up something that never occurred to me - how libraries manage the limited amount of space they have for all of their materials. This is to say, they keep track of how often each book is checked out (much easier to do since card catalogues and patron records went digital in the mid 1990's) and if it isn't touched for longer than a certain time, they either throw the books out (dumpster diving at the local library is how I got most of my books when …

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