Crunch time is upon me here at work, which means working each evening for as long as I can. (I usually go till 7:30 or 8, so that I have enough time to get home and read for an hour to recover. :P) But I’ll keep blogging, never fear. One a day seems like a good goal (at least for me).
Item 1: LibraryThing now has groups:
Very cool. I haven’t yet gotten really into LT (I’ve only written one review, for example, nor have I left many comments on others’ profiles), but I expect to do that before too long. I changed my picture and joined a ton of groups. If you have an LT account, let me know!
Item 2: I bought a fern plant for $3.99 at Smith’s a couple of days ago. This morning I realized that the yellowish-brown color on the tips of one of the stalks probably means it’s dying. Oh. Just when I was getting emotionally attached… ~sigh~ ;)
Item 3: I’ve been reading A Return to Modesty and want to blog about it right now, but I’ll restrain myself until I finish the book. Lots of good stuff. Go check it out.
Item 4: Lulu.com — cheap, on-demand publishing for the masses. I’ll write more about it after I submit Adventures in Thailand and see how the printing quality is, but I’m really, really, really excited about this.
Item 5: Have I mentioned that I’m working on a reader’s edition of the Book of Mormon? I’m taking the Project Gutenberg text and getting rid of the verse numbers, then reformatting it to be more like the first edition (though I’ll be making my own paragraphs). I’m also adding quote marks in for dialogue. It’ll be pretty nice when done. You can catch a glimpse of what it’ll kind of look like over at BenCrowder.com.
Item 6: While you’re there, check out the third pic on today’s post (wedding invitations). Blender is cool. :) Granted, it’s nothing too exciting (the 3D part, that is), but it’s nice to be able to throw together shaded mockups like this when working on projects that’ll be printed and folded.
Item 7: If you’re not using an aggregator, go to Bloglines.com or Newshutch.com. Now. You won’t regret it. (Saved time = happiness.)
Item 8: Breads and crackers and Wheat Thins and frozen burritos seem to have wedged their way into my diet in an unhealthy proportion. I look at my dinner plate each night and it’s all dead food. Nothing green, no fruit, nothing. This is bad. I do have an apple each morning, but it’s not enough. The only problem is, I usually forget to eat fruit. I’ve got a bag of grapes in my fridge right now that I’ve meant to eat for a while, but it keeps slipping my mind. I’ve got to change this — fruit is so delicious and good for you (um, me) that it’s insane not to eat it.
Item 9: Things are going well at work. I’ve found that attacking little projects — bite-size chunks — is making quite a difference. There’s still a mammoth-sized mountain of work left to finish by the end of the summer, but these small successes are building momentum for the big whammy.
Item 10: I’m still reading Grimm, of course, and it’s great.
Ten’s a good number to stop at. The End. For now, at least. Off I go to check out Rachel and Leah, go grocery shopping, and recover from 8.5 hours of coding…
[tags]LibraryThing, Lulu, Book of Mormon, Mormon, LDS, Project Gutenberg, Immigrant Ancestors Project, Orson Scott Card[/tags]
Comments
RSS Bandit (www.rssbandit.org) is good if you want/don’t mind a standalone aggregator. It’s very customizable via XSLT. You can write add-ins for it too, but I haven’t explored that part.
Thanks for the link. Speaking of standalone aggregators, and desktop apps in general, I’m finding more and more that I prefer to move as much online as I can. Why? 1) I can get to it anywhere, and 2) if my computer dies, I can still get to most of my data from lab computers on campus or public library computers or friend’s computers.
For example, my e-mail is online (Gmail), my book catalog is online (LibraryThing), my aggregator is online (Bloglines), my to-do lists are online (Backpack), my budget would be online if I had one (Google Spreadsheets), my calendar is online (Google Calendar), some of my documents are online (Writely and Backpack writeboards), and so on. When I get Beyond up, my genealogy will be online as well. That primarily leaves my artwork, and while I may not be able to work on it online (too slow), at least I’ll be able to save it there. (And I do, with the most important stuff, via FTP.) Even my software development is on a Subversion server, so I can work on it from any computer with Ruby on Rails and a Subversion client.
Granted, I’m still not quite there yet (and considering that I do a lot of work in Adobe apps, I’ll never be completely online), but it’s nice to know that even if my house burned down, I wouldn’t lose everything. I can’t wait till gDrive (Platypus) comes out so I can move more of my files there. S3 is nice but I’ve yet to see a decent web interface — everything I’ve tried has problems. gDrive will be wonderful. :)