DEBlog

links for 2009-11-21

2009-11-21T10:02:46-05:00

Thursday – Cheap Kindle Books

Robert Kroese's Mercury Falls is only $1.99 on the Kindle. I haven't finished reading it, but I can tell you already it's certainly worth downloading for that money.

Weekly Set Puzzle Challenge: November 21

2009-11-21T07:29:25-05:00

It's Saturday, which means it's time for the deblog's Weekly Set Puzzle Challenge! (View a list of winners of the Weekly Set Puzzle Challenge here.)

This week's scores:

Debra -- 2:24 Oy.
Karen -- 0:51
Maxine -- 3:00

How to participate:

Play the theoretically simple yet maddeningly difficult Set Puzzle. (Remember, the clock starts ticking the moment you open the Set window.)
Post your time in the comments to this post.
The winner for the week gets to hoist the much-coveted winner's badge.
This should be posted in a blog post rather than on your sidebar, say,
because, after all, your time to bask in the glory of the win is likely
to be ephemeral.

How to post the badge? Some possibilities:

a. Download the badge to your own space and link thereto.

b. Include this code in your post:

<a href="http://www.the-deblog.com/set_puzzle_weekly_challenge/index.html">src="http://dhamel.typepad.com/images/setduelwinner.gif&" /></a>

c. Alternatively, you're not obliged to post it. This is all in fun, after all.

Bartlett, Allison Hoover: The Man Who Loved Books Too Much

2009-11-17T10:09:14-05:00

Note: Review copy received from publisher. Amazon affiliate: Links pointing to Amazon contain my affiliate ID. Sales resulting from clicks on those links will earn me a percentage of the purchase price.

Allison Hoover Bartlett's The Man Who Loved Books Too Much is a quick, readable look at the world of book collection. She dips into the history of bibliomania and provides vignettes of other characters, but mostly the book is an account of two men and the author's experiences in getting to know them. Ken Sanders is the owner of a rare book store in Salt Lake City who served for six years as the security chair of the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association. He embraced that role enthusiastically, improved methods for alerting members of the organization to recent thefts during his tenure, and doggedly pursued one particular repeat offender. John Charles Gilkey, like other bibliomaniacs, is obsessed with adding to his collection of rare books, but in his case the books have tended to come free of charge, courtesy of the sorry souls who were unlucky enough to have once handed over their credit cards to Gilkey when he worked at Saks Fifth Avenue. Gilkey methodically collected their numbers and identities and used the cards, months later, to fund hotel stays and book-buying junkets.

Continue reading at book-blog.com »

TSS -- Salon Membership and Gone Tomorrow

2009-11-15T17:40:24-05:00

Looks like the Sunday Salon is operational again! This is good news. I'll restate here my proposal that we halt membership in the Salon at 500 members. (We're currently at 482.) Not that I want to. But I think we might be taxing Yahoo Pipes beyond all reason if we let the Salon grow indefinitely. Happy to hear arguments either way.

Meanwhile, here's a good book that I think a lot of you might enjoy:

The bulk of P.F. Kluge's Gone Tomorrow purports to be a manuscript that was found among the belongings of the late George Canaris, whose three previous books had landed him in the canon of must-read 20th century authors. Canaris became a writer in residence at a no-name Ohio college at the height of his fame, eager for a place that would give him the space to write his magnum opus, "The Beast," as he referred to it. But against all expectations Canaris stayed on at the school for more than thirty years and never published another book. His failure to come out with anything new lent him a Salinger-esque mystique, but his status slowly slipped from celebrity author on campus to beloved but has-been professor.

Continue reading at book-blog.com »

Crossword: Man of Many Words

2009-11-14T17:20:15-05:00

Here are the theme-related clues to this week's Sunday New York Times crossword.

ACROSS
21 *Tony Parsons novel [1943 song]
26 *Mandarin variety [1942]
67 *It flows into Ontario's Georgian bay [1961]
108 *Laurel and Hardy flick [1949]
115 Lyricist born 1118/1909 who wrote the words to the 10 songs with asterisked clues

DOWN
3 *"Omigosh!" [1938]
11 *Rural jaunt [1945]
42 Many a 115-Across collaboration
46 *Total sham [1963]
48 *Former first lady [1945]
59 *One of the Brontës [1964]
90 *Toro's target [1956]

THE ANSWERS
ACROSS
21 BAR SBE ZL ONOL
26 GNATREVAR
67 ZBBA EVIRE
108 TERNG THAF
115 WBUAAL ZREPRE

DOWN
3 WRRCREF PERRCREF
11 UNLEVQR
42 OEBNQJNL ZHFVPNY
46 PUNENQR
48 YNHEN
59 RZVYL
90 ZNGNQBE

The answers are encrypted. To decrypt them, select whichever ones you want to see, throw them into the Crossword Decrypting Widget below, and hit the red button:

Weekly Set Puzzle Challenge: November 14

2009-11-14T09:26:15-05:00

It's Saturday, which means it's time for the deblog's Weekly Set Puzzle Challenge! (View a list of winners of the Weekly Set Puzzle Challenge here.)

This week's scores:

Debra -- 0:56
Maxine -- 1:30
Karen -- 0:25
Susan -- 1:27

How to participate:

Play the theoretically simple yet maddeningly difficult Set Puzzle. (Remember, the clock starts ticking the moment you open the Set window.)
Post your time in the comments to this post.
The winner for the week gets to hoist the much-coveted winner's badge.
This should be posted in a blog post rather than on your sidebar, say,
because, after all, your time to bask in the glory of the win is likely
to be ephemeral.

How to post the badge? Some possibilities:

a. Download the badge to your own space and link thereto.

b. Include this code in your post:

<a href="http://www.the-deblog.com/set_puzzle_weekly_challenge/index.html">src="http://dhamel.typepad.com/images/setduelwinner.gif&" /></a>

c. Alternatively, you're not obliged to post it. This is all in fun, after all.

TSS Troubles with the Sunday Salon

2009-11-13T10:54:15-05:00

You'll probably have noticed that there was some trouble with the Salon over the last weekend. Most posts didn't go through, though some snuck by. I've been playing with it all week trying to get things working, but I'm hindered by my own ignorance and the fact that Yahoo Pipes is slow and has apparently been having problems itself.

At any rate, I wound up reorganizing the data that gets fed into the Pipe. Instead of taking the RSS feeds and tags from a single Google spreadsheet, it's now taking that information from a bunch of different spreadsheets, aggregating it in a handful of Pipes, and then aggregating outputs from those Pipes in a single Pipe. My idea was that maybe it would be better able to handle the data in smaller doses. Again, I have no idea what I'm doing. I've just been experimenting. But at present, at least, it seems to be working. You should see feeds from last week starting to come through your RSS readers.

I've also been trying to think of an alternative to aggregating the feeds in this way, but so far I've not been able to come up with a solution. There are other aggregators out there, using which you can mash different feeds together to create a single feed, but none seem as powerful as Pipes, and none seem able to add a tag to the post title (which I find very helpful when looking through Salon posts). We're dealing with almost 500 different feeds here, which is a lot of information. Yahoo Pipes, if it worked reliably and was faster, would really be the ideal solution.

So all of this is making me think that, unless an alternative solution presents itself, maybe the growth of the Salon should be halted at 500 members. (We're currently at 480.) Thoughts? Ideas?

Wells, H.G.: The Time Machine

2009-11-11T16:55:27-05:00

Note: Amazon affiliate: Links pointing to Amazon contain my affiliate ID. Sales resulting from clicks on those links will earn me a percentage of the purchase price.

With a Kindle in one's hands, downloading and reading many older books that are no longer in copyright is both free and simple. Having thus come into possession of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine the other day by way of experimenting with the Kindle, I found myself reading it at once, and so, almost without meaning to begin it, I've finished. In the book, first published in 1895, an unidentified narrator relates what he and others were told by the so-called Time Traveller, at whose house they were accustomed to congregate on successive Thursdays. The Time Traveller had built a time machine which he showed to the assembled one week. The following week, arriving at his own house for dinner late, sockless, and apparently injured, he told them of the experiences he'd had in the future since their last meeting. The Time Traveller had in fact gone very far into the future, looking to discover the ultimate fate of the earth, but he spent most of his time in the year 802,701. There he was greeted by strange descendants of humanity, the Eloi--small, childlike, sexless, pasty people, all of them having "the same girlish rotundity of limb." They spoke an uncomplicated, mellifluous language and all dressed similarly. (Here is the antecedent for that Star Trek trope, noted by Jerry Seinfeld, wherein everyone in the future always wears the same outfit.) The Eloi were strangely uninquisitive, apparently fearless, and they seemed to live in a sort of paradise, where man had thoroughly subjugated nature to his needs and, having nothing further to fear or for which to strive, had become soft. So, at least, the Time Traveller thought at first. But his first impressions turned out to be horribly mistaken, and the novel, in the end, is deeply pessimistic about the ultimate progress of mankind, Wells having taken the development of the relationship between the haves and the have-nots to its distressing extreme.

Turkeys in the Family

2009-11-09T07:30:10-05:00

Mel's Turkey
Originally uploaded by dhamel.

When Rebecca was in second grade, there was a family turkey project that we did. You had a turkey to decorate and everybody was supposed to work on decorating it. We did a good job, and the turkey's been hanging in our kitchen ever since (below).

Now Mel's in second grade, and was given the same turkey to decorate for a family project. This time we've outdone ourselves. Click through to the Flickr photo for notes on some of the areas.

Sunday Salon: Annoyance

2009-11-08T20:27:59-05:00

I'm seriously disgusted with Yahoo Pipes. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn't--you'll have noticed that it's not working today--even when I've made no changes. I don't understand it well enough to effectively troubleshoot. I'm trying to figure out if there's some other means of aggregating the Sunday Salon feeds. It's not as easy as you'd think: there are almost 500 RSS feeds we want aggregated, filtered, sorted, with dates appended to the titles, and spat out. I've wasted hours on this today and so far have not come up with anything like a solution.

Crossword: Colonization

2009-11-08T09:54:41-05:00

Here are the theme-related clues to this week's Sunday New York Times crossword.

ACROSS
23 "O say can you see" or "Thru the perilous fight"?
25 Resident of a military installation?
40 Tropical fruit seller?
61 Place to get drunk in the kitchen?
67 What overuse of a credit card might result in?
84 Gentleman's intransigent reply?
105 Where nitpickers walk on a street?
108 Online beauty contest?

THE ANSWERS
23 NAGURZ YVAR
25 ONFR GRANAG
40 CYNAGNVA QRNYRE
61 CNAGEL ONE
67 TVNAG OVYY
84 ZNQNZ V'Z NQNZNAG
105 CRQNAG KVAT
108 JRO CNTRNAG

The answers are encrypted. To decrypt them, select whichever ones you want to see, throw them into the Crossword Decrypting Widget below, and hit the red button:

Weekly Set Puzzle Challenge: November 7

2009-11-07T09:24:57-05:00

It's Saturday, which means it's time for the deblog's Weekly Set Puzzle Challenge! (View a list of winners of the Weekly Set Puzzle Challenge here.)

This week's scores:

Debra -- 1:29 [Karen's going to grind me into the dust on this one. It should have been much faster.]
Clare -- 2:30
Karen 0:37
Maxine -- 3:48
Susan -- 2:09

How to participate:

Play the theoretically simple yet maddeningly difficult Set Puzzle. (Remember, the clock starts ticking the moment you open the Set window.)

Post your time in the comments to this post.

The winner for the week gets to hoist the much-coveted winner's badge.
This should be posted in a blog post rather than on your sidebar, say,
because, after all, your time to bask in the glory of the win is likely
to be ephemeral.

How to post the badge? Some possibilities:

a. Download the badge to your own space and link thereto.

b. Include this code in your post:

<a href="http://www.the-deblog.com/set_puzzle_weekly_challenge/index.html">src="http://dhamel.typepad.com/images/setduelwinner.gif&" /></a>

c. Alternatively, you're not obliged to post it. This is all in fun, after all.

Test of Twitterfeed.

2009-11-06T15:48:42-05:00

Blah

http://is.gd/4O3vi

McNair, Cici: Detectives Don't Wear Seat Belts

2009-11-06T14:55:48-05:00

Note: Review copy received from publisher. Amazon affiliate: Links pointing to Amazon contain my affiliate ID. Sales resulting from clicks on those links will earn me a percentage of the purchase price.

In her book Detectives Don't Wear Seat Belts, Cici McNair introduces readers to her very unusual life. As the title suggests, she's a private detective (see Green Star Investigations), and stories about her experiences as a detective form the backbone of her memoir: her initial attempts to break into the business, stake-outs with guys with thick accents and foul mouths, investigations into counterfeit property or accusations of rape or lunchtime shenanigans, wearing a wire in the diamond district, in seedy warehouses, in a massage parlor. The author walks us through her role in a great many cases. It's fascinating, real-life stuff, the nitty gritty of detection, from paperwork to phone calls to the innumerable times the author has had to fake her way through a meeting to get information. She assumes an identity, swallows the information she'll need to pass herself off, and walks into a dangerous situation to lie her way through it and get her mark to say something incriminating on tape.

Continue reading at book-blog.com »

links for 2009-11-05

2009-11-05T10:13:58-05:00

ELEMENTARY EPIDEMIC: 11 Uncovered Videos Show School Children Performing Praises to Obama

links for 2009-11-04

2009-11-04T10:03:18-05:00

TwitterPeek gets reviewed, slated: sluggish & poorly featured - SlashGear

Sounds like there are some real negatives to the TwitterPeek experience, which is unfortunate. (I'm still annoyed by the people who think that everyone these days uses a smart phone and there's no market for a dedicated Twitter device.) Not being able to search and the truncation of the tweets are perhaps deal killers, if the price weren't.

Testing Blogo

2009-11-03T10:45:32-05:00

For the last half hour or so I've been testing out Blogo, a desktop blogging editor for Mac OS X. I use ScribeFire these days in Firefox, and I love its simplicity, but it leaves a lot to be desired: you can't post-date blog posts, for example. Or rather, you can post-date them, and the date of the post (in TypePad, at least) will reflect the date you've given the post, but it won't delay the publication.

There's a lot to like about Blogo. It's simple. It has an attractive interface. I particularly like that you can break off into the extended area of a post simply by adding three hash tags to your post. But it doesn't do everything I need a blog editor to do, alas. To wit (unless I'm missing something):

There's no way to add Technorati tags to a post.
You can post-date a post but, as with ScribeFire, it will still post in TypePad right away.
There's no way to access TypePad's excerpt field.
There's no way to create stationery (except making a draft post and copying it, I suppose, but that's a little inconvenient).

You can post to Twitter from Blogo, too, which is neat. But while the posting panel is attractive, the window for reading Twitter posts on Blogo is pretty ugly.

Crossword: Compound Fractures

2009-10-31T22:13:24-04:00

Here are the theme-related clues to this week's Sunday New York Times crossword.

ACROSS
22 Eyewear providing hindsight?
29 Peanut-loving ghost?
32 Intermittent revolutionary?
43 Rare mushroom?
56 Give up smuggled goods?
71 High-school athletic star at a casino?
81 Noble Les Paul?
99 "Maybe" music?
101 Dreams that don't die?
108 Bug that never takes a ride?

DOWN
21 Like online medical advice for kids?
44 Vegetable that gives you an emotional release?

THE ANSWERS
ACROSS
22 ERGEBFCRPGNPYRF
29 RYRCUNAGBZ
32 FCBENQVPNY
43 CFLPURQRYVPNPL
56 PBAGENONAQBA
71 ERQYRGGREZNA
81 THVGNEVFGBPENG
99 CREUNCFBQL
101 SBERIREVRF
108 PRAGVCRQRFGEVNA

DOWN
21 JVXVCRQVNGEVP
44 PNGUNEGVPUBXR

The answers are encrypted. To decrypt them, select whichever ones you want to see, throw them into the Crossword Decrypting Widget below, and hit the red button:

Weekly Set Puzzle Challenge: October 31

2009-10-31T09:04:42-04:00

It's Saturday, which means it's time for the deblog's Weekly Set Puzzle Challenge! (View a list of winners of the Weekly Set Puzzle Challenge here.)

This week's scores:

Debra -- 0:55
Karen -- 0:29
Susan -- 2:33

How to participate:

Play the theoretically simple yet maddeningly difficult Set Puzzle. (Remember, the clock starts ticking the moment you open the Set window.)
Post your time in the comments to this post.
The winner for the week gets to hoist the much-coveted winner's badge.
This should be posted in a blog post rather than on your sidebar, say,
because, after all, your time to bask in the glory of the win is likely
to be ephemeral.

How to post the badge? Some possibilities:

a. Download the badge to your own space and link thereto.

b. Include this code in your post:

<a href="http://www.the-deblog.com/set_puzzle_weekly_challenge/index.html">src="http://dhamel.typepad.com/images/setduelwinner.gif&" /></a>

c. Alternatively, you're not obliged to post it. This is all in fun, after all.

Maugham, W. Somerset: The Hero

2009-10-28T14:46:21-04:00

Note: Amazon affiliate: Links pointing to Amazon contain my affiliate ID. Sales resulting from clicks on those links will earn me a percentage of the purchase price.

In The Hero, which was originally published in 1901, Somerset Maugham tells the story of Captain James Parsons, who comes home to Little Primpton a wounded hero. He's been away for five years, first at Sandhurst and then in India and South Africa. During that time he has not seen his parents--his "people," as Maugham consistently refers to them--nor his fiancé, Mary Clibborn, to whom he was engaged shortly before he left home. Upon his return he finds, unhappily, that everything has changed. Or rather, he has: his experiences have broadened his mind, and he now finds the dogmatism and puritanical attitudes of his parents and their circle unbearably oppressive. His parents adore him and yet their love is conditional upon his adherence to the rigid code by which their lives are circumscribed. Mary is no better. Ostensibly an angel of mercy, whose good deeds toward the ill of Little Primpton are outdone only by the kindnesses she heaps on James and his parents, she is in fact an odious creature, small-minded and convinced of her own rightness and out to change James into the sort of husband she should like. It doesn't help that during his time away James experienced real passion, falling helplessly in love with the wife of a friend, a woman who made a habit of collecting and toying with admirers. His burning infatuation for this woman made James realize that his relationship with Mary, which he'd taken as love, had never been anything more than a comfortable friendship.

Continue reading at book-blog.com »