There is no dark side of the moon...

...fact is, it's all dark.

Taken with a Canon PowerShot A530 jammed up against a 25mm eyepiece in a 4.5" Newtonian telescope. I was hoping to get a picture at the moment of totality, but the mother of all cloudbanks moved in from the southwest.

Amazon is not killing the iTunes Store any time soon.

I have finally started clearing out our CD collection. There are a lot of discs in here that we never listen to, and others that we bought just for one song. (Remember when that was your only option?) Half Price Books offers a decent price for used CDs with little hassle, so that has been my outlet of choice so far. The proceeds from selling discs will go to buying individual tracks to replace more CDs, though I’ve found fewer than ten songs so far that I feel need to be replaced.

Not every song on CD is available at the iTunes Store, and getting rid of plastic mass outweighs brand loyalty in this case. Amazon’s MP3 store got a lot of press a few months back for offering DRM-free music at a price matching or beating Apple’s FairPlay-protected files. I figure that’s a good alternative, right?

One of the discs I’m looking to replace is a compilation of songs from movie soundtracks, produced by Blockbuster. The only track worth keeping is Vince Gill’s “Ophelia” from the Mel Gibson-Jodie Foster flick Maverick. The iTunes Store doesn’t have it, so let’s check the Amazon MP3 store.

Searching on “vince gill” is easy enough, but returns 285 results, more than I’m willing to sift through. Any way to refine the search? Not that I can see. Okay, I’ll sort by song title and just page down to the “O”s. Clicking on the “Song Title” column header doesn’t work. Off to the right, I notice a dropdown that says “Sort by”. That looks promising. My options are “Relevance”, “Bestselling”, “Price: Low to High”, “Price: High to Low”, “Avg. Customer Review”, and “Release Date”. No “Song Title”, no “Album”, apparently no “Artist” (assuming I searched on just a last name or the name of a song or album).

And like that, I suspect that I won’t be shopping the Amazon MP3 store again any time soon.

What's next, a Gopher client?

Lotus Notes on the iPhone

52 Books in 52 Weeks, 2006 Edition

For the sake of completeness, here is the list of books I read in 2006. I didn’t realize until now that I only managed 48 books that year, which I think says a lot about rules and how they can do more harm than good.

• Colicchio, Tom. Think Like a Chef.
• Bear, Greg. Dead Lines.
• Alder, Ken. The Measure of All Things.
• Wozniak, Steve. iWoz: How I invented the personal computer, co-founded Apple, and had fun doing it.
• Spencer-Fleming, Julia. All Mortal Flesh.
• Coupland, Douglas. JPod.
• O’Brien, Cormac. Secret Lives of the First Ladies: What Your Teachers Never Told You About the Women of the White House.
• Haddon, Mark. A Spot of Bother.
• DeMille, Nelson. The Charm School.
• Connelly, Michael. Void Moon.
• MacDonald, Laura. Curse of the Narrows.
• Barry, Dave. Tricky Business.
• Pelecanos, George P. Down By the River Where the Dead Men Go.
• Pelecanos, George P. Nick’s Trip.
• Pelecanos, George P. A Firing Offense.
• Vowell, Sarah. Assassination Vacation.
• Taber, George M. Judgment of Paris: California vs. France and the Historic 1976 Paris Tasting that Revolutionized Wine.
• Oliver, Garrett. The Brewmaster’s Table.
• Noonen, Greg. New Brewing Lager Beer.
• MacFarlane, Alan. The Empire of Tea: The Remarkable History of the Plant that Took Over the World.
• Meloy, Maile. Liars and Saints.
• Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird.
• Child, Lee. The Hard Way.
• Marson, Bonnie. Sleeping with Schubert.
• Pratchett, Terry. Thud!
• Ackerman, Kenneth D. Dark Horse: The Surprise Election and Political Murder of President James A. Garfield.
• Roach, Mary. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers.
• Standage, Tom. A History of the World in 6 Glasses.
• Cody, Diablo. Candy Girl.
• Rucka, Greg. Private Wars.
• Smith, Kyle. Love Monkey.
• Johnson, Steven. Everything Bad is Good For You: How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter.
• Toole, John Kennedy. A Confederacy of Dunces.
• Defrain, Darren. The Salt Palace.
• Tayman, John. The Colony: The Harrowing True Story of the Exiles of Molokai.
• King, Stephen. Cell.
• Winchester, Simon. A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906.
• Robbins, Tom. Wild Ducks Flying Backward.
• Pratchett, Terry. Going Postal.
• Levitt, Steven D. and Dubner, Stephen J. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.
• Gaiman, Neil. Anansi Boys.
• Hornby, Nick. A Long Way Down.
• Gladwell, Malcolm. Blink.
• Berendt, John. The City of Falling Angels.
• Pelecanos, George. Hard Revolution.
• Story, Rosalyn. More than You Know.
• Krakauer, Jon. Into the Wild.
• Grafton, Sue. S is for Silence.

52 Books in 52 Weeks, 2007 Edition

In past years, I’ve tried a number of rules to adhere to the letter of the “52 books in 52 weeks” law. In general, I’ve found they get in the way of just reading. So, this year I lifted most of the restrictions, and decided to start on 1 January, stop on 31 December, and come what may in the middle.

The results were a little surprising.

I passed 52 books somewhere in October or November, I forget which. Even with something of a dry spell towards the end of the year, I still managed to finish my 65th book on 30 December.

Highlights from the year in reading:

• No more Harry Potter books. This is a mixed blessing, as they got so big there at the end that they took a fair chunk of time to read.
• Three more novels by Lee Child from the Jack Reacher series. I feel a little guilty about devoting so much of the year (almost 5%) to a single author, but they’re ripping yarns, and I just can’t help myself.
• Three books with “CIA” in the title. I didn’t notice that until reviewing this list.
• I’m glad I have discovered Angela Nissel. (Come to think of it, her book makes two by panelists from NPR’s quiz show Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me.)
• Ken Jennings’ Braniac led me to http://www.ken-jennings.com, which was worth reading the book by itself. (Not that the book wasn’t worth it, too. Highly recommended.) I’ve been subscribed to his Tuesday Trivia email for several months now, and while I don’t compete for the big prizes, I enjoy playing along at home.

Forward-selling for 2008:

• After two years, Sue Grafton finally delivered T is for Trespass. Santa delivered it below the tree. It will be my first read for the year. (By this weekend. I promise.)
• Also on deck currently are The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold (author of The Lovely Bones, which remains one of my favorite books evar) and Heat by Bill Buford (a spontaneous pickup at the library).
• And of course, some fraction of the hundreds of books on my todo list.

The list for 2007, in reverse chronological order:

• Child, Lee. Die Trying.
• Gischler, Victor. Suicide Squeeze.
• Bodanis, David. Electric Universe: The Shocking True Story of Electricity.
• Rankin, Ian. Watchman.
• Couch, Dick. The Finishing School: Earning the Navy SEAL Trident.
• Pratchett, Terry. Making Money.
• Ferguson, Niall. Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire.
• Miller, John Ramsey. Inside Out.
• Finder, Joseph. Paranoia.
• Abbott, Karen. Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys and the Battle for America’s Soul.
• Gibson, William. Spook Country.
• Black, Baxter. Hey, Cowboy, Wanna Get Lucky?
• Brooks, Max. World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War.
• Hosseini, Khaled. A Thousand Splendid Suns.
• Connolly, John. Bad Men.
• Connelly, Michael. The Black Echo.
• Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.
• Plotz, Dave. The Genius Factory.
• Moran, Lindsay. Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy.
• Pelecanos, George. Drama City.
• Reilly, Rick. Hate Mail from Cheerleaders.
• Levinson, Marc. The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger.
• Bryson, Bill. A Walk in the Woods.
• Child, Lee. Killing Floor.
• Picoult, Jody. Nineteen Minutes.
• Butcher, Jim. White Night.
• Joss, Morag. Funeral Music.
• Budiansky, Stephen. Battle of Wits.
• Diamond, Jared. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.
• Dunning, John. The Bookman’s Promise.
• Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
• Yuan, Michael Juntao and Heute, Thomas. JBoss Seam: Simplicity and Power Beyond Java EE.
• Meltzer, Brad. The Zero Game.
• Pelecanos, George. The Night Gardener.
• Gehtland, Justin; Galbraith, Ben; Almaer, Dion. Pragmatic Ajax.
• Nissel, Angela. The Broke Diaries: The Completely True and Hilarious Misadventures of a Good Girl Gone Broke.
• Brogan, Jan. A Confidential Source.
• Bodanis, David. E=mc2: A Biography of the World’s Most Famous Equation.
• Preston, Douglas and Child, Lincoln. Still Life with Crows.
• Smiley, Jane. A Year at the Races: Reflections on Horses, Humans, Love, Money and Luck.
• Phillips, Scott. Cottonwood.
• Sterling, Bruce. The Zenith Angle.
• Child, Lee. Bad Luck and Trouble.
• Godin, Seth. Small is the New Big, and 183 Other Riffs, Rants, and Remarkable Business Ideas.
• Hiaasen, Carl. Nature Girl.
• Tennant, Alan. On the Wing: To the Edge of the Earth With the Peregrine Falcon.
• Lehrer, Kate. Confessions of a Bigamist.
• Viesturs, Ed with Roberts, David. No Shortcuts to the Top: Climbing the World’s Highest Peaks.
• Schwarcz, Joe. The Fly in the Ointment: 70 Fascinating Commentaries on the Science of Everyday Life.
• Krueger, William Kent. Blood Hollow.
• Anderson, Chris. The Long Tail.
• Andrews, Russell. Aphrodite.
• Roth, Philip. The Plot Against America.
• Heffernan, Thomas Farel. Mutiny on the Globe: The Fatal Voyage of Samuel Comstock.
• Johansen, Iris. Fatal Tide.
• Katzenbach, John. The Analyst.
• Gaiman, Neil. Fragile Things.
• Halpern, Jake. Braving Home: Dispatches from the Underwater Town, the Lava-Side Inn, and other extreme locales.
• Littell, Robert. The Company: A Novel of the CIA.
• Duncan, Dayton. Horatio’s Drive: America’s First Road Trip.
• Jensen, Jane. Dante’s Equation.
• Richelson, Jeffrey. The Wizards of Langley: Inside the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology.
• Felber, Adam. Schrödinger’s Ball.
• Groneberg, Tom. One Good Horse.
• Jennings, Ken. Braniac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs.

Week 20, Book 19: Private Wars

Rucka, Greg. Private Wars. This was an impulse pickup, as I was scanning the limited checkout shelf at the library. I read Rucka's A Fistful of Rain last year, and I'm a sucker for spy novels. The main character, Tara Chace, is an intelligence operative in the same mold as Tom Clancy's Clark, but more believable. She's also a new mother, and the conflict between the things she loves (her job and her daughter) constantly tears at her. But make no mistake, this is not a touchy-feely book; it's hardcore spy thriller. Private Wars is a sequel to A Gentleman's Game, which I must now add to my todo list. :-)

Week 20, Book 18: Love Monkey

Smith, Kyle. Love Monkey. I was surprised to learn that the television series was based on a book. I was even more surprised to learn that I already had the book on my todo list. I enjoyed this a lot—Kyle Smith's writing reminds me a lot of Nick Hornby's (to whom Smith pays homage by having his protagonist mention a book in which the main character keeps making top 5 lists). I can see why this ended up on TV instead of as a movie; it's similar to About a Boy, and the events of September 11, 2001 work into the background. The ending left me feeling a lot more satisfied than, say, The Salt Palace did.

Week 19, Book 17: Everything Bad is Good For You.

Johnson, Steven. Everything Bad is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter. The basic premise is, popular mass media is not dumbing us down, turning us all into the lowest common denominator, but is actually increasing in complexity, forcing us to think harder and better. An interesting read on the heels of Freakonomics and Malcolm Gladwell's books.

Week 18, Book 16: A Confederacy of Dunces

Toole, John Kennedy. A Confederacy of Dunces. It took me a while to get into this one—for the first few days, I felt like I was reading it because I was supposed to, not because I wanted to. The characters were largely unlikeable, and the whole thing read like a farce. Then, I realized that that was the point.

Catching up.

The 52 Books in 52 Weeks Challenge has not shaped up like I expected. As you may have noticed from the recent posts (or lack thereof), I had a five week dry spell at the end of March and most of April. Things have been busy at work and I just haven't been taking the time to read in the evenings like I used to.

I may need to alter the rules just a bit more. Right now, there's actually a disincentive to start a book toward the end of the week—I have to start and finish the book in the same week for it to be the "official" read for that week. In retrospect, I think that was appropriate for the first week of the year, but now I should count a book in the week it was finished, with the ultimate goal of finishing 52 books in 52 weeks.

I just put a bunch more books on hold at the library, so the count should pick up again for the next few weeks.

Week 16, Book 15: The Salt Palace

Defrain, Darren. The Salt Palace.. It would be easy to characterize this book as one of the dust jacket blurbs does: as a small narrative positioned above footnotes about the Church of Latter Day Saints and the Utah Jazz. The footnotes aren't just marginalia, but a whole other narrative—or, rather, two—in their own right. In fact, in one instance, when the narrator is unable to continue his story temporarily, there's a whole chapter that's nothing but a footnote, that itself has two footnotes.

However, that would be selling the main narrative short. It's the story of a young man born and raised in the Mormon church, now... not necessarily lapsed, but certainly off the spiritual path his family and faith would have chosen for him. He sets off on a road trip back home to Utah, which not coincidentally mirrors the exodus of early Mormons from the Midwest to the shores of the Great Salt Lake. Along the way is adventure, misadventure, and self-discovery.

Unfortunately, the ending is somewhat abrupt, after veering in a direction that left me wondering if it was supposed to be real or imagined. I could have done with more closure, but then again maybe that's the point of modern literature.

Week 16, Book 14: The Colony

Tayman, John. The Colony: The Harrowing True Story of the Exiles of Molokai.. We honeymooned on Molokai, and our flight from Honolulu landed briefly at Kalaupapa, but we weren't allowed to deplane. A few days later, we gazed down on the peninsula from the top of the cliff, but the National Park Service was not running tours (led down the cliff path on muleback) at the time, so that was the closest we got.

The Colony tells the tale of the residents of Kalaupapa, exiled from the rest of Hawaiian society for having contracted leprosy. I knew a little of the history, from our time on Molokai and shortly after, but Tayman's research and interviews with some of the remaining residents shows that most of the information out there is little better than urban legend. This is important American history—the laws banishing patients to Kalaupapa were on the books until 1969—and I recommend it highly.

Week 11, Book 13: Cell

King, Stephen. Cell.. I was really hoping that now that Stephen King has finished the Dark Tower cycle, he'd go back to the basic, visceral horror on which he built his reputation. No such luck, unfortunately. Cell is cut from the same cloth as just about every other book he's written in I-don't-know-how-long: trouble is a'brewin', unlikely compatriots find each other in their time of need, prophetic visions are... viewed I guess, help in the form of a magic bullet arrives from an unexpected source, there's a big showdown between good and evil (or normal and abnormal), and we're done. I enjoyed this more than I thought I would once I figured out where it was going, but if you're familiar with King's work, mash up The Stand with Trucks and save yourself some time.

Week 9, Book 12: A Crack in the Edge of the World

Winchester, Simon. A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906.. I've been reading a lot of my favorite authors lately—must be a "comfort food for the reading mind" kind of thing. In my opinion, no one does popularized history like Simon Winchester. This time, the topic is the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Thanks to the California Gold Rush of 1849, San Francisco was one of the premiere American cities at the time, a shining jewel and a den of iniquity at the same time. Thanks to the earthquake and subsequent fire (which was the more damaging of the two), the city lost its priority over Los Angeles and never recovered it. Thrown in for good measure is a layman's introduction to geology, plate tectonics, and seismology.

Week 8, Book 11: Wild Ducks Flying Backward

Robbins, Tom. Wild Ducks Flying Backward.. This is a collection of shorter works—reprints from magazines, for instance, and a screenplay treatment that apparently went nowhere. I'm normally a big fan of Robbins' work, especially the florid and parenthetical way he turns a phrase, but repeated short bursts like this left me feeling pummelled.

Week 7, Book 10: Going Postal

Pratchett, Terry. Going Postal.. The (next-to-) latest in the ongoing Discworld saga. This one deals with the rebirth of the Ankh-Morpork post office. As usual, Pratchett's satire is spot-on. The more I read, the more I want to read. Here's hoping that he keeps writing for a long time to come.

Week 7, Book 9: Freakonomics

Levitt, Steven D. and Dubner, Stephen J. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.. The book has been out for a while, and it's experiencing a rebirth of sorts (#5 on The New York Times bestselling nonfiction list this week), so there's not much I can add to the hoopla. Suffice it to say that it's not a dry read, and while it does come to its own conclusions about some things, its primary aim is to make you question your assumptions about the world—in other words, don't just accept the obvious answer because it's obvious. This book makes a good companion to the works of Malcolm Gladwell.

Week 6, Book 8: Anansi Boys

Gaiman, Neil. Anansi Boys. I'm trying to think how to describe this book without mucking it up, but it's late and I could use sleep. Neil Gaiman spins a good tale.

Every little bit helps.

Please consider registering as a bone marrow donor.

This is something I've been thinking about for a long time, more so lately. I used to donate blood regularly—every eight weeks, like clockwork. My blood is type O negative, which means that it can be given to anyone regardless of their blood type with minimal chance of complications (which is why in shows like ER you hear phrases like "push 2 units of O neg") and CMV negative, which means that it can be given to infants and pregnant women without concerns about them contracting, well, a cytomegalovirus infection. Check the link above for more information; all I know for sure is that it means I get called by the community blood center a lot.

Unfortunately, the last few years I've been busy with work, and usually feeling less healthy than I should (largely, I suppose, because I sit at my desk all day instead of exercising), the upshot being that I donate very, very rarely anymore. I reached my first gallon before I started college, my second some years ago, and am probably nowhere near a third.

That will change.

Week 6, Book 7: A Long Way Down

Hornby, Nick. A Long Way Down. Four people meet on New Year's Eve, on the roof of a building in London, because they've each independently decided to end their lives by jumping. What happens next is, well, the story. It reminded me a lot of About a Boy (the movie, not the book, I'm afraid to admit).